Marcionism

Sinope, the sea and money

Marcion was born at Sinope, a port of Pontus on the Black Sea, in the first decades of the 2nd century.^[1] He was the son of the city's bishop — a bishop father who excommunicated him, a detail the ancient sources stress with insistence.^[2] Two witnesses close to his time, Rhodo and Tertullian, describe him as nautes, nauclerus: a shipowner, a man of the sea and of trade, hence rich, mobile, accustomed to command.^[3]

A scandalous tale circulates about his youth, reported by Saint Epiphanius in the 4th century: Marcion is said to have displayed a provocative asceticism, then fallen into sin with a young girl; his father is said to have driven him out of the Church, obstinately refusing to admit him to penance despite his pleas, and Marcion, become the laughing-stock of his fellow citizens, is said to have secretly left Sinope for Rome.^[4] Many modern historians, since G. Krüger, reject this account as slander of the kind Epiphanius was prone to; others read it as a metaphor — the violated "young bride" being the Church, the young spouse of Christ, dishonoured by heresy under cover of austerity.^[5] No earlier ecclesiastical writer accuses Marcion of impurity, and his personal austerity seems an acknowledged fact.^[6] This article therefore retains the methodological lesson: on this point, the sources contradict one another and honesty requires saying so.

One solid clue, however, sheds light on his rank: everything indicates that Marcion did not arrive at Rome as a mere layman, but as a bishop — probably auxiliary or suffragan to his father at Sinope.^[7] A layman would not have disputed Scripture with the Roman priests, nor issued the threat that remained famous — "I will divide your Church, and this division will last forever" — nor founded a worldwide institution of episcopal structure whose disciples claimed him for centuries as their "first bishop", without any adversary, despite so many works of refutation, disputing that title.^[8]

Rome, 140–144: from the donation to excommunication

Marcion arrived at Rome around 140, after the death of Pope Hyginus, the see being vacant, before the accession of Pius I.^[9] According to Epiphanius, he asked for admission into the Roman Church and was refused: one cannot receive, without his bishop's approval, a man whom his own bishop has expelled.^[10] The objection seems implausible — the great Church of Rome admitting incompetence before a bishop of Pontus! — but it becomes natural if one remembers that Rome was then without a bishop and that it was priests who answered, and above all that Marcion was himself a bishop, required to present a confession of faith, as Tertullian attests three times over.^[11] Disappointed, it is said, at not being made bishop of the vacant city, the Pontic waited — and paid: he offered the Roman community the enormous sum of two hundred thousand sesterces, a gift reported by Tertullian.^[12] The sum was returned to him after the break, which suggests a donation with a tacit condition rather than pure charity.^[13]

At Rome, Marcion made common cause with Cerdo, a Syrian Gnostic who had arrived under Hyginus and was already teaching that the God announced by the Law and the Prophets is not the Father of Jesus Christ.^[14] That Marcion truly derived his doctrine from Cerdo seems unlikely, however: he had his own thesis, simpler and sharper than all Gnostic speculations.^[15]

The final break erupted in autumn 144: the Marcionites themselves counted 115 years and 6 months between Christ and the birth of their sect, and Tertullian speaks broadly of a hundred years and more.^[16] Marcion left the Church with his followers, recovered his money, and founded his counter-Church.

After 144: an expanding counter-Church

The expansion was lightning-fast. Around 150, Saint Justin, in his First Apology, already described Marcion's heresy as spread everywhere.^[17] Barely a few years after the break: several historians judge this interval too short for such success and suppose that Marcion had already spread his ideas in Asia Minor before Rome — the Chronicle of Edessa placing the beginning of Marcionism in 138, and Clement of Alexandria making him the elder of Basilides and Valentinus, which would make him already a mature man on his arrival at Rome.^[18]

The success can be measured by encounters: Saint Polycarp, during his stay at Rome under Pope Anicetus (traditionally dated around 154), met Marcion, who asked him: "Do you recognize me?" — and the old bishop of Smyrna, a disciple of John, answered: "I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan."^[19] Saint Irenaeus, who reports the scene, places Marcion's full power under Pope Anicetus (around 155–166): invaluit sub Aniceto.^[20]

"I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan." — Saint Polycarp of Smyrna to Marcion, during his stay at Rome under Anicetus (traditionally dated around 154), as reported by Saint Irenaeus^[21]

The exact date of Marcion's death is unknown.^[22] Tertullian recounts that the old heretic is said to have done penance and accepted, as the condition of his readmission, to bring back to the Church those he had led astray — but that death prevented him.^[23] A tale of eleventh-hour conversion or a pious legend of the controversialists? The sources do not allow a verdict, and this article will give none.

A distinction must be made between the doctrine of Marcion himself and that of his disciples, who quickly drifted toward ordinary gnosis.^[24] Marcion himself was no Gnostic dreamer: abstract questions — the origin of evil, emanations, aeons, syzygies, eternally opposed principles of good and evil — interested him little.^[25] His sole passion was practical and, in his eyes, purifying: to free Christianity from every tie to Judaism, to deliver a pure and simple New Testament, without the Old.^[26] The Old Testament scandalized the faithful and repelled cultivated pagans by its apparent crudeness and cruelty: it had to be set aside.^[27] Two obstacles stood in the way; Marcion swept them aside with drastic measures.

The just God and the good God

First obstacle: accounting for the very existence of the Old Testament. Marcion postulates a second god, a demiurge: a god in a sense, but not the supreme God.^[28] He is just, rigidly just, he has his good qualities — but he is not the good God, Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.^[29] The metaphysical relationship between these two gods troubles Marcion little: he does not attain the absolute consistency of Manichaeism, which would come a hundred years later.^[30]

Saint Justin, the first to describe the doctrine (around 150), sums it up: with the devil's help, Marcion blasphemes by refusing to acknowledge the Creator as God; he acknowledges another god, essentially greater, author of greater works than those of the maker of the world.^[31] The supreme God is good (agathos), all love; the lower god gives way to fierce anger.^[32] Inferior to the good God, the just god nevertheless keeps his own independent sphere of activity: the two are not opposed like Ormuzd and Ahriman, for the good God, alone all-wise and all-powerful, intervenes on behalf of men and loves mercy more than punishment.^[33] All men are created by the Demiurge, but the latter chose for his own the Jewish people and thus made himself god of the Jews.^[34]

Marcion's theological horizon is limited to the Bible: his struggle with the Church looks like a battle of texts, nothing more.^[35] The Old Testament is true enough; Moses and the Prophets are the messengers of the Demiurge; the Jewish messiah will surely come to found on earth a millennial kingdom for the Jews — but that messiah has nothing to do with the Christ of God.^[36] The good God, invisible, unspeakable (aoratos, akatanomastos, agathos theos), unknown until then both to the creator and to his creatures, revealed himself in Christ.^[37] To what extent Marcion admitted a Trinity of persons in the supreme divinity is unknown; Christ is indeed the Son of God, but he is also simply "God," without further qualification.^[38]

A Christ who came down without being born

Second obstacle: the New Testament passages that endorse the Old. Marcion resolutely cuts them out: he makes himself his own New Testament.^[39] And his Christology follows: Marcion's Christ is God manifested, not God incarnate — the Christology of the Docetists, set out in its own right in the article on Docetism.^[40]

His Gospel opened with these astonishing words: "In the fifteenth year of the emperor Tiberius, God came down to Capernaum and taught there on the Sabbaths."^[41] No Nativity, no childhood, no Davidic genealogy: the Saviour appears as an adult, deus ex machina, and Tertullian mocks him cruelly: "Suddenly a Son, suddenly sent, suddenly Christ!"^[42] A daring manipulation of the Gospel text — and, Catholic historians note, a splendid testimony that in Christian circles of the first half of the second century, the divinity of Christ was already held as a central doctrine.^[43]

Marcion admits no prophecy of Christ's coming: the Jewish prophets announced only a Jewish messiah, who has not yet appeared.^[44] To illustrate a Christ without a real body, he invoked the three angels who ate, walked, and conversed with Abraham without any real human body: such, he said, would have been Christ's life.^[45] Tertullian even reports that, when Apelles and deserters began attributing to Christ a real body — not by birth, but gathered from the astral elements — Marcion reportedly preferred to accept even a putative birth rather than a real body; whether this is Tertullian's mockery or a genuine concession by the old man is unknown.^[46]

Despised flesh, forbidden marriage

Matter and flesh are not for Marcion essentially evil, but they are contemptible things, the mere product of the Demiurge: inconceivable that God should truly have taken them to himself.^[47] Christ's whole earthly life contrasts with the conduct of the Demiurge, and Marcion staged these contrasts skilfully: the Demiurge sends bears to devour children for a childish mockery — Christ brings little children to himself, caresses and blesses them; the Demiurge declares lepers unclean and banishes them — Christ touches and heals them.^[48] The putative Passion and death of Christ would be the work of the Demiurge who, to avenge the abolition of the Jewish Law, would have delivered him to the underworld; but even in the underworld Christ triumphs by preaching to the spirits in limbo, and by his Resurrection he founds the true Kingdom of the good God.^[49]

Epiphanius adds that fourth-century Marcionites believed that Christ in limbo had saved Cain, Korah, Dathan and Abiram, Esau, and the pagans, while leaving damned all the saints of the Old Testament — a possible doctrine of certain late Marcionites, but not of Marcion himself, who had no antinomian tendency.^[50] Logically, Marcion denied the resurrection of the body — "flesh and blood shall not inherit the Kingdom of God" — and denied the second coming of Christ to judge the living and the dead: the good God, all goodness, does not punish those who reject him; he simply leaves them to the Demiurge, who will cast them into eternal fire.^[51]

Discipline follows doctrine. The main point: the rejection of marriage — only those who did not live in marriage were baptized: virgins, widows, the unmarried, and eunuchs; all others remained catechumens.^[52] By contrast, the absence of separation between catechumens and the baptized in Marcionite worship shocked the orthodox; Marcion defended it by the Epistle to the Galatians (6:6).^[53] For the rest, he kept the received practices — the water of baptism, anointing with oil, milk and honey for catechumens — even though Tertullian jeers at these "wretched elements of the Creator".^[54] The Marcionites must have been excessive fasters to provoke Tertullian's mockery even in his Montanist period; Epiphanius notes their fasting on Saturday, in opposition to the Jewish God who made the Sabbath a day of joy — perhaps a mere Western custom adopted by them.^[55]

What Marcion was not

Neither a Gnostic dreamer, nor a consistent Manichaean, nor merely one Docetist among others: Marcion occupies a place apart, which must be marked so as not to confuse the cases. Gnosis properly so called — emanations, aeons, myths of salvation through reserved knowledge — is dealt with in the article on Gnosticism: Marcion retains almost nothing of it and is interested only in texts. The refusal of Christ's true flesh is treated in its own right in the article on Docetism: Marcion is one of its faces, the one who brings down to Capernaum a God without childhood. And the absolute dualism of two coeternal principles of good and evil belongs to the Manichaeism of Mani, a century later: Marcion's disciples slid into it; Marcion himself never quite got there.^[56]

The amputated Gospel

To make the contrast between the two Testaments perfect, Marcion had to omit a large part of the New Testament writings and manipulate the rest.^[57] He retained only one Gospel out of four: our Gospel according to Saint Luke, amputated of its first two chapters — farewell to the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple and the twelve-year-old child among the doctors — and purged of everything that smacked of Judaism.^[58]

The Marcionite text has been patiently reconstructed by scholars, notably Theodor Zahn from all available sources — foremost Saint Epiphanius, who had collected 78 passages from Marcion's Gospel in order to refute them one by one.^[59] The alterations consist chiefly of omissions; the textual changes are slight but significant: "I thank thee, Father, God of heaven and earth" becomes "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven" — the Creator's word "God" is erased; "foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken" becomes "all that I have told you" — the prophets are erased.^[60] Sometimes slight militant additions: the accusation of the Jews before Pilate — "We have found this man perverting our nation" — receives this reinforcement: "and destroying the Law and the Prophets".^[61] And Catholics kept pressing Marcion even on the texts he had retained, hence a continual need for fresh alterations.^[62]

The expurgated Apostle: ten Epistles of Paul

As the second book of his canon, the Apostolikon, Marcion admits only ten Epistles of Saint Paul.^[63] Paul's mantle has fallen on his shoulders: in his struggle against the Judaizers, the Catholics of his day are in his eyes only the Judaizers of the previous century, and he insinuates without writing it openly that the pillars themselves — Peter, James and John — betrayed their mandate, fondly speaking of "false apostles" while letting the reader guess whom he means.^[64]

The choice is not arbitrary: the Pastorals organize a Church of bishops and deacons rooted in continuity, Acts recounts the concord of the apostles with Peter, Revelation and Hebrews breathe the Old Testament in every line. Everything contradicting the system disappears. Note in passing one indication of the antiquity of the Pauline dossier: Dominique de Bruyne showed in 1907 that the short prologues to Paul's Epistles, once attributed to Pelagius, in fact come from a Marcionite Bible, later completed with Catholic summaries for the missing Epistles.^[66]

The Antitheses: the method of contrasts

The cardinal doctrine — the opposition of the Old to the New — had been amply illustrated by Marcion in his great lost work, the Antitheses, the "Contrasts".^[67] The title probably came from Saint Paul himself: "avoid the antitheses of knowledge falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20).^[68] The method is formidably simple: set side by side a trait of the God of the Old Testament and a trait of Christ, and let the reader conclude that there are two gods.

The device is seductive because it looks honest: texts, nothing but texts. It is precisely there that the Catholic reply will strike — by showing that the texts, read in full, proclaim unity.

One God, Creator and Saviour

From the mid-second century onward, the riposte can be summed up in one sentence, handed down by Saint Justin in his Syntagma against Marcion — a lost work, quoted by Saint Irenaeus — which rings like an oath:

"I would not have believed the Lord himself, had he announced another God than the Creator." — Saint Justin, Syntagma against Marcion, quoted by Saint Irenaeus^[77]

Saint Irenaeus, who had planned a special work against Marcion without ever carrying it out, nevertheless keeps returning to him in his great Against Heresies: one God, who made all things through his Word, and whose "two hands" — the Son and the Spirit — fashion man and save him.^[78] And Tertullian, in his Against Marcion in five books (c. 207-208), takes apart the mainspring of the system: a good God who remained unknown for centuries, who lets the Demiurge lead humanity astray without intervening, then redeems at great cost creatures that are not his own — what goodness, what wisdom, what power?^[79] If the world is evil, why should the good God want to save a flesh he did not make; and if he saves it, then it is good and its Author is good.^[80]

The Old Testament announces Christ instead of contradicting him

Faced with the Antitheses, the Church does not discard the Old Testament: she shows that it prepares the New. Christ himself had said it: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets: I have not come to abolish, but to fulfil."^[81] Saint Paul describes Israel as the true olive tree onto which the Gentiles, a wild olive, have been grafted: cut the root and the graft dies.^[82]

"The New Testament lies hidden in the Old, and in the New the Old is unveiled." — Saint Augustine, Questions on the Heptateuch, II, 73, quoted by the Catechism^[83]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church has fixed the doctrine: the Old Testament is an inalienable part of Scripture, its divinely inspired books retain permanent value, and its whole economy was aimed solely at preparing the coming of Christ; Christians and Jews venerate the same God, and the Church reads the Old Testament in the light of Christ without cancelling its letter.^[84] The Second Vatican Council (constitution Dei Verbum) likewise teaches the unity of the two Testaments, willed by the one God who is author of both.^[85] The bears of Elisha and the lepers of Leviticus then cease to be exhibits for the prosecution: restored to the divine pedagogy — a rough people educated step by step toward mercy — they become the shadows of which Christ is the light.^[86]

Flesh assumed, therefore flesh saved

On Christology, the answer lies in the axiom that Saint Gregory of Nazianzus would formulate a century later and that the whole tradition would take up: what was not assumed was not healed. A Christ without birth, without flesh and without true death saves neither our births, nor our bodies, nor our dead.^[87] Saint Irenaeus had already said it in his own way — God must truly have taken on man for man truly to live by God:

"The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God." — Saint Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, IV, 20, 7^[88]

Tertullian, in his On the Flesh of Christ, pushes the paradox to the cry that sums up the whole faith of antiquity in the face of the subtle Doctors:

"The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed of it, because it is shameful; the Son of God died: it is believable, because it is foolish; buried, he rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible." — Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 5^[89]

The full development of this refutation — Scripture, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, the councils — belongs to the article on Docetism, to which the reader is referred: here Marcion is only a textbook case of the refusal of the flesh.

Faced with Marcion, the canon takes shape

Did Marcion "invent" the canon of the New Testament by forcing the Church to equip herself with one? The formula, often repeated, is half true. On the one hand, long before 144 the Churches were already reading the "memoirs of the apostles" and Paul's letters as Scripture — Justin testifies to this around 150.^[90] On the other hand, the Marcionite challenge forced the Church to name and to close: to say which books are received, and why the others are not.

Two scholarly projects illustrate this effect. Scholars such as Kattenbusch and then McGiffert maintained that the Apostles' Creed, as the Roman Church formulated it, was drawn up in direct opposition to Marcionism — each article answering one of Marcion's denials: one God the Father almighty, creator; a Christ born, suffered, crucified, risen; the resurrection of the flesh.^[91] The hypothesis remains debated, but it expresses the essential point: faced with Marcion, the faith had to state itself article by article. Another, more material clue: the Roman list called the Muratorian Fragment, whose dating — late second century or fourth century — still divides specialists, is often invoked in this debate; the article notes it without deciding a question the scholars have not decided.^[92] What is certain is that the Church did not answer an amputated canon with an improvised canon, but with the solemn recognition of what she was already reading as the Word of God.

Bishops, churches and martyrs

Marcion founded not a school of teachers but a parallel Church, modelled on the Catholic Church down to its episcopal structure.^[93] On one point, the Marcionites even did better than many: they held it unlawful to deny their religion under persecution and nobly rivalled the Catholics in shedding their blood for the name of Christ — Marcionite martyrs recur several times in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History.^[94] It would therefore be a mistake to see Marcionism as a cut-price Christianity for weak minds: it was a demanding, austere religion, capable of dying for its faith — all the more formidable for it.

The disciples drift: three principles, one single principle

The fate of Marcionism was to drift almost at once from the founder's ideas toward pure Gnosis.^[96] Marcion's creator-god was too inconsistent a conception — inferior to the good God yet independent, just but not good, author of writings that were true yet to be rejected, creator of all men without any right to their worship: the disciples wanted more logic.^[97]

Some posited three principles — the good, the just and the wicked — a solution defended by Syneros and by Lucanus (or Lucianus), to whom Epiphanius devoted a whole chapter of refutation.^[98] Origen and Epiphanius seem to know Lucanus's sect only by hearsay: it was probably extinct by the end of the 3rd century.^[99] Tertullian notes that Lucanus outdid Marcion in denying the resurrection — not only that of the body, but that of the soul, admitting only the resurrection of some I-know-not-what, a pneuma distinct from the psyche — and that he was aiming at his doctrine when writing his On the Soul; he may have taught the transmigration of souls.^[100] The doctrine of the three principles nevertheless survived a long time: around 225, an Assyrian named Prepon defended it in a work entitled Bardesanes the Armenian.^[101]

Others reduced everything to a single principle of which the Jewish god is only a creature. This was the path of the famous Apelles — once a disciple of Marcion himself, grown more Gnostic than Marcionite.^[102] He travelled with a young girl named Philumene, a sort of seeress given to magic, who claimed to receive frequent visions of Christ and of Saint Paul in the figure of a child.^[103] Tertullian calls Philumene a prostitute and accuses Apelles of impurity; but Rhodon, who had known Apelles personally, speaks of a man "venerable for his conduct and his age" — a contradiction this article records without resolving.^[104] Apelles repudiated Marcion's two gods and confessed "one sole good God, one sole Beginning, one sole Power beyond all description"; below, a creator god fashioned by the supreme God, a fire-god-angel who traffics in souls, and a lawgiver god author of a lying Old Testament.^[105] His great work, the Syllogisms, demonstrated the falsity of the Old Testament — Origen quotes a characteristic fragment — and his theses were refuted by Tertullian, Rhodon, Hippolytus and Ambrose among others.^[106]

The Marcionite East down to the 5th century

In the West, the Marcionites died out quickly; in the East, they prospered. Saint Epiphanius attests that in 374 they had "seduced an immense number of men" and were found not only in Rome and Italy, but in Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Cyprus, the Thebaid and as far as Persia.^[107] Near the diocese of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, not far from Damascus, a Marcionite church inscription dated 318-319 proves they then enjoyed freedom of worship.^[108] And Theodoret himself, bishop of Cyrrhus from 423 to 458, boasts in his letter to the patriarch of Antioch of having converted a thousand Marcionites in his scattered diocese.^[109] Constantine had nevertheless forbidden all public and private worship of Marcionism.^[110]

The sect spread as far as Armenia, where the archpriest Eznik refuted it in the 5th century — proof that it remained numerous there — and to the margins of the Empire.^[111] Some scholars debate whether Eznik's description still reflects Marcion's primitive doctrine; the question remains open.^[112] Later and more indirect, the link with the Paulicians: Peter of Sicily, who lived among them in 868-869 and remains a first-hand witness, reports that their founder, Constantine the Armenian, received from a deacon of Syria the Gospel and the Apostolikon of Marcion, passed them on to his followers — who at first kept them as their Bible — while repudiating the writings of Mani.^[113] Marcionism therefore did not die: it slowly dissolved into younger dualisms, down to Manichaeism which absorbed it.^[114]

Marcion reread by the moderns

The 19th century made Marcion a romantic hero of criticism: the Tübingen school saw in his Gospel the primitive text of which Luke supposedly amplified the version, and Adolf von Harnack devoted to him in 1921 his great monograph, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, hailing him as an unrecognised religious genius.^[115] Later research — Zahn before it, then the 20th-century work on the Marcionite text — reversed the perspective: it was Marcion who mutilated an already received Luke, not Luke who amplified Marcion.^[116] The historian Judith Lieu (Marcion and the Making of a Heretic, Cambridge, 2015) showed how much our "Marcion" is a construction of his adversaries: we possess not a single autograph line of his, only what Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Epiphanius quote from him in order to refute him.^[117] The Catholic lesson to retain: the Church was not afraid of the dossier, it preserved it — including Epiphanius's 78 passages — faithfully enough for scholars, sixteen centuries later, to still be able to reconstruct the heretic's text.^[118]

• The heresies of the early centuries
• Gnosticism
• Docetism
• Manichaeism
• Montanism
• The Nestorian crisis
• The Monophysite crisis