St. Paul - The Writings of St Paul ("The Only True Apostle: Marcion's Radical Paul" excerpt) lyrics

The Only True Apostle: Marcion's Radical Paul While the Valentinians and other Gnostics emphasized Paul, there was no one in the ancient church, either "heretic" or "orthodox," who made such serious and xclusive claims on Paul and Paul alone as did Marcion. Born some twenty or thirty years fter Paul's d**h, Marcion became convinced that salvation by grace alone was the purest essence of the Christian gospel. But carried to its logical conclusion, he believed this would mean that the God of grace manifested in Jesus Christ was distinct from the God of the Old Testament. The creation and the law were the products of the God of justice, but humanity's hope lay in the God of pure love, unknown before Christ and totally unrelated to this world. Catholic Christianity's insistence on the identity of the two Gods was in Marcion's eyes a devilish mixture of opposites, the result of a Judaizing conspiracy in which all the apostles except Paul had engaged. They had even dared to corrupt the text of Paul's letters, which must therefore be expurgated of references to the Creator and his prophets. Marcion produced his own "critical" New Testament which some scholars have claimed was the first strictly defined Christian canon of scripture. 1 To it he added, his single original writing, The Antitheses, portions of which are quoted below. 2 When Marcion's teaching of the two rival gods got him expelled from the church in Rome-according to one report he had been excommunicated years earlier from his home church in Sinope, Pontus, of which his own father was bishop 3 He set about to reform the church from without, establishing independent parishes and dioceses, tightly disciplined and organized on lines parallel to the catholics. His reformer's zeal was prodigious-for good reason Harnack has seen in him a second-century Luther-and his success was so great that his churches were serious contenders for dominance over the catholics in many parts of the empire for two centuries. "Tracts 'Against Marcion' were still being written," notes Bardenhewer, "when the name of Valentinus had long since faded away." 4 Marcion was not a Gnostic. True, some elements of his thought are shared by Gnostics 5 and his hatred of the world resembles the Gnostic's existential nausea. 6 but he rejected allegory as an interpretative method, denied that any form of oral tradition (especially esoteric secret tradition) was authoritative, and repudiated cosmogonic mythology-all of which were characteristic of Gnosticism. Above all, his doctrine of grace was fundamentally anti-Gnostic. For the Gnostic, salvation of the spiritual part of humanity is possible only because that part is consubstantial with the saving deity. For Marcion the essence of grace is that the good God is totally other; he has no relationship with humans before his absolutely free decision to save them. In this radical notion of grace, Marcion is not Gnostic, but ultimately Pauline. Yet it is a perversely one-sided (one might say with Harnack, perversely consistent) Paulinism which, in its very zeal to be truly Pauline, has demolished the dialectic that is most characteristic of Paul's genius. Marcion was the only one in the second century who understood Paul, said Harnack, and he misunderstood him. 7 Since no connected work by Marcion survived the final suppression of his schism, he must be represented here only by a few hostile but revealing words from two of his orthodox opponents. 8 by conjectured fragments of his Antitheses, and by excerpts from a modern description of his thought which has become a scholar's cla**ic.9 IRENAEUS [Marcion] (ca. 18o) Marcion of Pontus ... increased the [Gnostic] school through his unblushing blasphemy against Him who was proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, declaring that He was the cause of evils, desirous of war, changeable in opinion and 'the author of inconsistent statements. He says that Jesus came from the Father, who's above the Creator, to Judaea in the time of Pontius Pilate the governor, who was the procurator of Tiberius Caesar, and in the form of a man was manifested to the people who were then in Judaea. He says that he rendered null and void the prophets and the law and all the works of the Creator God, whom they call Cosmocrator. He used an expurgated edition of the Gospel of Luke, removing all the pa**ages that referred to the birth of our Lord, and. many things from his teaching in which he very plainly referred to the creator of this universe as his Father. In the same way he mutilated the Epistles of Paul, cutting out all that the Apostle said about the God who made the world, and which went to show that he was the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also pa**ages bearing on the advent of our Lord, which that Apostle had quoted from the prophets. TERTULLIAN [Marcion's Special Work] (207) * * * Marcion's special and principal work is the separation of the law and the gospel; and his disciples will not deny that in this point they have their very best pretext for initiating and confirming themselves in his heresy. These are Marcion's "Antitheses," or contradictory propositions, which aim at committing the gospel to a variance with the law, in order that from the diversity of the two documents which contain them, they may contend for a diversity of gods also. * * * Notes: 1. See, for example, Hans von Campenhausen, The Formation of the Christian Bible (Philadelphia:Fortress, 1972), 148, who argues that "the idea and the reality of a Christian Bible were the work of Marcion." Other scholars argue that Marcion's role in the formation of the NT has been greatly exaggerated. It is extremely unlikely, for example, that he was the first to make a collection of Paul's letters it is much more probable that he edited an existing corpus, and his textual readings are often less important for their future influence than they are as a witness to the. Pre-Marcionite Pauline textual tradition. In any case, his Pauline corpus-the so-called Apostolikon-consisted Of ten letters, all but the Pastoral Epistles, which he either did not know or rejected. The most important recent study of the text of Marcion's Apostolikon is that of Ulrich Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995). 2. The so-called Marcionite Prologues, which precede the Pauline letters in most of the best man*scripts of the Vulgate, frequently have been claimed to derive, in whole or in part, from Marcionite circles. That claim has now been persuasively refuted by N. A. Dahl, The Origin of the Earliest Prologues to the Pauline Letters," Semeia 12 (1978): 233-77., 3. For a careful an*lysis of the ancient ecclesiastical traditions about Marcion's pre-Roman period, see Jurgen Regul, Die antimarcionitischen Evangelienprologe (Freiburg: Herder, 1969), 177-95. 4. Otto Bardenhewer, Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur (Freiburg i. Br., 1912; rp. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1962) I, 371. 5. lrenaeus (Haer. 1.27. 1-2) regarded Marcion as a Gnostic and linked him with a Syrian Gnostic teacher in Rome named Cerdo, and several modern scholars have either cla**ified Marcion as a Gnostic or emphasized his closeness to Gnostic thought. See, e.g., Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (2nd cd.;Boston: Beacon, 1963), 137-391 Barbara Aland, "Marcion: Versuch einer neuen Interpretation," ZTK 20 {1973): 420--47; and Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1983), 313-17. 6. Hans Jonas, "Delimitation of the Gnostic Phenomenon-Typological and Historical," in The Origins of Gnosticism, ed. by Ugo Bianchi (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 104. 7. This witticism, made famous by Harnack, was coined by Franz Overbeck, as he says in Christentum und Kultur (Basel: B. Schwabe, 1919), 2 l 8f. 8. Not included here are excerpts from Clement of Alexandria, who depicts Marcion as a radical Platomst (Strom. 3.12.1-25.4, esp. 3.21.2) and thus as someone whose starting point was the Philosopher rather than the apostle. 9. The reference is to Adolf von Harnack's magisterial Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1921). The second edition of that work ( 1924) is now available in English: Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. by J. E. Steely and L. D. Bierma (Durham: Labyrinth, 1990).'