Adversus Marcionem

It occurred to me that I might be accused of cosmic dualism, of a Christian sort. In what follows, I refer to H Clifton Ward "Marcion and his Critics". Ward was asked to present the present-year consensus on Christianity's most earnest early Platonist.

Bear with me as I remind y'all that we all rely upon Marcion's enemies. We have little Marcion directly. We may have his prologues to certain Pauline epistles in Latin - I am presuming "vetus", that is pre-Jerome. (CALLED IT 7/15/21: For the NT, Jerome did only the Gospels, leaving the rest to the Pelagians.) But otherwise we are stuck with Tertullian and others like him.

For Ward, Marcion's thought derives from a fellow Anatolian Greek, one Numenius of Apamea. I must disclose that I have not so far read Numenius directly. Ward presents Numenius as proposing a great Platonic ideal of goodness, to which ideal other gods aspire. So far so Bagestan.

Marcion judged the Old Testament God so imperfect that Marcion could not serve Him. In His stead Marcion proposed that Jesus had dropped in on us from a superior god, the "Father". In this respect Jesus acts like the Serpent in Eden, which later or parallel "gnostic" sects made explicit.

Marcion, perhaps, reified Numenius' ideal of goodness as a god itself. I have not done this directly; but I do admit that, in my schema, the "demiurge" Who created this universe has not reached the Divine ideal Himself. In an uncountable multiverse, other gods are likely ahead of Him. And again, Marcion's enemies might not be being fair to his thought.

This daring supposition, Marcion could not prove from the four Gospels we got - which are all thoroughly Jewish. Instead Marcion acquired some version of Luke's Gospel. The anti-Marcionite Church Fathers, in what they quote, certainly make it look bad for Marcion's text. However that text might not be Marcion's own. Since - once more - we rely on Marcion's enemies, it is possible those enemies had taken genuinely-distorted recensions; by Marcion's more-zealous disciples, perhaps. (Hippolytus similarly owned an expansion of "Gospel of Thomas" ch. 4 perhaps via tafsir. Ditto, what John Damascene would make of the Quran's Camel of God.) Also many variants are shared with known manuscripts of Luke, not otherwise Marcionite.

It happens that Luke in any version relies on Mark. Tertullian (Ward points out) marvels that Marcion's Jesus appears in Capernaum out of nowhere and starts preaching in synagogues. A nonJew may certainly enter a Bet Midrash and observe the services therein; but he won't be ascending the pulpit to preach. Marcion's text has a subtext, at the very least; that Jesus appeared in the semblance of a mature rabbi.

I would further question that the God of Torah was all that bad. Certainly the Jews and Samaritans never thought so; it only takes a cursory reading of Dennis Prager to learn how Israel has wrestled with God and decided to submit to Him. If nothing else, the God of the Good Book created us and loves us: He is the God we know and grew up with. If the Old Testament God is good-enough, there is no need to posit a better one. I go further: given all the horrors that inhabit the Far Realm, the chances that any other god is trustworthy drop to the infinitesimal.

Marcion, writing in the early second century, had little warrant to argue that Jesus himself had posited some other god. In that gospel anterior to Luke - both ours and Marcion's - Jesus would not even renounce Judaism. The most Mark's Jesus did, was to argue points of halakhah, and here and there to assert Messianic privilege for himself.

I can best sum up Marcion's thought as - nice try, dude.