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Marcion

Marcion

All our information about Marcion is from hostile sources. They agree in a few particulars, among them his place of origin: Sinope, on the north or Black Sea coast of modern Turkey, the port of exit for goods from Cappadocia and Galatia, and one terminus of trade routes from further east. The family seems to have had money from shipping, and many stories presume that Marcion's father was Bishop in Sinope. Paul had preached in some parts of Galatia, and Marcion, almost a century later, seems to have advocated an extreme Pauline position: he sought to remove all traces of Judaism from Christianity, leaving a freestanding and self-consistent Christian doctrine. He rejected Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, and celebrated instead Jesus's Heavenly Father as alone relevant to modern concerns. This rejection of the Jewish God (and the Mosaic Law) parallels, but goes beyond, the "New Israel" theory, which held that the Christians, not the Jews, are now the chosen people of God, and the community in which earlier prophecies and promises would be fulfilled.

Marcion probably established a recognizable movement while still in the east; the Chronicle of Edessa gives the not implausible date of 138. He presently came to Rome, where he soon aroused high-level opposition (Irenaeus, a disciple of Polycarp, records a scathing remark made by Polycarp to Marcion), ending with Marcion's excommunication in 144. He returned to Sinope, where he continued to advocate his kind of Christianity, evidently with considerable success. The story that he left Sinope because of his seduction of a young girl, or that, once he had returned there, he sought readmission to the Roman church by promising to convert those he had earlier misled, are standard-issue propaganda tales, and need not detain us here.

As authority texts, Marcion admitted only the highly Pauline Gospel of Luke, which he called Evangelikon or "The Gospel," and ten of the epistles attributed to Paul, which he collectively called Apostolikon, "The Apostolic Message," with Galatians standing first on that list. From Luke, and also from Galatians (and Romans), he is said to have removed passages which he regarded as too accepting of Christianity's Jewish heritage. The full list of the Marcionite Canon is:

It will be seen that this Marcionite version of the Pauline corpus admits only 3 items (2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians) beyond the 7 that are considered unquestionably genuine in our time. This showed a certain critical acumen. For example, Marcion's contemporary and foe Irenaeus cited in his own writings, as authentic, the non-Pauline 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Irenaeus also upheld, and specifically defended, the fourness of the Four Gospels. He thus represents what we may call the already conventional view of the Christian Canon - the texts approved to be read in churches. Marcion's wish to reduce the multiple Gospels of his time, with their mutual contradictions, to one single consistent account has a parallel in the work of his slightly later contemporary and fellow easterner, Tatian the Assyrian, whose Diatessaron (c155) weaves the four Gospels into a single account. Marcion's own tract, the Antitheses, evidently sought to differentiate the Jewish idea of God from that of the Christians, a position also advocated by the Syrian Gnostic Cerdo, a contemporary of the major Gnostic figure Valentinus. Both Cerdo and Valentinus (so says Eusebius 4/10) had come to Rome shortly before Marcion. Like Marcion, Cerdo was eventually excommunicated by the Roman authorities. Later anti-Marcionite tracts, including that of Tertullian, make much negative hay out of Marcion's supposed affinity with the hated Gnostics. There seems to have been at least this much in common: both sought to disburden Christianity of its Jewish heritage, and in the Gnostic case, also of its links with the specific life history of Jesus, as then understood. These, in short, were simplifying movements. They have found ongoing sympathy in the present age. The sympathies of the present age are not evidence for any other age, but they are sometimes usefully indicative all the same.

Marcion's Antitheses is no longer extant. It was angrily cited by Tertullian as attempting to prove the difference between the Christian and the Hebrew Gods. It suffices to assume that Marcion sought to show the incompatibility of the Hebrew and Christian concepts of God, an incompatibility of which no reasonably bright Sunday School student can long remain unaware. Marcion's problem in this area would seem to be that the Church of his time had accustomed itself to the antiquity claim inherent in the Jewish tradition, and did not want to cut itself loose from that familiar mooring. Here, as in the area of the already emergent canon, it was too late for these ideas.

However strident the adverse literature may be, it does have the merit of preserving for us many details of Marcion's position. That adverse literature also provides a sort of map of the geographical and temporal range of Marcion's influence, which clearly persisted longest in the East. Here is a geographical summary of attestations of the existence of the Marcionite position:

From the detailed citations and refutations in the opposition literature, both Marcion's Gospel and his texts of Galatians and Romans have been reconstructed by modern efforts. Some of these reconstructions are available at the links below. For the Gospel we are pleased to add, to those previously available, the Marcion/Luke comparison of David Inglis, of the NT Quest group. The views of these authors (and of the scholars comprising the secondary literature, and for that matter, of Tertullian and his colleagues) sometimes differ from the conclusions reached on the present Marcion page; we offer these differences as material for future discussion.

Beginning with Charles B Waite in 1881, and continuing with John Knox in more recent years, some scholars have held that Marcion's Gospel simply adopts, without changes, a Luke which had not yet reached the stage of textual evolution represented by canonical Luke, and which was subsequently extended to make the version we know. We agree that Luke was composed in more than one stage, but find that many of the Lukan addenda are better accommodated in a three-stage formation model, all of whose stages fall within the 1st century, and thus before Marcion's active lifetime. For instance, the Lukan Infancy Narrative (Lk 1-2), which is not present in Marcion, is doubtless secondary in Luke, as witness the very convincing opening statement with which Lk 3:1 and Marcion's Gospel both begin. The question, then, is whether the Lukan Infancy Narrative was added to the previous text of Luke in time to be part of the Luke which Marcion knew (and which he excised), or was added after Marcion, probably later than 145. This question necessarily involves the date of Acts, concerning which there are also widely divergent views, but our conclusion favors a pre-Marcion date of Acts, and thus also of the final form of Luke.

Note that a decision on whether Marcion deleted material from Luke ideally needs to be consistent with the answer to the same question for Galatians and Romans (Tertullian claimed, with specific examples, that Marcion had abridged all three).

Marcion, in his lifetime and for centuries afterward, was a clearly an influential figure, but one whose position was not in the end constitutive for Christian doctrine. Things had gone too far in the other direction, and Marcion's popularity with believers throughout Christendom availed him nothing against the opposition of the leaders in Rome. The eventual equilibrium point between Christianity and its Jewish roots turned out to be the "New Israel" theory, not Marcion's "No Israel" theory. The Jewish roots continued to support the Christian tree. But Marcion's logicality deserves modern respect, and his relation to the Gnostics, which has been both affirmed and denied since antiquity, holds continuing interest for students of the early Jesus movement, in all its many and mutually hostile varieties.

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25 March 2011 / Contact The Project / Exit to Biblica Page