MARCION A N D H I S T E A C H I N G
Marcion is the first person known to us who published a fixed collection of what we should call New Testament books. Others may have done so before him; if so, we have no knowledge of them. He rejected the Old Testament, as having no relevance or authority for Christians; his collection was therefore designed to be a complete Bible.
Marcion was born about AD 100 at Sinope, a seaport on the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor. His father was a leader in the church of that city, and Marcion was brought up in the apostolic faith. Of all the apostles, the one who appealed to him most strongly was Paul, to whom he became passionately devoted, concluding ultimately that he was the only apostle who preserved the teaching of Jesus in its purity.
He embraced with intelligence and ardour Paul’s gospel of justification by divine grace, apart from legal works. Adolf von Harnack did not really exaggerate when he called Marcion ‘the only man in the early church who understood Paul’, although he had to add, ‘and even in his understanding he misunderstood him.” Paul’s refusal to allow any element of law-keeping in the message of salvation was taken by
’ A. von Harnack, Hzrtovy
of
Dogma, E. T., (London, 1894), p.89 (where the translation is slightly different from that given above).Marcion to imply that not only the Old Testament law, but the Old Testament itself, had been superseded by the gospel. The gospel, he believed, was an entirely new teaching brought to earth by Christ.
The law and the prophets made no sort of preparation for it, and if some passages in Paul’s correspondence suggested that they did, those passages must have been interpolated by others- by the kind of judaizers against whom Paul polemicized in Galatians and other letters. *
Marcion appears to have remained in communion with the catholic church so long as he lived in Asia Minor. There is some reason to think that he shared his radical thoughts with leading churchmen of the region, such as Polycarp of Smyrna and Papias of Hierapolis, but found them unresponsive. 3
Perhaps it was in the hope of finding a more positive response from the more enlightened churchmen of Rome that he made his way to the imperial capital early in the principate ofAntoninus Pius (who became emperor in AD 138). On his arrival in Rome he made a handsome donation of money to the church (he is said to have been a shipowner and was probably quite well ~ff).~ His understanding of the gospel and its implications was so self-evidently right to his own way of thinking that he could not believe that it would fail to be equally self-evident to any unprejudiced mind. But the Roman churchmen were so disturbed by his doctrine that they not only rejected it but even returned the money he had presented to the church.
Not only did Marcion regard Paul as the only faithful apostle of Christ; he maintained that the original apostles had corrupted their Master’s teaching with an admixture of legalism. Not only did he reject the Old Testament; he distinguished the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New. This distinction of two deities, each with his independent existence, betrays the influence of gnos-
’ On Marcion and teaching see above all A. von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gort (Leipzig, 192 1, ’ 1924), with its supplement Neue Studien zu Marcion (Leipzig, 1923); also R. S. Wilson, Marcion: A Study of a Second-Century Heretic (London, 1932); J. Knox, Marcion and the New Testament (Chicago, 1942); E. C.
Blackman, Marcion and his Influence (London, 1948).
3 Some contact with Polycarp may be implied in the story ofMarcion’s seeking an interview with him (perhaps in Rome, when Polycarp visited the city in AD 154) and asking him if he recognized him, only to receive the discouraging reply: ‘I recognize -the firstborn of Satan!’ (Irenaeus, Agaimr Heresies 3.3.4). For a contact with Papias seep. 157.
4 Tertullian, Against Marcion, 4.4, 9; Presrription, 30.
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T H E C A N O N O F S C R I P T U R E
ticism on Marcion’s thought. The God who created the material universe, the God of Israel, was (he held) a totally different being from the Father of whom Jesus spoke. The Father was the good and merciful God of whom none had ever heard until Jesus came to reveal him. As in the teaching of most gnostic schools, the God who made the material world was an inferior deity-inferior in status and morality alike - t o the supreme God who was pure spirit. The gnostic depreciation of the material order finds an echo in Marcion’s refusal to believe that Jesus entered human life by being ‘born of a woman’ (Cal.
4:4).
Enlightened and unprejudiced the church leaders in Rome might be, yet they understandably found this teaching unacceptable. So Marcion, despairing of being able to convince the catholic church anywhere of the truth of his message, withdrew from the catholic fellowship and established a church of his own. This church survived for several generations-surprisingly, when it is considered that its membership was maintained solely through conversion. It could not keep its numbers up by incorporating the children of existing members, for celibacy was obligatory on all its membership. At the same time, Marcion was a faithful enough Paulinist to allow no discrimination against female members of his church in matters of privilege or function: for him, as for Paul, there was ‘neither male nor female’ (Gal. 3:28).
A N T I T H E S E S , G O S P E L A N D A P O S T L E He provided his followers with an edition of the holy scriptures, to which he prefaced a series of Antitheses, setting out the incompatability of law and gospel, of the Creator-Judge of the Old Testament and the merciful Father of the New Testament (who had nothing to do with either creation or judgment). The Antitheses opened up with a lyrical celebration of divine grace, which should arouse a sympathetic echo in every evangelical heart: ‘0 wealth of riches! Ecstasy, power and astonishment! Nothing can be said about it, nor yet imagined about it; neither can it be compared to anything!”
The holy scriptures to which the Antitheses served as an introduction inevitably included no part of the Old Testament; they consisted of an 5 See F. C. Burkitt, ‘The Exordium of Marcion’s Antitheses’, JTS 30 (1929), pp.279f.
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edition of the Greek New Testament. Marcion did not call it the New Testament, so far as we know; indeed, he may not have given any one title to the edition as a whole. He referred to it by the titles which he gave to its two component parts: Gospel and Apostle. 6 Our main source of information about it is Tertullian’s treatise Against Marcion, written over half a century later, when Marcion had been dead for some decades. ‘Hostile and vituperative as Tertullian’s treatment is, his factual data appear to be reliable.
Marcion’s Gospel was an edition of the Gospel of Luke. Why he should have chosen Luke’s gospel is a matter of speculation: perhaps in his native environment it had already come to be associated in a special way with Paul.’ He nowhere mentioned Luke’s name in connexion with it; it was presented simply as the gospel of Christ. Its text was purged of those elements which were inconsistent with Marcion’s understanding of the truth and which therefore, on his principles, must have been interpolated by judaizing scribes. The birth of John the Baptist was omitted; it implied a connexion between Jesus and something that went before. The birth of Jesus himself was omitted:
Jesus entered the world not by birth but by a descent as supernatural as was his later ascension. (Marcion found the whole idea of conception and childbirth disgusting.)
It is possible that the text of Luke which Marcion used as the basis for his Go@ was not identical with the text that has come down to us;
it may have been an earlier edition, lacking the first two chapters-a sort of ‘Proto-Luke’.* Even so, Marcion’s Gospel cannot be equated with any ‘Proto-Luke’ recovered by modern methods of source criticism.’ But even if the text which lay before Marcion did lack the first two chapters, it began at latest with Luke 3:1, ‘In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’, and those are the words with which Marcion’s Gospel began. But the material which follows immediately on that
6 In Greek: Eaangelion and Apostolikon. ’ Seepp.161, 174.
* P. L. Couchoud argued that the canonical Luke was an expansion of Marcion’s gospel, and indeed that all the synoptic gospels were later than Marcion’s canon (‘Is Marcion’s Gospel one of the Synoptics? HibbevtJournal34 [1935-361, pp.265-277;
see also A. Loisy’s rebuttal, ‘Marcion’s Gospel: A Reply’, in the same volume, pp. 378-387). J. Knox leant to a modification of this theory, envisaging the canonical Luke-Acts as a reaction to Marcion’s Gospel-Apostle compilation (Marcion andthe New Tutarwzt, pp. 106167; ‘Acts and the Pauline Letter Corpus’, in Studies in Lwke-Acts, ed. L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn [Nashville/New York, 19661, pp.279287).
’ See B. H. Streeter, Tix Four Gospel (London, 1924), pp. 199-222; V. Taylor, Behind tbr Third Go.@ (Oxford, 1926).
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THE CANON OF SCRIPTURE
time-note was unacceptable to him. The account of John the Baptist’s ministry and his baptism of Jesus implies some continuity between Jesus and the old order. So does the genealogy of Luke 3:23-38,
tracing Jesus’ ancestry back to Adam through David and Abraham.
The temptation narrative (Luke 4:1-13) represents Jesus quoting from Deuteronomy three times, as though it had authority in his eyes-an impossibility, according to Marcion’s principles. Equally impossible, for Marcion, was the idea that Jesus, preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4: 16-30), should have claimed that his ministry was the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. So, having begun his edition of the Gospel with the time-note of Luke 3: 1, ‘In the fifteenth year of Tiberius’, Marcion went straight on to Luke 4:3 1 and continued: ‘Jesus came down to Capernaum’-as though he came down there and then from heaven, fully grown. lo
In place of ‘Thy kingdom come’ in his version of the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:2), Marcion’s Gospel had the interesting variant: ‘Let thy Holy Spirit come on us and cleanse us.’ He may have found this in the copy of Luke which served as the basis for his edition, or it may have been his own emendation; in the latter case, it is interesting that it should have found its way into the textual tradition of ‘orthodox’
Christians: it is cited by the church fathers Gregory of Nyssa” and Maximus of Turin,‘* and is the reading of one or two Greek manuscripts of the gospels. I3
‘The old is good’ (Luke 5:39) is omitted because it might be taken to imply approval of the Old Testament order. The reference to Jesus’
mother and brothers could not be retained in Luke 8:19 (Jesus belonged to no human family) and the description of Zacchaeus as a son of Abraham in Luke 19:9 had to go. There are other peculiarities of Marcion’s Gospel which can be explained with equal ease, but there are some which do not appear to have arisen from his presuppositions and which probably bear witness to the second-century text which he used.
Marcion’s Apostle was an edition of ten letters of Paul. The three Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are not included: this could be the result of his deliberately leaving them out, but more probably the copy of the Pauline corpus which he used as the basis of
“’ Tertullian, Aguin~t Marcion, 4.7.1. ’ ’ Bishop of Nyssa, AD 37 l-394.
” Early 5th century A D.
I3 See I. H. Marshall, Thr Gospd of Luke, NIGTC (Exeter/Grand Rapids, 1978), p.458.
MARCION
his edition lacked them, as the Chester Beatty codex of Paul’s letters (p6) evidently did. I4
At the head of his Apode Marcion placed the letter to the Galatians.
We do not know if it occupied this position in any other copy of Paul’s letters, but there was a special appropriateness in this position to Marcion’s way of thinking, for here the antithesis between Paul and the Jerusalem apostles (as he read the letter) was expressed most sharply. To Marcion the letter mounted a direct attack on the Jerusalem apostles, for it was at their instance, or at least by their agents, that the attempt was being made to win Paul’s Gentile converts in Galatia over to a judaistic perversion of Christianity. The Jerusalem leaders might have reached an agreement with Paul at the conference described in Galatians 2: l-10, but they had broken that agreement by their effort to subvert the pure faith of the Galatian churches.
The remaining letters were arranged in descending order of length, the two letters to the Corinthians being reckoned together as one composite letter and the two letters to the Thessalonians being treated in the same way. The Marcionite order of Paul’s letters was accordingly:
Galatians, Corinthians (1 and 2), Romans, Thessalonians (1 and 2),
‘Laodiceans’ (which was the name Marcion gave to Ephesians), Colos- sians, Philippians, Philemon. The letter to the Ephesians appears in some ancient copies without the words ‘in Ephesus’ in Ephesians 1: 1, and the copy which lay before Marcion probably lacked them. ” What was he to call the letter, then? He found a clue in Colossians 4:16, where Paul gives directions for the exchange of his letter to the Colossians with one from Laodicea. This Laodicean letter could not be otherwise identified: why should it not be this letter which lacked internal evidence of its addressees?‘6
Marcion dealt with the text of Paul’s letters in the same way as with the text of Luke’s gospel: anything which appeared inconsistent with what he believed to be authentic Pauline teaching was regarded as a corruption proceeding from an alien hand and was removed. Even Galatians had been subjected to such corruption here and there, he
I4 It is most unlikely, however, that the reference in 1 Tim. 6:20 to the ‘contradic- tions (anti&m) of what is falsely called knowledge (gn%si.r)’ is a reference to Marcion’s Anrithrse~, as has sometimes been supposed.
‘s The words are absent from the oldest known copy of Paul’s letters (P4”), from the Sinaitic and Vatican codices (first hand), and from some other manuscripts.
I6 For a later attempt to supply the supposedly missing letter to the Iaodiceans see pp.238-240.
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found. The mention of Abraham as the prototype of all who are justified by faith (Gal. 3:6-9) could not be left standing and the tracing of any kind of relationship between law and gospel (as in Gal.
3 : 15 - 25) was equally unacceptable.
Marcion’s edition of Romans lacked Romans 1: 19-2:l; 3:21- 4:25; all of Romans 9-11 except lO:l-4 and 11:33-36, and’
everything after Romans 14:23. The idea of establishing the law through faith (Rom. 3:3 l), the application of the story of Abraham in chapter 4, the grappling with the mystery of Israel’s unbelief in chapters 9- 11 (with their concentration of proof-texts from the Old Testament), were all incompatible with Paul’s gospel as Marcion understood it. As for chapter 15, its opening section includes a general endorsement of the Christian value of the Old Testament scriptures (verse 4) and a string of quotations designed to show that the Gentile mission was foreseen and validated by Old Testament writers (verses 8 - 12), while its closing paragraph (verses 25 - 33) bears witness to a concern on Paul’s part for the church of Jerusalem which Marcion must have found incredible, given his understanding of the relation between Paul and that church.
Marcion’s edition of Romans seems to have affected the textual history of that epistle far beyond the frontiers of his own community.
There is a whole group of manuscripts and versions of the Pauline letters in which Romans 14:23 is followed immediately by the doxology which appears in our editions as Romans 16:25-27; this bears witness to a state of the text in which the epistle ended with chapter 14. Marcion does not appear to have known the doxology.”
Moreover, the edition of Romans which he used may have lacked the whole of chapter 16, with its long series of personal greetings. If, because of its general interest and importance, this epistle was circulated at an early stage among other churches than that to which it was primarily sent (whether on Paul’s own initiative or on someone else’s), the greetings might well have been omitted from the circular form, since they were manifestly intended for one group of recipients only. I8
I’ Harnack thought that the doxology, in its original form, was composed by disciples of Marcion. See F. F. Bruce, The Letter I$ Pad to the Ronun~, TNTC (Leicester, ‘1985), pp.267-269.
‘” P4’, which places the doxology at the end of chapter 15 (the only known manuscript to do so), bears witness to a text of the letter which lacked chapter 16. See p. 131, n.54.
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MARCION
An example of a change reflecting Marcion’s doctrine of God comes in Ephesians 3:9. The gospel is there described as ‘the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things’ (hidden, that is to say, in the divine mind and not revealed until the fulness of the time had come).
But to Marcion the ‘God who created all things’ had nothing to do with the gospel; he was a different being from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So, by a very small change, Marcion made this text refer to ‘the mystery hidden for ages from the God who created all things’. l9
T H E S O - C A L L E D M A R C I O N I T E P R O L O G U E S The Pauline letters in Marcion’s Apostle were later supplied with prologues sufficiently objective in character to have been subsequently taken over and reproduced in ‘orthodox’ copies of the Latin New Testament, although they were originally composed by followers of Marcion. It has indeed been asserted more recently that, despite their traditional designation as ‘Marcionite’ prologues, there is nothing specifically Marcionite about them. “Before this can be discussed, it is best to reproduce them. Here they are, in Marcion’s sequence of the letters:
Galatians
The Galatians are Greeks. They first received the word of truth from the apostle, but after his departure were tempted by false apostles to turn to law and circumcision. The apostle calls them back to belief in the truth, writing to them from Ephesus.
Corinthians (1 and2)
The Corinthians are Achaeans. They likewise had heard the word of truth from apostles but had been subverted in various ways by false apostles-some led away by the wordy rhetoric of philosophy, others by the party of the Jewish law. The apostles call them back to the true wisdom of the gospel, writing to them from Ephesus.
I9 In the Greek text Marcion removed the preposition en, leaving the simple dative case of ‘God’ (tij her?).
” See J. Regul, Die antir,rarcionitischen Ewqelienprdqe (Freiburg, 1969), pp. 13, 85188-94.
‘ 4 ’
T H E C A N O N O F S C R I P T U R E
Romuns
The Romans are in a region of Italy. They had been overtaken by false apostles, under pretext of the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and led on into an acceptance of the law and the prophets. The apostle calls them back to the true evangelical faith, writing to them from Athens.
Tbessalonians ( 1 and 2 )
The Thessalonians are Macedonians in Christ Jesus. Having received the word of truth they persevered in the faith, even under persecution by their fellow-citizens; moreover, they did not accept what was said by false apostles. The apostle commends them, writing to them from Athens.
‘Laodiceans’ (= Ephesians)
The Iaodiceans are Asians. Having received the word of truth, they persevered in the faith. The apostle commends them, writing to them from prison in Rome.
Colossians
The Colossians also are, like the Laodiceans, Asians. They also had been overtaken by false apostles. The apostle did not visit them himself, but puts them right by means of a letter. They had heard the word from Archippus, who indeed received a commission to minister to them. Therefore the apostle, now in chains, writes to them from Ephesus.
we have no knowledge of it at an earlier time. *I But ‘they emphasize, to the exclusion of any mention of the really important contents of the epistles, the relation of Paul to the recipients of the letter, and whether he had to vindicate himself against false apostles in it, and use such phrases as “the true evangelical faith”, “the word of truth”.‘** More- over, they detect anti-judaiting polemic in letters where it can scarcely be traced. Romans, for example, is one of the least polemical of Paul’s letters; yet the prologue says that it was sent to the Roman Christians because they had been hoodwinked by false apostles claiming the authority of Christ and persuaded to submit to ‘the law and the prophets’. The addition of ‘the prophets’ to ‘the law’ seems designed to exclude the Old Testament writings from any part in the gospel economy. Paul denies that any one can be justified by ‘works of law’
(Rom. 3:20) but when he uses ‘the law’ in the sense of the Old Testament writings, in whole or in part, he speaks of it with the highest respect; and as for ‘the law and the prophets’ taken together, he affirms that they bear witness to God’s way of righteousness through faith in Christ, ‘apart from law’ (Rom. 3:2 1, a text omitted from Marcion’s edition). No one but a Marcionite could have mis- represented the message of Romans as this prologue does. When we consider this set ofprologues as a whole, it is difficult not to agree with F. C. Burkitt’s conclusion: ‘They are the work of one who was as much obsessed by the opposition of Paulinism to Judaizing Christianity as was Baur himself.‘23 The Muratorian list, at which we shall look shortly,24 appears to be acquainted with these prologues, ‘and it is certainly possible that its intention was to counter them directly with Philippians
The Philippians are Macedonians. Having received the word of truth they persevered in the faith, and did not accept false apostles. The apostle commends them, writing to them from prison in Rome.
*’ See N. A. Dahl, ‘The Origin of the Earliest Prologues to the Pauline Letters’, Semeia 12 (1978), pp.233-277; H. Y. Gamble, The New Testament Canon (Phila- delphia, 1985), pp.4lf.
Philemon .
To Philemon he composes a personal letter on behalf of his slave Onesimus. He writes to him from prison in Rome.
These prologues are most fully intelligible when they are read in the same order as the epistles, as arranged in Marcion’s Apostle. This in itself does not conclusively prove their Marcionite origin, for Marcion’s order was conceivably derived by him from an earlier edition, although
” R. P. C. Hanson, Tradition in the Ear/y Church (London, 1962), p. 188.
” F C Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission (London, 21907), p.354.
Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), Professor in the University ofTiibingen, in a series of publications from ‘Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde’, TiihingerZeitm5rtftfiir TheoLogie 5 (183 1). Heft 4, pp.bl-206 (reprinted in Ausgew2bltr We&r tn Einzefausgaben, ed. K. Scholder, I [Stuttgart, 19631, pp. l-76) to his Chrrrcb History of the First Three Cmtwies (1853), E. T., I (London, 1878), pp.44-98, propounded the view that the first generation of church history was dominated by a conflict between Paul and his law-free gospel on the one side and the Jerusalem leaders, with their law-related gospel, on the other.
” See pp. 158- 169.
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