Remember this wasn't a human being. He didn't suffer. None of them were stupid enough to believe that the Passion derived from the word pathe (see Origen for this prevalent notion). So what did they think was going on at the Passion?
I have already given you the answer. 'The Passion' of Christ was a Greek translation of an Aramaic term which could also be translated as 'the Formation' or 'Transformation of Christ.' The rendering yetser as 'passion' was deliberate. It opened the door to the Catholic notion of 'Jesus the man.' No Marcion would have been interest in Jesus' 'humanity' in our inherited sense of the word only his 'super-humanity' i.e. that he represented the supernatural being who gave humanity derived its 'form' (Ethiopian Christian still preserves this original understanding).
Of course the corollary of the Marcionite position was that Christ hadn't yet emerged until the Resurrection (hence the garbled references in the Church Fathers to their 'denial' that Jesus was the messiah of the Law and prophets). Jesus wasn't the messiah PERIOD. He was ho chrestos rather than ho christos (I explain this term elsewhere; use the search engine).
Yet when we really think about it the idea that Christ ONLY manifest himself on Easter Sunday is quite in keeping with the spirit of earliest Christianity. This is the day of the revelation of Christ as anatole (see my Real Messiah for the Philonic interpretation of the word anatole; it denotes the messiah 'rising up' that day cf Zech 9:6f BUT NOT BEFORE THAT DAY).
The anatole wasn't Jesus. Jesus was God who descended at the beginning of the gospel and went into (or perhaps 'became one' cf Eph 2:15 'His purpose [i.e. God's] was to create in himself one new man out of the two) his beloved disciple 'little Mark' (see the Acts of Peter of Alexandria Latin text where Mark is said to have witnessed the Passion). There is also a Syriac tradition that Mark preserved the original bread of the Eucharist to pass it on to the Church.
Little Mark was the anatole. That is why he was venerated with the little throne of Alexandria I discovered in Venice. It is also why Origen tells us the Marcionites claimed 'little Mark' sat to the left of Jesus ...
Stephan Huller's Observations by stephanhuller.blogspot.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at stephanhuller.blogspot.com.
