A Brief Note About Marcion

I am walking in the woods again with my BlackBerry and thought I would share another observation (hence the name of this site).

If Marcion was who the Church Fathers say he was - ie a strange guy who had a fight with the Roman Church about keeping "Judaism" out of the gospel and New Testament - his position is utterly illogical as Ulrich Schmid notes because his New Testament retained Old Testament citations.

There is a word for what the Church Fathers do with "Marcion" - he is little more than a caricature.

Notice the number of rewrites and layers to Tertullian's Against Marcion and the confession at the beginning of Book One that what follows is a copy of a reworking of a copy of a lost original work likely by someone else (or many "someone elses").
Anyone who takes this information at face value will necessarily only be studying a gruesome caricature of the original historical figure behind "Marcion.". This information is inherently unreliability (thanks Beowolf for reminding me of this).

Adamantius is worse so we are left having to overturn the traditional scholarly "difficulty" with later reports about the Marcionites.

Ephraim and Eznik likely get it right. (Epiphanius is consistently retarded about everything he reports; he's the Don Knotts of the Church Fathers).

So when it comes time to understand the Marcionite attitude towards Judaism the reports of a tripartite division in the heavenly household in Eznik and other sources are likely the most reliable.

Marcionitism was not a dualistic tradition. It wasn't Manichaeanism.

The Creator wasn't the Devil in this system. He was the lower power "Adonai" in Jewish mystical traditions.

The Marcionite distinction between this Creator and Chrestos (otherwise called 'the Good' god) undoubtedly distinguishes the six hundred and three commandments written on the authority of Moses with the ten from heaven.

I have never run across this exact system in Jewish mystical writings but it seems to be only an earlier variation on a common theme (ie God as a series of emanations).

To this end, if this explanation of Marcionitism is accepted it is difficult to argue that Marcionites weren't gnostics. They were just better at hiding their kabbalah.