Marcion
Heresy in the early church led to the church having to examine
its crucial teachings and provide definition to its basic doctrines. One such teacher was Marcion (ca. 85-160 AD). Marcion was independently wealthy and gave 2,000
silver coins to the church in Rome, apparently in an attempt to buy some influence
within the church. His unique doctrines
and attempts to change the teachings of the church compelled the church to
return his sizeable donation and excommunicate him.
We do not have today the direct writings of Marcion. What we know about Marcion comes from some
writings of the early church fathers, especially Tertullian who wrote a
treatise entitled “Against Marcion.”
From these rebuttals, historians have pieced together the doctrines of Marcionism.
Marcion believed and taught that the God of the Old
Testament (Yahweh) was incompatible with the God of the New Testament. He believed that the God taught by the Old
Testament was on a higher, somewhat transcendent level and that Jesus in the
New Testament was a lower world creator and ruler. What he accepted of the Old Testament, he
read very literally to prove his point.
As an example, when he read in Genesis of God walking through the Garden
of Eden asking where Adam was, that proved to him that Yahweh had a physical
body and had limited knowledge. The God
of the Old Testament was angry, capricious, genocidal. The God of the New Testament (as he edited
the books) was loving, benevolent, and merciful. To Marcion, these two ‘gods’ were
incompatible with each other. Jesus was
sent to reveal the merciful New Testament God.
Marcion also taught that Jesus had only an imitation of a
physical body, and thus denied Jesus’ physical birth, life, death, burial, and resurrection. Jesus was crucified because of his opposition
to Yahweh, but he wasn’t really harmed because he did not actually have a
physical body (a teaching of the Gnostics of his day).
To support his views, Marcion instituted a canon – an authoritative
list of books he deemed proper. These books
numbered eleven: a highly edited version of the Gospel of Luke (removing His
birth account, for example) and ten of Paul’s epistles (removing the Pastoral Epistles). To Marcion, Paul was the only apostle not corrupted
in his teaching.
Marcion’s heresy was actually beneficial to the church in
the long term. The development of a
specific set of books by Marcion was the impetus for the early church to come
to an understanding of what books were authoritative as Scripture. While this essay does not purport to examine
precisely how that happened, it can be summed up by saying that God
miraculously moved in the early church to bring them to consensus on the 27 books
of the New Testament as currently stated.
At the time of the early church father Athanasius (AD 367), there was no
dispute as to the canon of the New Testament.
The early church developed the Apostles’ Creed in response
to heretics, including Marcion, to succinctly state basic Christian doctrine.
Moody Handbook of Theology, Paul Enns, Moody Bible
Institute, 1989.
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