Here I continue my discussion of Marcion, the arch-heretic of the second century, whose followers forged writings in the name of Paul to support their view that the God of the Old Testament was not the God of Jesus and Paul.  Recall:  Marcion argued that the God of the Old Testament was the Jewish God who created this world, chose Israel to be his people, and then gave them his law.  He was a just, wrathful God:  not evil, just ruthlessly judicial.  The God of Jesus, on the other hand, was a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness.  This good God, superior to the God of the Jews, sent Jesus into the world in order to die for the sins of others, to save people from the wrathful God of the Old Testament.  Salvation comes, then, by believing in Jesus’ death.

To prove his point, Marcion pointed out the contradictions between the Old Testament God and the God of Jesus. The God of the Old Testament sent his prophets, one of whom was Elisha.  One day, we are told in the Old Testament, Elisha was verbally harassed by a group of boys making fun of his bald head.  Elisha called the wrath of God down upon the boys, and two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of them to death (2 Kings 2).  Is this the same God who said “let the little children come unto me”?  No, there are two different Gods.

Since the God of Jesus is not the God of the Old Testament, and is therefore not the creator of the world, Jesus could not belong to this created order.  He could not be born into this world as a flesh-and-blood being; otherwise he would belong to the God of the Jews, just as every other created being does.  Jesus must have come from heaven, from the true God, directly.  For that reason he was not an actual, physical human being.  He only seemed to be.  In other words, Marcion was a docetist (see chapter two).  For this view he could again appeal to the writings of Paul, who stated that Jesus came into this world “in the likeness of sinful flesh”  (Romans 8:3).  For Marcion, it was all an appearance.

Marcion is the first Christian of record to have insisted on a distinct canon of Scripture, that is, a collection of books that he considered to be sacred authorities. Marcion’s canon was remarkably short by most standards.  Since the Jewish God was not the true God, his book was not part of the Christian Scriptures.  There was no Christian Old Testament.  The canon, instead, was made up of two sections.  There were, of course, Paul’s letters.  Marcion apparently knew ten of these, all the ones in the New Testament except 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, the so-called Pastoral epistles.  Moreover, in his letters Paul constantly refers to his “gospel.”  And so Marcion included, as the other part of his canon, a Gospel account of the life of Jesus.  This was apparently a version of the Gospel of Luke.

The problem with this eleven-book canon is that even these books quote the Old Testament as an authority and seem to affirm the creation as coming from the true God.   How could that be, if Marcion’s views of Paul and Jesus were right?   Marcion had an easy answer to that.  He believed that after Jesus left this earth, his followers,  the disciples, changed his teachings and went back to their old Jewish ways, misinterpreting his gospel message as if he wanted to affirm the goodness of the Creator God and his creation.  They never fully understood Jesus’ teaching that the creator was not the true God.  That is why Paul had to be called to be an apostle.  The apostles before him had altered the teachings of Jesus, and so Paul was commissioned to set things straight.

This wide misinterpretation of Jesus’ message had affected lots of other Christians, including the scribes who copied the writings of Paul and Luke.  These eleven books had in fact been miscopied over the years.  Scribes who did not understand the truth — that there are two gods, that Jesus was not really born and is not really human, and so on —  altered the texts and inserted false views into them.  Marcion then edited his eleven books, eliminating from them portions that seemed too Jewish.

In addition to these eleven books, Marcion and his followers had other books, which were forged in Paul’s name.  We know this from a fragmentary text that comes to us from the second century, a text that discusses which books actually belong in Scripture, as opposed to the canons of Marcion and other heretics.  This text is called the Muratorian Canon, named after the Italian scholar, Muratori, who discovered it.[1]

Among other things the Muratorian Canon indicates that the Marcionites, the followers of Marcion, had forged two books in the name of Paul, a letter to the Christians in the city of Alexandria and a letter to those in the town of Laodicea.  These letters to the Alexandrians and Laodiceans, regrettably, no longer survive.  But we can be relatively certain that if they ever turn up, they will represent even more forcefully than the books of Marcion’s canon his distinctive views about the two gods, the non-human Jesus, and the salvation that he has brought.

 

[1] For an English translation, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament, pp. xxx.  Some scholars date the Muratorian Canon to the fourth century, but this view has not proved convincing to most.