What's In Your Bible?

Marcion and His Bible

June 11, 2014

Christians have had a definitive list of the books that are considered to be sacred scriptures since Bishop Athanasius issued his Easter letter of 367 A.D. and listed the books for his people.  Before that list came out, however, Christians all over the Mediterraean world built their own Bibles by collecting documents that fed them spiritually.  Long before 367 most Christians had agreed that four Gospels, the book of Acts, Paul's letters and the epistles of John, Peter and Jude deserved to be treated as God's word for them.  Many of these Christians, however, added other works to these books because they were inspired by them.  And, in some cases, churches reduced the canon, the list of accepted books, to eliminate passaages that did not fit their understanding of God.  As we have seen in an earlier study, the Jewish Christians known as Ebionites probably did not read Paul's letters because they valued the Jewish Law  and Paul stressed faith as the key to salvation.  These Christians leaned heavily on Martthew's Gospel because it was anchored in the Old Testament which, of course, they treasured.  So if one had asked these Jewish Christians "What's in your Bible?" they would have pointed to the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew and probably not much else.
On the other hand, there were Gentile Christians who accepted Paul's position that they were not required to keep the whole Law, especially the food laws, and the necessity of circumcision for male Christians.  For these Christians, the Old Testament was important as a testimony to God's role in creation, God's use of Abraham, his intervention on behalf of Israel, and the prophets' visions of a coming Messiah.  They tended to take much of the Old Testament as story rather than as literal commandments.  For these "centrists," their Bible contained the same books as ours and in some cases a few more.
And then there was Marcion who may well be the most influential early Christian of whom we have never heard.  If Jewish Christians kept only those books that linked directly to the Old Testament, Marcion would keep none.  As we shall see, this son of a Bishop developed such a radical theology and a Bible to go along with it that his own father had him ex-communicated from the Church.  Marcion was convinced that Paul was absolutely right about the Law, but he went far beyond Paul in discarding the Old Testament and everything Jewish.

Who Was Marcion?
Nearly everything about Marcion is subject to considerable debate.  All the information we have about him comes from his enemies and, thus, is not likely to be completely accurate and fair.  Fortunately, his enemies considered him so dangerous they wrote voluminously about him. His major opponent is a Christian writer named Tertullian who wrote five volumes refuting Marcion. Everything Marcion himself wrote has been lost except for those passages quoted by his opponents.
He came from the region of Pontus from which Priscella's husband, Aquila, also came and to which Peter addressed his first epistle.  Pontus is the region that borders the Black Sea to the north of  Galatia and Cappadocia and to the east of Bithynia.  Since this is a coastal region it is not surprising that Marcion was associated with ships.  It isn't clear whether he was a ship builder or a ship owner, but in one of those two roles he obviously became very wealthy.  Marcion was born about 100 A.D. in the city of Sinope on the Black Sea.  His father was the Bishop of the church there, so Marcion would have been given the equivalent of an Ivy League education, and he would have grown up in the Christian faith.  By the time he was in his thirties he had developed some beliefs, and perhaps also some moral practices, that  were not acceptable to the church and his father, the Bishop, ex-communicated him.  By the year 139 A.D. he had moved to Rome and made a very large gift of money  to the church there.  Just a few years later, after his theological positions became public, the church gave back his money and excluded him from their congregation as well.  Marcion succeeded in convincing some--perhaps many--of the members of the Roman church to leave with him, and he began the development of what, in effect, was one of the first denominations complete with its own Bible and versions of the Lord's Supper and Baptism.  Marcion became a missionary founding churches all across Asia Minor.  There were many Marcionite churches in existence when Tertullian wrote his five volumes in the 200's AD and the fact that Tertullian wrote from North Africa (Carthage) condeming Marcion's theology means that this form of Christianity was not limited to Asia Minor.

What Did Marcion Believe?

There Were Two Gods
Marcion stood with Paul in his affirmation that salvation was by faith alone and that obedience to the Law was not required.  In fact, it seemed obvious to him that the God who gave the Jews the Law was so different from the God of grace and love shown us by Christ that he could not have been the same God.  So Marcion held that there were two Gods, the God who created the world and gave the Law to the Jews and the God of Jesus whom Paul descibes as a God of grace and love.
Once Marcion arrived at this understanding, everything else naturally fell into place. The God of the Old Testament was the God who created this world and everything in it, as described in Genesis. The God of Jesus, therefore, had never been involved with this world but came into it only when Jesus himself appeared from heaven. The God of the Old Testament was the God who called the Jews to be his people and gave them his Law. The God of Jesus did not consider the Jews to be his people (for him; they were the chosen of the other God), and he was not a God who gave laws.
The God of the Old Testament insisted that people keep his Law and penalized them when they failed. He was not evil, but he was rigorously just. He had laws and inflicted penalties on those who did not keep them. But this necessarily made him a wrathful God, since no one kept all of his laws perfectly. Everyone had to pay the price for their transgressions, and the penalty for transgression was death. The God of the Old Testament was therefore completely justified in exacting his punishments and sentencing all people to death.
The God of Jesus came into this world in order to save people from the vengeful God of the Jews. He was previously unknown to this world and had never had any previous dealings with it. Hence Marcion sometimes referred to him as God the Stranger. Not even the prophecies of the future Messiah come from this God, for these refer not to Jesus but to a coming Messiah of Israel, to be sent by the God of the Jews, the creator of this world and the God of the Old Testament. Jesus carne completely unexpectedly and did what no one could possibly have hoped for: He paid the penalty for other people's sins, to save them from the just wrath of the Old Testament God.

Jesus Was Not Human
For Marcion our material world is evil, created by the evil God of the Old Testament.  Jesus was not evil, therefore he could not really have been part of this evil material world. He was not really flesh and blood--according to Marcion, Jesus came as Paul put it "in the likeness of sinful flesh" (Romans 8:3), but he was not born as a human.  Jesus only "seemed" to be human.  The idea that Christ only "seemed" to be human is one that is familiar to scholars.  It formed an essential element of a widespread movement called Gnosticism.  John's Gospel which explicitly affirms that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (1:14) may be our earliest refutation of the Docetic view of Christ.
Unfortunately, we do not know how Marcion understood that Jesus' death on the cross paid for our salvation if, as he believed, Christ was not material flesh and blood.  Others who held such views developed elaborate theories to explain that the seeming death of Christ on the cross deceived the God of the material world.  It is incredible to us that such a view could have captured the hearts and minds of so many people in the ancient world, but it did.

Marcion's Bible
Marcion produced two written documents that made the case for his theology.  One of these documents was called  the Antitheses.  As the name suggests, this work must have contrasted explicit statements in the Old Testament with Jesus' teachings.  "While the
exact form of the work may resist reconstruction, some of its contents were genuinely antithetical propositions. Thus Tertullian reports Marcion writing, ‘It says in the law, “eye for eye and tooth for tooth”, but the Lord says in his gospel, “if someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”’   Marcion wrote his book to set forth his case that the God of the Old Testament was so radically different from the God of Jesus that he could not be the same God.  To make his case, Marcion took the Old Testament literally and did not allow for any allegorical interpretation which might have softened the contrast between the Old and New Testaments.
The other written document was his version of the Bible.  Technically, of course, he did not write this document; he produced an edited version of the Bible used by the Church.  What was in his Bible?

No Old Testament
Obviously, since Marcion identified the God of the Old Testament with an evil being who created an evil world, he would not have any of the scripture associated with that God in his Bible.  "These were books written by and about the Old Testament God, the creator of the world and the God of the Jews. They are not sacred texts for those who have been saved from his vengeful grasp by the death of Jesus. The New Testament is completely new and unanticipated."  Marcion threw out the entire Old Testament.  He rejected both the Law and the Prophets.  While we might have thought he would keep the prophecies of the Messiah that were so important to the early church, he did not.  He rejected these because they spoke of a Messiah for the Jews, and this was not Jesus.

Luke's Gospel Edited
Since Paul himself speaks of "his Gospel" (Romans 2:16),  Marcion needed to keep at least one of the Gospels in his Bible.  Apparently the Gospel he chose is that of Luke although there is some debate about this identification.  "It is not clear why Marcion chose Luke as his Gospel, whether it was because its author was allegedly a companion of the apostle Paul, or because it showed the greatest concern for Gentiles in the ministry of Jesus, or, perhaps more plausibly, because it was the Gospel he was raised on in his home church of Sinope."   He could not keep all of Luke because Luke quoted prophecies from the Old Testament about Jesus, so Marcion deleted from Luke all the references that involved the Old Testament.  This led one early writer to say that Marcion
mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father. He likewise persuaded his disciples that he himself was more worthy of credit than are those apostles who have handed down the Gospel to us, furnishing them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it. (Irenaeus, Ad. Haer. 1.27.2)
Marcion's use of Luke's Gospel may very well be the very first written quotations from that Gospel.  Interestingly enough, Marcion's version of Luke added a sentence to the Lord's Prayer. If the scholarly reconstruction is correct, Marcion began the Lord's Prayer with the petition:
                               "Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us."
It may well be that the Lord's Prayer known in Marcion's home church in Pontus used this prayer.  A bishop from a nearby region notes that his people used this petition.

Paul's Letters
Marcion's New Testament consisted of eleven books. Most of these were the letters of his beloved Paul, the one predecessor whom Marcion could trust to understand the radical claims of the gospel. Why, Marcion asked, did Jesus return to earth to convert Paul by means of a vision? Why did he not simply allow his own disciples to proclaim his message faithfully throughout the world? According to Marcion, it was because Jesus' disciples-themselves Jews, followers of the Jewish God, readers of the Jewish Scriptures-never did correctly understand their master. Confused by what Jesus taught them, wrongly thinking that he was the Jewish Messiah, even after his death and resurrection they continued not to understand, interpreting Jesus' words, deeds, and death in light of their understanding of Judaism. Jesus then had to start afresh, and he called Paul to reveal to him "the truth of the gospel." That is why Paul had to confront Jesus' disciple Peter and his earthly brother James, as seen in the letter to the Galatians. Jesus had revealed the truth to Paul, and these others simply never understood.
Paul understood, however, and he alone. Marcion therefore included ten of his letters in his canon of Scripture, all, in fact, of those that eventually came to be found in the New Testament with the exception of the Pastoral epistles: 1and 2 Timothy and Titus. We may never know why these three were not included as well. It may be that they were not as widely circulated by Marcion 's
time and that he himself did not know of them.
Conclusion
Surely Tertullian was right to refute Marcion so vigorously.  Marcion's understanding of God and Christ were tortured versions of the truth.  Having said that, however, we should not overlook the fact that Marcion gave his life to Jesus as he understood him; he was a believer but his understanding was surely very defective.  In the long history of the church, heretics often were martyred for their faith just as the orthodox believers.  They fact that they did not share the church's understanding of God's revelation in Christ should not overshadow their devotion to our Lord.
Marcion's development of an actual list of eleven books which he considered to be sacred scripture  may well have been the push that the church needed to decide for itself which books would be included in the canon, the accepted list of sacred books.  Certainly Marcion caused other Christians to think about what should be in their Bible.  What's in your Bible?

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  1  Marcion gave 200,000 sesterces.  Bart Ehrman writes that "There is at least one way to put this amount in perspective, however: For a member of the Roman upper-class aristocracy to become an "equestrian," which ranked right below a senator, a man needed to demonstrate that he was worth 400,000 sesterces. Marcion gave away half that amount upon entering the Roman church." Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 269.

2  Ehrman, 105

3  The technical term docetism applied to this comes from the Greek word for "seem."   "Two varieties were widely known. In one version as in Marcionism, Christ was so divine he could not have been human, since God lacked a material body, which therefore could not physically suffer. Jesus only appeared to be a flesh-and-blood man, his body was a phantasm. Other groups who were accused of docetism held that Jesus was a man in the flesh, but Christ was a separate entity, who entered Jesus’s body in the form of a dove at his baptism, empowered him to perform miracles, and abandoned him on his death on the cross."  Wickipedia, "Docetism."

4 Tertullian's remark comes from Against Marcion  4.1.1.  The quotation comes from Paul Foster, "Marcion: His Life, Works, Beliefs, and Impact," The Expository Times, 121 (6) 276.

5  Ehrman 107

6  Ehrman, 108

7  Foster, 275

8  Dieter T. Roth, "The Text of the Lord’s Prayer in Marcion’s Gospel," ZNW 103 (2012) 54.

9  " In the spiritual tradition of the Church, the prayer “Thy Kingdom come” has also been understood as an invocation of the Holy Spirit to dwell in God’s people. In his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer, St. Gregory of Nyssa says that there was another reading for this petition which said “Thy Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us.” Thus he says, following the scriptures, that the presence of the Holy Spirit in man is the presence of Christ and the Kingdom of God."  From the Web Site of the Orthodox Church of America. http://oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-alms-giving/the-lords-prayer.

10  Ehrman, 107

11  Ten of Paul's letters  (without 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) and the Gospel of Luke