Boid to Daniel Mahar on the Subject of Marcion

I have been going through the material on your website, to my great profit. A comment on one matter that comes up more than once in the texts on the website. I must admit I have not yet been able to see for myself whether or not the assertion that Markion distinguished between the god of the Old Testament and the god of the New Testament is true. This is simply because I have not yet read enough. Obviously I will be predisposed not to accept the accuracy of this claim about Markion. You know, I think, that I don’t hold this theological view, and that my aversion to it runs at the deepest level. At the risk of revealing my ignorance, I would like to suggest that this opinion or doctrine could have been falsely attributed to Markion. It would be very easy to use this assertion to cover up what he actually said, and it would then seem to be reinforced by third-hand accounts of his writings. Here are the ingredients of my hypothetical reconstruction of the materials for such a deception. (a) Markion said he had a better Torah. This could be falsely interpreted as meaning he disparaged the first. I am not the first to suggest this explanation. (b) Very early on, some Christian theologians forgot the distinction between the Torah and the rest of the O.T. This error is still prevalent. It would then be thought that Markion disparaged the whole O.T. (c) Markion correctly saw that creation is not perfect in the current dispensation. (Here I definitely agree). I suppose he agreed with Paul that “the whole of creation groaneth and travaileth, waiting for the coming of the sons of God”. (Actually I think Markion was Paul). (d) It was known that all or many Gnostics rejected or disparaged the O.T., and it would have been easy or convenient to think that Markion was a kind of Gnostic in this sense. (e) This next bit is I think original. .Markion might well have denied the inspiration of certain parts of the O.T. Note carefully that I don’t mean he accepted the view of some Gnostics that the lower god had interpolated the Torah with verses of his own. I mean it is fairly easy to argue that certain books of the O.T. outside the Torah are from a contaminated source. Have a look at the cryptic message to Stephan attached here. It follows on from a message about my current research, in which I say that the original Joshua was no more than an inoffensive account of the carrying out of the commands of the Torah to set up an altar on Mt. Gerizim and recite a set of blessings and curses, followed by a very short statement that the land was settled in one year with no battles of any importance. The original book of Judges was an equally inoffensive account of an orderly succession of High Priests and Kings for three hundred years, ruling a peaceful society with universal justice and equality.. At the end came an explanation of how this state of affairs degenerated into the world we see now. This form of the two books is now only preserved in the Samaritan tradition, but I have argued that it was originally the common property of Jews and Samaritans. It has been argued convincingly by modern scholars (mostly in Scandinavia and Scotland) that these two inoffensive booklets were turned into long polemical tracts by the agency of the Hasmonaean dynasty. The purpose was to try to attribute divine sanction to their policy of conquering the whole of Palestine, annexing the Trans-Jordan to Palestine in the process. All non-Jews were to be expelled or massacred if possible, but if it turned out to be impossible to make the whole area Kanaanerrein or Syrerrein, the rest could be enslaved. My series of articles is intended to prove this theory of the re-writing of two booklets of an entirely different character, but using a completely new line of proof. This is why I feel compelled to finish the job, even though it takes time away from other activities that are important to me.

Thie theology of Joshua and Judges in their re-written form is the policy of the State of Israel and of Christian Zionism. Each of these has taken the power of a God-given religion and turned the power of the religion to demonic purposes. In out time, we can say that the books of Joshua and Judges have been altered by human hands. We can then say that the alteration consisted not just of expansion, but of CORRUPTING THE INTENTION AND MEANING OF THE TWO BOOKS. In Markion’s time they didn’t have the tools to come to this conclusion. In the message below I used the word totalitarian. In Markion’s time you would say the source is impure or that an inferior being inspired the two books. I think I could accept that terminology, because the doctrine of these two books as we have them is metaphysically corrupted, that is, human hands changed the text but some malevolent power inspired the deed. I don’t say Markion was necessarily thinking of Joshiua and Judges. I only say that he could have believed on instinct that parts of the O.T. had been corrupted. There is one long passage, a whole half-chapter in length, that is in the MT of Jeremiah but not in the LXX and can be shown not to be original to the book, but a very very late interpolation. This passage is highly suspect in its theology, and has been used to do harm. (I can’t find the chapter just at the moment).

Your comments would be welcome.