Did the Marcionites ABANDON Their Fasting in the Thirty Day 'Redemption' Period that Led Up to Easter Sunday?

I have been working on the Festal Letters of Athanasius all day, the underlying relationship between pre-Athanasian Alexandrian Christianity and Marcionitism and my ideas about a thirty day 'redemption' ritual calculated outward from the Resurrection and you know what I think?

I keep thinking that if highly ascetic traditions like the Marcionites, the Meletians and others were so very zealous about keeping fasts every week on Wednesday, Friday and - in some cases - Saturday too how could the period leading up to Easter be distinguished from the rest of the year?

I mean, what would the difference be if they added another day to three days of fasting? You couldn't add more prayers to the Marcionite ritual as Ephrem says they seemed to spend all day engaged in prayer anyway.

And then I started thinking about the ban on fasting on Easter Sunday. It was supposed to be a joyous time. And then there is this idea in the East that even the fasting during Lent is supposed to be joyous.

And then I looked again at that passage from Athanasius' Twelfth Festal Letter about the highly ascetic Meletians NOT fasting during the run up to Easter where it says:

I have further deemed it highly necessary and very urgent, to make known to your modesty—for I have written this to each one— that you should proclaim the fast of forty days to the brethren, and persuade them to fast, lest, while all the world is fasting, we who are in Egypt should be derided, as the only people who do not fast, but take our pleasure in these days. For if, on account of the Letter [not] being yet read, we do not fast, we should take away this pretext, and it should be read before the fast of forty days, so that they may not make this an excuse for neglect or fasting. Also, when it is read, they may be able to learn about the fast. But O, my beloved, whether in this way or any other, persuade and teach them to fast the forty days. For it is a disgrace that when all the world does this, those alone who are in Egypt, instead of fasting, should find their pleasure. For even I being grieved because men deride us for this

I found no evidence of a forty day fast in Peter I. Athanasius seems to have introduced this practice in to the Alexandrian tradition.

And then there is that line in the Marcionite gospel where Jesus says "Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast." [Luke 5.34 - 35]

I started thinking that if you took this argument literally one would suppose that once 'the bridegroom' left - viz. Christ - in those days there would be perpetual fasting.

Yet isn't there a running theme in the liturgies leading up to Easter that in a sense Christ HAS RETURNED in this period. That's the whole point of participating in the Stations of the Cross and the like. You are supposed to be reminded of Jesus' suffering every step along the way.

But in the Marcionite community where Jesus was wholly divine and was entirely without affects and feelings, one could only imagine that the return of Holy Week would be met with unbridled joy. The bridegroom had returned and - in essence - it would be only natural for all the fasting which governed the other forty five weeks of the year would disappear.

Indeed this is another reason why I suspect the little disciple John Mark is being the one being (secret) venerated because it would only make sense under such a scenario for the congregation to celebrate continually from the Theophany straight through to the Resurrection.

The fact that it was limited to a shorter period of time within Jesus' ministry lends me to believe that they weren't really venerating Jesus' appearance on earth but the thirty days from the time of his baptism of his neaniskos to his resurrection.

Given that the Marcionites did not have the story in the Acts of the Apostles about a special dispensation of the Holy Spirit in the fifty days immediately following the Passover, I strongly suspect that the joy and celebration associated with this period of the Church calendar was originally identified with the period leading UP TO Easter in the Marcionite calendar.

Just a hunch but a very strong one I think ...