A number of readers have asked the same question based on my posts on Marcion:  Was Marcion a Gnostic?   Here’s one reader’s way of asking it, and my response. QUESTION: Marcion’s “previously unknown God” of Jesus vs Israel’s creator sounds a bit like some of the gnostic beliefs, particularly Jesus coming from the realm of Barbelo in the gospel of Judas. Was Marion an early Christian Gnostic? RESPONSE: Marcion was sometimes considered a Gnostic by ancient heresiologists (“heresy-hunters”), such as Irenaeus; and in modern times scholars used to consider him a Gnostic, or at least Gnostic-like.  And one can see why.  Like Gnostics, Marcion had more than one God, the Creator was not good, and part of the goal of the religion was to escape his clutches.  But there are a lot more differences than similarities between them; the differences are so numerous and deep, that scholars simply don’t think of Marcion as a Gnostic these days. Was Marcion a Gnostic? I won’t review Marcion’s teachings at length here: for more information see these earlier [...]

In the previous post we saw how two important church fathers attacked the “modalist” view of the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, which claimed they were *one* person who relates to creation and humans in three different ways, with three modes of existence.  God is both the Father of the Son and the Son of the Father. Depending on how old you are, you may remember the song, “I’m My Own Grandpa.”  (If not, look it up; it’s a scream.)  As in the song, it gets confusing. This modalist view came to be rejected by the likes of Hippolytus of Rome and Tertullian of Carthage.  But what did they put in its place?  How did *they* understand the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit, if they wanted to insist that all three were God but there was only one God? Enter the doctrine of the Trinity.  These relatively early thinkers did not have the fully developed view of the Trinity that came later, as we will see.  But [...]

In my previous post I summarized the view that God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit were actually one and the same – that they were three ways of God relating to the creation and the people who inhabit it – just as I am only one person but am both a father and a son and a brother, depending on whom I am relating to.  That view has been given various names among historians of theology; here I am calling it “modalist” – God is one person who has three different modes of existence and ways of relating. Here I continue by discussing how the view came to be attacked by others.  Again, this is based on the fuller discussion in my book How Jesus Became God. The attackers were fighting an uphill battle.  As we have seen that the view was widely accepted at the end of the second and beginning of the third, even though it came to be rejected as a heresy.  Two of the main opponents [...]

In the past couple of posts I have talked about early Christian “docetists,” those who were so convinced that Jesus was completely God that they denied he was a “flesh-and-blood” human being.  In the early Christian centuries, no one advanced that view more than the “arch-heretic” Marcion.   Marcion had a huge following.  In some parts of the Christian world at the end of the second century, there were apparently more Marcionites than other kinds of Christian.  One could argue he his views are still broadly popular today, even among Christians who have never heard of him and among those who, if they have, would say that he was a “heretic.”   Do you know Christians who think that there is a difference between the God of Wrath in the Old Testament and the God of Love in the New Testament, and who think that the Old Testament does not really apply anymore?  That is a weakened version of Marcion’s thought.  Or do you know people who say Christ was God and so he wasn’t [...]

In my previous post I talked about Jewish Christians of the early centuries who held to an “adoptionistic” view of Christ, the view that he was not by nature divine but was a human being who at some point came to be adopted to be God’s son.  This view was held by other groups as well (and still is); one that we know of from ancient sources comes not from Jewish but gentile circles.   This was a group known as the Theodotians, named after their founder,  a shoemaker who happened also to be an amateur theologian, named Theodotus.   Since they were centered in Rome, scholars sometimes refer to this group as the Roman Adoptionists. The followers of Theodotus did think that Christ was unlike other humans in that he was born of a virgin mother (and so they may have accepted either the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke as Scripture).  But other than that, as the church father and heresy-hunter (i.e., "heresiologist") Hippolytus, tells us, for them “Jesus was a (mere) man” [...]

You might think – and many people do think – that as Christianity developed, every Christian more or less went along with the “standard” or “orthodox” Christian beliefs that emerged.  The term “orthodoxy” literally means “right beliefs” (or correct opinions); the word “heterodoxy” means “other opinions” (that is, other than the right ones!).  A term often used alternatively for the latter is “heresy,” which literally means “choice,” used for people who “choose” to believe the wrong things. (!)   As you might imagine, these are highly subjective terms  A view is “right” (that is, orthodox) for you depending on what you personally believe.  That’s because no one chooses to believe something they know is wrong.  If they think it’s wrong, they change their view to what is right.  But that means that everyone necessarily believes they are right, i.e. orthodox.  Or as one wag put it, “orthodoxy is my doxy, and heterodoxy is your doxy.” That also means that it’s impossible to say that one group within early Christianity was absolutely right about everything (i.e. “orthodox”) [...]