Why I Don't Believe There Ever Was a Heretic Named 'Marcion'

I develop a lot of these posts quite quickly. Please read the following as the first step towards a more comprehensive treatment of the subject matter (with an unfortunately high number of uncorrected mistakes that need edits).

I'd love to return to the task of rebuilding the Marcionite paradigm but there is a problem inherent in any work in the field of Marcionitism. I can't believe that 'Marcion' is real historical figure.

I mean I think that 'Marcion' goes back to a real historical person. Maybe 'Ebion' and 'Elxai' do too. Nevertheless I have always been struck by the fact that with Tertullian's Five Books, Irenaeus and Hippolytus material, three books by Ephraim not to mention others by Epiphanius, Adamantius and Eznik - that nothing of what survives about 'Marcion' tells us anything substantial about him or his tradition.

Yes, there is his alleged origin in 'Sinope' or 'Pontus,' the business about his father 'Philologos' being a bishop, Marcion's 'excommunication' from the Church owing to his alleged 'defiling' of a virgin and the like. Most of these stories are very late and develop out of stock narratives used to discredit one's enemies.

The problems I have with our accepted scholarly interpretation of Marcion begin with the fact that almost no one has recognized that his gospel was not a corrupt version of Luke. It was rather most certainly 'Diatessaron-like' in its appearance - i.e. what we would identify as 'mixing' from material from our canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Once this is put out in the open, I can't help but wonder - if scholars were so off the mark with regards to Marcion's gospel, how can any of us trust what they say about the man himself?

It just seems odd that once you subtract the father named Philologos, the defiling of the virgin, and the excommunication (the Marcionites undoubtedly claimed that the Catholic Church was an offshoot of THEIR ecclesiastic tradition) - what are you left with?

Indeed what we end up with is a whole bunch of strange statements from a variety of sources with no discernible literary context.

So what do we do?

I think we have to cut through all the bull#%$# and go back to the original source for ALL the confusion - Irenaeus of Rome (I go out of my way not to identify him as 'Irenaeus of Lyons').

And here is where all the strangeness begins.

The actual manner that 'Marcion' ended up in Irenaeus' is a story in itself and should cause all of us to have doubts about his historical reality. For when we really scrutinize the earliest layers of the development of Irenaeus' treatise Against the Heresies - and which Robert McQueen Grant notes developed book by book over a generation - 'Marcion' did not appear in the first edition of this work.

Indeed this is confirmed quite clearly by Hippolytus' ignorance of Irenaeus' account of Marcion.

The reality of the situation is that 'Marcion' amounts to being little more than an afterthought in even our surviving edition of Irenaeus' work Against the Heresies. Book One - the most famous part of that work, which provides detailed information about heresies WITHIN the Church - originally did not mention Marcion. 'Marcion' has been added haphazardly as part of a section which has been tacked on the report about the Marcosians beginning with 'Simon Magus.'

Moreover 'Marcion' is mentioned four times in that later section (undoubtedly added in the third or fourth addition of the work. Irenaeus even seems to exhibit reluctance even mentioning this heretic at all writing grudgingly acknowledge that "[a]t present, however, I have simply been led to mention him, that thou mightest know that all those who in any way corrupt the truth, and injuriously affect the preaching of the Church, are the disciples and successors of Simon Magus of Samaria." [AH i.27.4]

I have always found this strange.

Most scholars now acknowledge that the 'Marcionites' were by far the most important and earliest of heresies. Irenaeus however dumps the mention of Marcion as a kind of 'afterthought' - an appropriation of someone else's argument (almost certainly Justin) - that all heresies derived their origins from Simon Magus.

Scholars have written page after page on the subject of 'Marcion' and his 'sect' without noticing that Irenaeus - the earliest of the 'historical Church Fathers' (i.e. the first Church writer who isn't a literary phantoms like Justin 'Martyr,' 'Ignatius' and Clement of Rome) - really doesn't have much to say about this supposed 'towering figure' in the early Church. Irenaeus merely enumerates Marcion as one of the offshoots of Simon. Irenaeus obviously got this idea from 'Justin' (whoever he was) as we see from the arrangement of the First Apology:

after Christ's ascension into heaven the devils put forward certain men who said that they themselves were gods; and they were not only not persecuted by you, but even deemed worthy of honours. There was a Samaritan, Simon, a native of the village called Gitto ... [a]nd almost all the Samaritans, and a few even of other nations, worship him, and acknowledge him as the first god ... [a]nd a man, Menander, also a Samaritan, of the town Capparetæa, a disciple of Simon, and inspired by devils, we know to have deceived many while he was in Antioch by his magical art. He persuaded those who adhered to him that they should never die, and even now there are some living who hold this opinion of his. And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator. And he, by the aid of the devils, has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert that some other being, greater than He, has done greater works. All who take their opinions from these men, are, as we before said, called Christians; just as also those who do not agree with the philosophers in their doctrines, have yet in common with them the name of philosophers given to them. And whether they perpetrate those fabulous and shameful deeds — the upsetting of the lamp, and promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh— we know not; but we do know that they are neither persecuted nor put to death by you, at least on account of their opinions. But I have a treatise against all the heresies that have existed already composed, which, if you wish to read it, I will give you. [Justin, First Apology 26]

I and at least a few other notable scholars suspect that the material Irenaeus added to the end of Book One of his Against the Heresies - i.e. the aforementioned list which 'proves' that a number of fictitious or sketchy reports about 'heretical groups' who ultimately derived their origins from Simon - was nothing short of a wholesale appropriation of the treatise referenced by 'Justin' in his Apology.

I can't explain why Irenaeus decided to expand his treatise against the Valentinians and the Marcosians (i.e. those heretics who existed WITHIN the Church itself) but it is worth noting that the new material does not fit that original argument at all.

The reality of the situation was that Irenaeus wrote the original edition of Against the Heresies to assist bishops and presbyters to spot members of their body who were continuing to engage in outlawed practices and beliefs. At some point Irenaeus decided to add chapters 23 to the beginning of 31 undoubtedly because - as Hippolytus intimates - the accuracy of Irenaeus' information was being challenged by the Marcosians. I suspect that the transformation of Irenaeus' original work occurred immediately following the murder of Commodus (192 CE) and the ensuing instability through to Severus' final consolidation of his authority over the whole Empire (c. 197 CE).

It was in this period that earlier information from Justin regarding that list of Simon's heretical 'offshoots' was incorporated.

The point of course is that the interest that 'Justin' shows in Simon undoubtedly developed from his own familiarity with Samaria (Justin was from Shechem). As this Semitic source is the ultimate source for Irenaeus' information my contention that the name 'Marcion' was a typical development of an Aramaic gentilic plural is strengthened immensely:

Hebrew MRQ + YWN + IM = "those of Mark"
Aramaic MRQ + YWN + I = "those of Mark"

Pronunciation is Mar-qi-yo-ni-yim and Mar-qi-yo-ne

The forms of names of sects can vary from author to author and from ms. to ms. Thus the Dositheans are called Dosithaioi, Dosthenoi, and so on. You will see that Abu ‘l-Fateh. uses a sources that had Dosthenoi, since he calls the Dositheans Dostan or Dustan (a collective plural form in Arabic). The translations of the Greek sources hardly ever give this kind of information.

The bottom line is that it is hard not to suspect that Justin simply originally identified 'Mark' as an offshoot of 'Simon.' 'Marcion' was only introduced into the story as a mistake or a deliberate attempt to obscure the identity of 'Mark' as the historical evangelist. Notice what Irenaeus says at the conclusion of his three paragraph discussion of Marcion:

I have simply been led to mention him, that thou mightest know that all those who in any way corrupt the truth, and injuriously affect the preaching of the Church, are the disciples and successors of Simon Magus of Samaria. Although they do not confess the name of their master, in order all the more to seduce others, yet they do teach his doctrines. They set forth, indeed, the name of Christ Jesus as a sort of lure, but in various ways they introduce the impieties of Simon; and thus they destroy multitudes, wickedly disseminating their own doctrines by the use of a good name, and, through means of its sweetness and beauty, extending to their hearers the bitter and malignant poison of the serpent, the great author of apostasy [AH i.27.4]

It is worth comparing the manner in which Irenaeus' account of 'Mark' begins with a very similar reference:

there is another among these heretics, Mark by name, who boasts himself as having improved upon his master. He is a perfect adept in magical impostures, and by this means drawing away a great number of men, and not a few women, he has induced them to join themselves to him, as to one who is possessed of the greatest knowledge and perfection, and who has received the highest power from the invisible and ineffable regions above. Thus it appears as if he really were the precursor of Antichrist. [AH i.13.1]

We needn't mention that 'Marcion' is also inevitably identified as the 'Antichrist' in our existing sources. Polycarp was like 'Justin' an Aramaic speaking Christian. He too would have identified the followers of Mark as 'Marqioni.'

It is also worth noting that in the Greek translators of Justin's Dialogue clearly knew to translate Marqione as 'those of Mark' rather than 'Marcionite' as we read:

yet they style themselves Christians, just as certain among the Gentiles inscribe the name of God upon the works of their own hands, and partake in nefarious and impious rites.) Some are called Markians, and some Valentinians, and some Basilidians, and some Saturnilians, and others by other names; each called after the originator of the individual opinion, just as each one of those who consider themselves philosophers, as I said before, thinks he must bear the name of the philosophy which he follows, from the name of the father of the particular doctrine.

This is the EXACT same argument which we cited earlier from the Apology of 'Justin' save for the fact that Marqione has been associated with 'Marcionites' rather than 'Markians.'

Now I have heard the argument many times before by 'Marciophiles' that that there is nothing short of a chasm which separates the 'Markians' and the 'Marcionites.' I won't get into the specifics here but it is enough for me to respond to their arguments by saying that I think we can easily explain away these differences and that they all come down to previous generations of scholars not realizing that 'Marcion' was a product of (deliberately) bad translations of Justin's original material.

Again, it has to be acknowledged that ALL of Irenaeus to 'Marcion' come from Aramaic speaking Christians. Let's start with the most famous - the one where Polycarp confronts 'Marcion' (at Rome presumably) and identifies him as the Antichrist.

It is clear from the surviving fragments of Irenaeus' attacks against Florinus that Irenaeus only could claim to have any direct information about this LATER encounter between his master and 'Marcion' through another source or sources. We can't possibly know who those sources may have been but Justin is again the logical choice as he is acknowledged to have spent time in Rome.

If we go back to Irenaeus' addition of material from Justin to Book One of his Against the Heresies, it is very easy to see how all of this information original came from Justin, only being slightly reshaped by Irenaeus to fit arguments being developed in Book Three. Yet we can perhaps still see some of Justin's original text shining through Tertullian's work Against Marcion, which must have been heavily based on Justin's work.

It is noteworthy that in both Irenaeus and Tertullian 'Marcion' is not connected to Simon directly but through a figure named 'Cerdo' or 'Cerdon' (who may well be one and the same with the Alexandrian Patriarch of the same name). The original witness of this 'relationship' was clearly in Rome at the beginning of the rule of Antoninus Pius - just like Justin - viz. "Cerdo was one who took his system from the followers of Simon, and came to live at Rome in the time of Hyginus"[AH i.27.1]

Indeed I submit that if you really look carefully at the two paragraphs of information that Irenaeus gives us about 'Marcion' in what follows - this report neatly encapsulates ALL the pertinent information we have about the heretic spread out over the pages of the other Church Fathers.

So it is that 'Marcion' is accused of having 'developed' Cerdo's doctrine advancing what is called:

the most daring blasphemy against Him who is proclaimed as God by the law and the prophets, declaring Him to be the author of evils, to take delight in war, to be infirm of purpose, and even to be contrary to Himself. [ibid i.27.2]

Irenaeus preserves a short description of the literary context for the 'Marcionite' gospel narrative:

Jesus being derived from that father who is above the God that made the world, and coming into Judaea in the times of Pontius Pilate the governor, who was the procurator of Tiberius Caesar, was manifested in the form of a man to those who were in Judaea, abolishing the prophets and the law, and all the works of that God who made the world, whom also he calls Cosmocrator. [ibid]

All that I think that he changed from Justin's original report was that while Justin originally noted the textual variants between HIS DIATESSARON and the Marcionite text (which the surviving texts of Tertullian still preserve in a slightly reworked form) was that Irenaeus RE-ORIENTED this argument with reference to one of his four canonical gospels- viz:

Besides this, he mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most dearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father. [ibid]

Most of the gist of this was likely already present in the original copies of Justin that made its way down Irenaeus.

So it is again that Irenaeus tells us that 'Marcion'

likewise persuaded his disciples that he himself was more worthy of credit than are those apostles who have handed down the Gospel to us, furnishing them not with the Gospel, but merely a fragment of it. [ibid]

This same argument is preserved by Irenaeus a little later in

Marcion, rejecting the entire Gospel, yea rather, cutting himself off from the Gospel, boasts that he has part in the Gospel. [AH iii.11.4]

The bottom line here is that I think that both of these statements derive from something in Justin's original treatise that is forever lost to us.

What is clear to me at least is that even though Irenaeus provides us with the sparsest of details - it essentially demonstrates the limit of ALL of our knowledge of this 'Marcion'. The numbers in the body of the text are my addition:

(1) he dismembered the Epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.
(2) Salvation will be the attainment only of those souls which had learned his doctrine; while the body, as having been taken from the earth, is incapable of sharing in salvation.
(3) In addition to his blasphemy against God Himself, he advanced this also, truly speaking as with the mouth of the devil, and saying all things in direct opposition to the truth,--that Cain, and those like him, and the Sodomites, and the Egyptians, and others like them, and, in fine, all the nations who walked in all sorts of abomination, were saved by the Lord, on His descending into Hades, and on their running unto Him, and that they welcomed Him into their kingdom. But the serpent which was in Marcion declared that Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and those other righteous men who sprang from the patriarch Abraham, with all the prophets, and those who were pleasing to God, did not partake in salvation. For since these men, he says, knew that their God was constantly tempting them, so now they suspected that He was tempting them, and did not run to Jesus, or believe His announcement: and for this reason he declared that their souls remained in Hades.

The point I am trying to make here is that these paltry details - details which it must now be acknowledged Irenaeus simply took over directly from Justin's report - demonstrates how little reality 'Marcion' and his tradition actually has.

I mean really - does any of what we have described here amount to a 'real historical portrait' of anything let alone anyone?

I am convinced that the portrait that we have developed of 'Marcion' as that of a rigidly conservative promoter of an anti-Jewish agenda is nothing more than a bi-product of the limited amount of information that Irenaeus provided to his successors to work with. There really is nothing of any substance in these reports - and it causes us to think that 'Marcion' and his tradition just limited to this silly two-dimensional portrait.

I can't start to prove that the 'real Marcion of history' was more like the portrait of the heretic Marcus which develops in Irenaeus. This would take me outside of our present discussion. As a teaser, however, I can for the moment cite Gregory Nazianzen's words "they will flee from Marcion's god, compounded of elements and numbers." (Oration 33:16)

There will be more to follow in a subsequent post.

For the moment I want only to note that it is Justin's original report - the one where his many references to the marqioni gave birth to the idea of 'Marcion' in Irenaeus' imagination - which defined the limit of what could be said about 'Marcion.' Unlike many of the other sects there really were a Marqyoni sect. As such new information was always being incorporated to what was established by Justin and Irenaeus.

Nevertheless the core identity of 'Marcion' was firmly established in Irenaeus' treatise. The same thing is demonstrated by all future writings on the Marcosians - they all amount to little more than a perpetual reworking of Irenaeus' original report.

As such the Marcionites were always defined as the one sect which 'changed' the words of the gospels. We see Irenaeus go on to write:

since this man is the only one who has dared openly to mutilate the Scriptures, and unblushingly above all others to inveigh against God, I purpose specially to refute him, convicting him out of his own writings; and, with the help of God, I shall overthrow him out of those discourses of the Lord and the apostles, which are of authority with him, and of which he makes use.

Again, I am absolutely certain that the text referenced here WAS eventually published by Irenaeus. It was little more than a reworking of Justin's (lost) original material. It was this reworked version of Justin's original by Irenaeus that eventually made its way to Book 4 and 5 of Tertullian's treatise Against Marcion.

Yet more important than this - we should finally recognize that our whole understanding of what 'Marcionitism' is, is rooted in this Irenaean reworking of Justin.

The question I am left with is - after all this dissection can anyone really have any confidence that there was an actual 'Marcion'? At best Irenaeus found his development useful for putting some distance between the Marcionites and their beloved apostle - enough 'wiggle room' to allow the Catholics to develop 'Paul' as a champion of their ultimate annihilation.