MARCION

MARCION (d. 160?), founder of an independent Christian church in the second century and influential exponent of the idea that God's sole attribute is goodness. Marcion was born toward the end of the first century in Sinope, a city in Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea. A shipowner by profession and a man of wealth, he was a member of the Christian church in his home city (where, according to some sources, his father was bishop), but he left there after being ejected by the church. He lived for a time in western Asia Minor but again left because his ideas found little acceptance. In Rome he became a member of that city's more cosmopolitan congregation, presenting it with the large gift of 200,000 sesterces, and came under the influence of Cerdo, a Christian teacher from Asia. As his ideas became more clearly defined, he ran into conflict with the leaders of the church in Rome, and in 144 he founded his own church (his money was returned), which spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire and came to rival the Catholic Church. By the end of the century, there were Marcionite congregations in cities throughout the Roman world, and writers in Greek (Justin Martyr), Latin (Tertullian), and Syriac (Bardesanes, or Bardaisan) were refuting his views.

Both because of his success in establishing an organization parallel to the "great" church, with its own bishops, elders, catechumens, liturgy, and canon of holy scripture, and his radical conception of God as love, Marcion is a significant figure in early Christian history. He taught that Christianity has no relation to the Judaism from which it sprang, he rejected the Hebrew scriptures in their entirety, and he abbreviated the New Testament to conform to his teaching. He believed that the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with, and is superior to, the God of the Hebrew scriptures who created the world, and he believed that Jesus came to reveal an utterly new and strange God, who is of pure goodness and mercy and without wrath or judgment. Marcion claimed to have learned this message from the apostle Paul, who, he believed, was alone among the early Christian leaders in understanding the revelation in Christ. While most Christians saw continuity between the covenant with Israel and the new covenant initiated under Jesus, Marcion saw only contradiction and opposition, and by a selective reading of the scriptures he sought to restore and repristinate the original and authentic faith that had been obscured by Christian teachers. He did not, however, make any claims for himself, either as a prophet or as a holy man. He saw himself as a teacher and a man of learning who pointed beyond himself to the teachings of Jesus and Paul.

Like other Christian thinkers from this period whose views were not accepted by the growing consensus, Marcion has gone down in history as a "heretic," but this epithet should not obscure his importance. At a time when questions such as the relation of Christianity to Judaism, the place of the Hebrew scriptures (Christian Old Testament) in Christian life and thinking, the proper method for interpreting scripture (especially passages that describe God as capricious, despotic, or vindictive), and indeed the very terms in which the Christian faith would be expressed, were matters of intense dispute, Marcion provided clear and unequivocal answers. He also emphasized a central element in Christianity, the boundless grace of God, a point that was lost on his critics. Marcion repudiated all attempts to see Christ as the fulfillment of ancient prophecy. Christ is wholly unique and must be set apart from everything, that is, from Judaism, the created world, and the God who made the world.

His critics classified him among the Gnostics, but he does not fit easily into this classification. On certain points—his contrast between the creator God and the high God who is the father of Jesus, his depreciation of the world, his dualism, his docetic Christology (his view that Christ did not have a real human body), and his rejection of the Old Testament—there were affinities with Gnosticism, perhaps through the influence of Cerdo and others he met at Rome. But Marcion had little sympathy for the speculative systems of the Gnostic teachers: he did not think that salvation comes through gnōsis ("knowledge"), and he had a different anthropology (there is no "spark of light" in human beings; they are wholly the work of the creator God) and a different view of redemption.

Marcion was the first Christian to put together a collection of books (a canon) as a standard for Christian life and teaching. His canon of the New Testament, in contrast to the generally accepted Christian collection of twenty-seven books, comprised an edited version of the gospel of Luke (omitting such parts as the infancy narratives, genealogy, baptism, and temptation) and ten epistles of Paul (not including 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus ) with the references to God as judge and passages dealing with punishment or the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy edited out. His effort to provide an original and authentic witness to the gospel was a powerful impetus toward the adoption of an approved list of books by the Catholic Church. Marcion also figures in the history of textual criticism of the New Testament, although recent scholarship has tended to see his work less as that of an independent witness and more as a testimony to one branch of the textual tradition.

Marcion wrote one book, Antitheses, which is known only through fragments and allusions in the writings of his critics. It consisted of a series of contradictory statements setting forth opposition between the creator God of the Old Testament and the good and benevolent God of Jesus, between the Jewish law and the Christian gospel. Though designed as a polemical and theological work, it assumed a creedlike status as a confession of faith within the Marcionite congregations and served as a key for interpreting the scriptures.

Besides taking an active part in the formation of the biblical canon, Marcion indirectly forced Christian thinkers of the second and third centuries to clarify their ideas on the relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament and led them to affirm that the Hebrew scriptures were not to be discarded by the church. In modern times, largely through the historical and theological interpretation of the nineteenth-century German church historian Adolf von Harnack, there has been renewed interest in Marcion as an original Christian thinker with an alternative vision of the Christian faith; his admirers have included figures as diverse as the Marxist Ernst Bloch and the historian Arnold Toynbee.

Bibliography

Aland, Barbara. "Marcion: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 70 (1973): 420–447.

Blackman, Edwin C. Marcion and His Influence. London, 1948.

Harnack, Adolf von. Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott; Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche. Leipzig, 1921. A fundamental study, with a collection of the most important texts.

Hoffman, R. Joseph. Marcion and the Restitution of Christianity. Chico, Calif., 1984.

Robert L. Wilken (1987)