/lit/ - Literature

>>4647836

Whether Marcion was a "gnostic" is very debatable since he actually is said to have opposed to many allegorical interpretations of Biblical passages that would be associated with gnostic movements.

Also, he wasn't the first to come up with ideas he did.

Cerinthus before him promoted a kind of Jewish form of Christian gnosis, teaching that a group of ignorant angels created the world, although God's hand was apparently in it, and he promoted observing Jewish law.

Irenaeus and Tertullian claim that Marcion became acquainted with the preaching of Cerdo, who taught that the god of the Law and Gospel were separate.

Recent reconstructions of Marcion's Evangelion and Apostolikon also suggest that Marcion's version of the Gospel of Luke was not edited according to his ideology and shows no evidence of such as his Tertullian and later church fathers claim. The theory gaining some popularity among scholars is that Marcion's version of Luke represents a different line of textual transmission geared more towards a Gentile audience and Marcion didn't edit out the positive references to Jewish figures in it or Paul's letters. The Pauline epistles he included in his bible also happen to be the ten epistles scholars tend to consider the most likely ones to be authentic letters of Paul and Marcion is probably our earliest witness to the Pauline epistles. The funny thing about his version of the epistles is that the versions in Apostolikon based on recent reconstruction work appear to be, for the most part, identical with the catholic and orthodox versions, contain no evidence of ideologically motivated edits and their only omissions are coincidentally passages which many modern Biblical scholars feel are interpolations with no relation to the larger body of the work.

it would appear that Marcion had practically the same books as his opponents, but just derived the different interpretation from Paul's letters. His ideas were not all that original, but he was a much bigger threat than his predecessors cause he was wealthy enough to spread his ideas across the Mediterranean and organized a collective body of scripture which he felt all interpretation of the message of Christ must be derived from, i.e. he created the first known Christian scriptural canon. He was much more organized than his opponents at the time and was the biggest contributor of his time to a change in Christianity from a largely oral based tradition to the literary one it would eventually become which based its authority on an authoritative body of religious texts.

>>4647904

cont'd

Marcion appears to have promoted a much more literal reading of Biblical texts, opposing the philosophical speculations his opponents used to rationalize Christ's message with the Old Testament. When Paul differentiates between Law and Gospel, he takes it much more literally. If we consider the fact that Marcion's Christian bible had texts which would be included in catholic manuscripts with little change in order to promote a vastly different interpretation than he derived from them, then in my opinion we probably should re-examine how we choose to interpret Paul. For all we know, Paul may have been closer to Marcion's viewpoint after all. Acts, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Hebrews, were all likely written after Marcion's time in order to domesticate Paul more.

Marcion also takes Paul's ethics seriously. Marcionites rejected marriage based on the fact that Paul said it was better not to be married and that he wished all men could be like himself: single. Marcionites rejected meat and wine because Paul said it was better for you to avoid those things.

bump

The under-appreciated Oswald Spengler on this topic:

"A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes — Marcion. He saw in Paul's creation and its consequences only the basis on which to
found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ — namely, the Jewish canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century — but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real "conspiracy against the truth" and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testa-
ment as fulfilled and concluded — Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated
and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail.
From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder,
like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel,
like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity,
he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.^ Jehovah as the Creator-God,
the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil: Jesus as the incarnation of the
Saviour-God in this evil creation is the "alien" — that is, the good Principle. The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated. But to the new doctrine properly belonged new scriptures. The "Law and Prophets" which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the Bible of the Jewish God, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil's book that the Christian
had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God — likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the — one and true — Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, cor-
rupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the one prophet of Jesus, who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament."

>>4648781

Elaine Pagels in one of her books delves into the possibility that much of the Gnosticism you see emerge in Christianity has a good share of its origins in the Pauline school and Paul himself.

Honestly, I think Marcion was probably closer to Paul's original teaching than the orthodox. Even Tertullian admits the problems with taking Paul as an authority himself and calls him "the apostle of the heretics" since all the gnostic groups that were emerging that held similar views to Marcion, like Marcion, loved Paul and justified themselves by appealing to his teaching and authority.

Pagels I know notes in her book The Gnostic Paul (haven't read it, but see it cited), the fundamentally Greek gnostic language of Paul's letters that many don't easily recognize in the English translations. Also, Paul's justification for himself was fundamentally Gnostic in its character. His authority was not inherited directly from the other apostles, and he appeals a lot to the "secret wisdom" made known to him.

Again, when we consider the findings by scholars that Marcion's Gospel and his Pauline corpus were just as capable of being interpreted according to the Catholic point of view as his own and that he didn't subsidize his New Testament with any other apocryphal book rejected by the Catholic church besides his own handwritten commentary, The Antitheses, AND that even the Church Fathers admit that Marcion's beliefs weren't all that new in the religion, there being predecessors to him with similar ideas, I think it raises a question of whether or not how we interpret is due more to what we are told he means by his words through centuries of Catholic domestication of his character. If we are to put all that stuff aside for the moment and just read the ten letters Marcion chose by themselves without interpreting them according to any other tradition, does our impression change to that of someone much closer to Marcion's worldview?

>>4647904
>>4647911
>>4648781
>>4648839
Quality posting on my /lit/?

>>4648839
This thread needs a picture of Oswald Spengler.

"To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of
"John" and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the
communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror,^ he set out to
build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church.^ From 156 to 190 this
was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church
succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing with the Manichasans.®

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had
underestimated the vis inertia of existing conditions, his grand effort was not in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in oppsition to, instead of through, him."

>>4648868
The early Catholic Church arose in its greatness only about 190, and then it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion's Bible by another of similar structure — Gospels and apostolic Epistles — which it
then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the Church's attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion's third creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own on the basis of his enunciation of the problem.

>>4648879
So having quoted all that, "Marcion expropriated Paul's gnostic bias" is the phrasing I would prefer to the OP's.

op here
thx, my body wasnt ready for these replies
i am quietly digesting them now

What class are you doing research for, OP? Might be in the same one.

>>4648868
>>4648879
>>4648920

This is what Jason D. BeDuhn has to say in his recent book The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon:
---Somewhat later than Barnabas, the seven letters penned byIgnatius display considerable concern over the still ill defined distinction between Christian and Jewish observances. Ignatius was apparently involved in debates with fellow Christians about the trustworthy foundations of the faith. His opponents refused to believe anything not explicitly supported by the archeiois, the Jewish scriptures, while Ignatius embraced the independent authority of "the gospel," the oral instruction and interpretive tradition of the Christian communities. "For Ignatius," William Schoedel concludes, "the teachings and myths of Judaism are 'old'--a term used to described what is opposed to God (cf. Eph. 19.3). 'Judaism,' then, is not granted even a historically limited role in the unfolding of God's plan"

From the same period, the Letter to Diognetus goes even further in criticizing the Jewish tradition in a manner unqualified by any claim that Christianity is a truer Judaism, repeatedly emphasizing the newness of Christianity, instead of the more typical claim that it was something ordained from of old. According to the author, no one had any knowledge of God before the coming of Christ, and God held back his "wise counsel as a well guarded mystery."--- (BeDuhn pg.19)

---We do not know if Marcion set out for Rome with the intention of reforming the Christian community (or communities) there. He may have thought any local difference of opinion he had experienced in the provinces came from ignorance and that the Christians in the capital certainly would share the views he regarded as "orthodox." If so, he was in for quite a surprise. John Knox pictures such a scenario:

"Now imagine a zealous and forceful Christian of the early second century whose Christianity has been of a decidedly non-Jewish type, who has been nourished on Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and other writings of that apostle, who has found salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his God and Father, who has made little use, if any, of Jewish Scripture, thinking of it as the 'law' which Christ has brought to nought--imagine such a Christian finding himself in a community where the historical contininuity with Judaism is prized as one the most precious values, where ultimate authority is vested in the Jewish Scriptures, where the sharp Pauline antithesis between law and gospel, between letter and Spirit, is softened, if not effaced. Do we not have in such a situation all we need to explain what seems to have happened several years after Marcion came to Rome...?"

If Marcion arrived in Rome with any illusion that he would find a community living according to his Pauline ideal, he must have quickly discerned the divergence between his vision and local reality.--- (BeDuhn pg.21)

bump