Theopedia

Marcion

Overview

Marcion, styled “Marcion of Sinope” after his home city in scholarship,1 was a mid-second-century Christian teacher who argued that the church should reject the Hebrew Scriptures altogether and drew up his own rival list of authoritative writings: an edited Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters.2 The church at Rome excommunicated him as a heretic in AD 144, and historians of the New Testament canon still debate how large a role his break with the church played in prompting the wider church to settle its own list of books.23

Life and Ministry

Marcion’s activity can be dated with some precision: the church at Rome excommunicated him in AD 144 for his teaching, after which he formed a rival group of his own.2 His central argument was that the church could not rightly go on using the Hebrew Scriptures, since these, he held, were addressed only to the Jewish people; he taught that Jesus was not the Messiah sent by the God of the Old Testament but the son of a God previously unknown, first revealed in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, the date Luke’s Gospel gives for Jesus’s baptism (Luke 3:1).2 Marcion also doubted the reliability of some of Paul’s own letters, fearing they had been altered by Jewish-leaning Christians.2

Having set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, Marcion drew up his own list of writings to serve in their place: the Gospel of Luke, edited by removing material on Jesus’s birth and much of his teaching, and ten of Paul’s letters, also edited in places: Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, and Philippians.2

Theological Contribution

Rejection of the Old Testament and a rival canon

The wider church rejected Marcion’s position on three counts. First, and foremost, it would not set aside the Hebrew Scriptures, which had constituted the whole of Christian Scripture from the beginning and remained, in Ronald Heine’s words, “the highest written authority recognized in the church.”2 Second, where Marcion recognized only one Gospel, the wider church would insist, within a few years of his excommunication, that there were four, no more and no fewer.2 Third, where Marcion recognized the teaching of only one apostle, the church recognized at least three: Matthew, John, and Paul, and, with them, Peter.2 Heine is careful to say it would be too much to claim Marcion’s own teaching caused the church to draw up its list of accepted writings, but he “must… have caused the church to think seriously about the growing need for such a list.”2

Marcion’s premise, that the God of the Old Testament could not be the true God, made him the paradigm case of what Michael Kruger calls a “quasi-gnostic” reading of the faith: one in which the Creator is downgraded to a “demiurge,” a lesser being distinct from the true God revealed in Christ.4 As Ben Witherington puts it, in a passage Kruger quotes, this kind of move “was a non-starter from the outset because it rejected the very book the earliest Christians recognized as authoritative,” namely the Old Testament.4 Herman Bavinck describes the same move: Marcion “separated the God of the Old Testament from the God of the New,” and even within the New Testament turned Paul’s own law/gospel and flesh/spirit contrasts into a tool for driving a wedge between Scripture and Scripture.5 John Gill answers the underlying claim: goodness, he argues, is essential to God’s own nature, not a separable attribute he might lack in one dispensation and possess in another, so that “the evil god of Cerdon and Marcion is not the true God.”6

Christ without a true body

Marcion’s rejection of the Old Testament’s Creator carried over into his account of Christ. John Calvin engages Marcion directly in his discussion of Christ’s human nature: “Marcion imagines that Christ, instead of a body, assumed a phantom, because it is elsewhere said, that he was made in the likeness of man, and found in fashion as a man.”7 Calvin argues this misreads Paul’s actual point in Philippians 2:7, which describes not what kind of body Christ had but the humility with which he set aside the outward display of his divine glory; Calvin appeals in turn to 1 Peter 3:18 (“put to death in the flesh”) and 2 Corinthians 13:4 (“crucified through weakness”) as texts that hold only if Christ genuinely took on the weakness of human nature, not a mere appearance of one.7

Historical Significance

Scholars disagree about how much weight to put on Marcion’s role in the church settling its own New Testament canon. Helmut Koester, cited by Kruger, goes so far as to call Marcion “the impelling force for the formation of the canon,” arguing that the New Testament canon “was thus essentially created by Irenaeus” in reaction to him.3 Bruce Metzger, cited by Kruger in a later volume, takes a more measured position: “it is nearer to the truth to regard Marcion’s canon as accelerating the process of fixing the Church’s canon, a process that had already begun in the first half of the second century.”8

Bavinck sees Marcion’s own move, of setting God’s goodness against his justice, recurring well beyond the second century. Discussing the church’s teaching on eternal punishment, Bavinck writes that arguing from God’s goodness against eternal punishment, “in the manner of Marcion, secretly introduces a conflict between God’s justice and his goodness and offers up the former to the latter,” a move he attributes to “modern theologians” of his own day, not only to Marcion’s ancient followers.9 Elsewhere Bavinck groups Marcion with “the Gnostics… and modern theologians who only see God as love and draw sharp divisions between law and gospel, the God of wrath and the God of grace,” the same error he sees resurfacing in his own day.10

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 383. ↩

  2. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 2, “Christian Scripture,” 18-20. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10

  3. Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2

  4. Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩

  6. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 16, “Of the Goodness of God.” ↩

  7. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), bk. 2, chap. 13, sec. 2, 410. ↩ ↩2

  8. Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), chap. 5, “The Date of Canon.” ↩

  9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩

  10. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩