Early Heresies: Marcion
Imagine you belong to an urban church. You have some generous members, but money remains tight as the church continues to grow. Meanwhile, tensions with city and its officials are on the rise. Your social credit score, much like your actual credit score, could use a bit of a boost.
Then a visitor arrives one Sunday morning. He seems intelligent, charismatic, and good natured. His father is a prominent pastor, and the visitor himself has some theological credentials. He also has money, having earned a fortune in maritime manufacturing. He wants to join the church, contributing a small offering of $400,000 as a sign of his earnest faith.
And yet, “All that glisters is not gold.”
The Story of Marcion
This was the situation facing the church in Rome in the late 130s AD, when Marcion of Sinope, a wealthy shipbuilder, arrived from the coastal region of Pontus (northeast Turkey). Marcion’s background is a bit of a mystery to us.[1] We know that he was the son of a bishop, that he was initially received by the Roman church, and that he presented this church with an impressive 200,000 sesterce gift upon his arrival.[2]
It was not long, however, before the church began to notice strange ideas coming from Marcion. The shipbuilder soon ran into trouble and was excommunicated in 144 AD, with his generous gift returned. As one does in such situations, Marcion responded to his excommunication by starting his own church. Thus Marcionism was born.
Marcion’s church enjoyed some immediate success. Ever the hustler, the heresiarch quickly set out on a missionary journey to spread his teaching across the known world. Marcionism eventually became so formidable that the church father Tertullian dedicated an entire book to exposing and refuting it. In Marcion’s church, Tertullian wrote, “you will more easily discover apostasy than apostolicity.” He called Marcion’s followers “a swarm” that swept across the land. “Even wasps make combs; so also these Marcionites make churches.”
Tertullian was not the first to confront this heresy. As Irenaeus relates, Polycarp of Smyrna had made it his mission late in life to evangelize Marcionites in Rome. Then he met Marcion himself who, in what might of been a moment of prideful gloating, asked the old saint, “Do you know me?” Without missing a beat, Polycarp replied, “I do know you, the first-born of Satan.”
How did Marcion become a heretic of the first order? What was he teaching, and why was it wrong?
The Teaching of Marcion
Marcion’s teaching confronted orthodox doctrine on almost every possible front, from biblical interpretation to the doctrine of Christ to sexual ethics. This was possible because, at its core, Marcionism made a simple yet radical claim about God and the Bible: The “god” of the Old Testament was an entirely different being from the good and holy God of the New Testament. Known as “the Demiurge,” the Old Testament “god” was a lesser being who created the physical realm with all of its “beggarly elements,” along with all the misery we experience therein.[3]
If this is starting to sound familiar, it’s worth pointing out that Marcion stands a little distinct from that confusing cluster of heresies known as “gnosticism.” Marcion did not produce a complex cosmology or taxonomy of spirit-beings like that of his friend, the gnostic Valentinus. However, Marcion did share — and amplified — the proto-gnostic aversion to material reality.[4]
Matter was the Demiurge’s doing, as was apparently everything that was wrong with the world. In Marcion’s eyes, this Old Testament creator-god was crass, cruel, and completely incompatible with the God of love he found in the New Testament — a New Testament which Marcion conveniently paired down to a heavily-edited version of Luke’s Gospel and an edited selection of Paul’s Epistles.
Marcion’s antitheses (oppositions) between the Old and New Testaments allowed him to explain away the severity of God, the judgement for sin, and other “inconvenient” doctrines as mere artifacts of the Demiurge, or else the corruption of the text by the first Jewish Christians (did I mention that Marcionism has an antisemetic bent?). For Marcion, love, goodness, peace, and gentleness were the dominant, if not exclusive, attributes of the true God.[5] In sum, Marcion’s was a “cut-and-paste” gospel, an announcement of the love of God and the possibilities of human achievement — with no regard for creation, judgment, atonement, obedience, or bodily resurrection.
Marcions in Our Midst
The story of Marcion reminds us that there is nothing new under the sun. It is much easier to reconfigure Christianity to suit to our preferences than to trust a God whose ways are not our own (Isaiah 55:8). Marcion was an intelligent and capable man, but he refused to believe in a God he did not fully understand. This led him to drop most of the Bible and reinterpret the rest in order to support his own doctrinal system.
That peculiar system may have vanished for the most part, but Marcion’s method unfortunately remains alive and well. Whenever the Old and New Testaments are pitted against each another; or whenever a distinction is made between the “cruel god” of the Old Testament and the “kind God” of the New; or whenever the Old Testament in minimized or neglected, the specter of Marcionism lies close at hand.
In contrast, God assures us that all Scripture comes from Him and is profitable for us (2 Timothy 3:16). God really did make promises to us in the Old Testament Scriptures concerning the Christ (Luke 24:25–26), and it was on the basis of these Scriptures that the Apostles preached Christ (Acts 8:35; 17:2–3; 18:28). Across the whole Bible we find the same God accomplishing the same redemption for the same people — His people, Jew and Gentile alike. There is no opposition between the two Testaments, but a great harmony that we dare not ignore.
Polycarp’s epithet was apt. In teaching others to ignore the Bible and the God of that Bible, Marcion was following in the tradition of his spiritual father. That father has been a liar since the beginning, ever sowing doubt over the goodness and the trustworthiness of God with one simple question: “Did God really say?”
[1] As with most heresiarchs, his biography comes largely from opponents who do not always agree
[2] See “Marcion, Marcionites,” in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. VII.
[3] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. 1 (1971), 73.
[4] Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, rev. ed. (1993), 38f.
[5] Pelikan, 74.
