Marcionism-The Forgotten Crisis

Overview/Introduction

An important overlooked episode in the early church was the movement founded by Marcion near 144 A.D. It is known as Marcionism. It is important because it explains the two gospels in the current New Testament and why they were tolerated. Marcionism was a split in the church that almost divided Christianity in two. Marcion taught only Paul had the correct gospel of Paul's Jesus, i.e., faith alone, but the twelve apostles presented a Jesus who had a superceded gospel that did not apply to Gentiles. It was a gospel of Law where disobedience caused loss of salvation, especially found in Matthew's Gospel.

Tertullian in 207 A.D. in Against Marcion rebutted Marcion by attacking Paul. He questioned whether Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ, saying a self-serving claim, as Paul made, does not suffice. Tertullian suggested Paul was a false prophet. He also called Paul the "apostle of the heretics." (See below, Marcionism - Excerpt from JWOS]

This split was healed by including Paul's writings but treating it as "Scripture" which does not mean what we think today. In the OT, the third division after the "Law and Prophets" was the "Writings" section, which translates in Greek as "Scripture." This is where Jews put works where it was not always inspired words, or it had not yet been determined to be prophetic, e.g., Daniel was still in the Writings, not Prophets section when Christ came. Hence, Scripture in those days meant edifying material that should not be used for the basis of doctrine until more proof allows one to elevate it to fully Prophet-section materials. Until accepted as 100% inspired, it was kept in the "Scriptures" scroll to show a lesser authority. For a scholarly brief discussion on the "Writings" section of the OT and its lack of 100% inspired status, and that Jesus affirmed the same understanding, see this knol.

In the early church, with that true perception of canon still well-known (unlike now when it is forgotten), the church could attach merely edifying works to the Bible without causing any misunderstanding that this implied the author was 100% inspired. For example, Jerome in 402 A.D. attached the Apocrypha and explained elsewhere his purpose was because it was merely edifying. It was not because it was inspired. The Roman Catholic Church (RCC) forgot this and at Trent in the 1500s the RCC said the Apocrypha too was 100% inspired in every word. More important, this reminds us the standard for joinder was not necessarily inspiration in those early days.

Hence, Paul was attached after the split caused by Marcionism. His joinder was evidently designed to bring Marcionites (Paul-only Christians) back into the Orthodox church. As a result, eventually Orthodox Christianity defeated or merged with Marcionism by the end of the 300s. It can be debated whether some of Marcion's doctrines such as on the defunct nature of the Law were ingested by the Roman Catholic Church when previously the early voices favored the Law/Decalogue as still binding with only the ceremonial law not continuing.

Here I will provide quotes from my various books that discuss Marcionism for background on this important movement:

Marcionism Similar to Calvinism/Lutheranism

Thomas Scheck aptly states he found “real and apparent similarities between certain Protestant theological formulae, especially those of Calvinism and [early] Lutheranism, and the assertions of Gnostic and Marcionite exegesis....” (Thomas Scheck, Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Washington DC: CUA, 2001-02) at 1.23-4.) [Jesus Words on Salvation at 570 fn. 44.]

Marcionism -- Excerpt from Jesus Words on Salvation at pp 578 et seq.

Importance of Protestants Coming to Grips with the Early Heretic Marcion’s Cheap Grace Doctrine

Has the last four hundred years been a waste? Has the descent into cheap grace at odds with Jesus’ doctrine all this time been an unprecedented error? No. This has been a valu­able period of cleansing of doctrinal errors. However, our response to those errors ended up in over-reaction. We need to come back to Jesus. It is that simple. We can take encour­agement from the fact that this very same error happened once before. Let’s see how the early church escaped, and per­haps we can simply repeat the measures taken back then.

Most Protestants are utterly unaware that Paulinism, in particular faith alone doctrine, previously threatened to overwhelm Jesus’ salvation doctrine and destroy it. In 144 A.D., there arose a ship-builder from Pontus named Marcion. He founded a church system that rivaled in numbers and influence that of the orthodox Christian church. By 150 A.D., Justin wrote that Marcionites had expanded “to the uttermost bounds of the earth.” It required three hundred years for the orthodox church to eventually rout out the heresy of Marcion.

Marcion was not battling the Roman Catholic church. It did not yet exist. Instead, there was a large orthodox church led from Jerusalem. The Roman bishop was just one bishop among many throughout the Mediterranean. Even if Peter was in Rome at one point, there was no effort to exercise superiority from Rome until many centuries later.

What happened is that Marcion declared in 144 A.D. that Paul alone was the true apostle for the era of grace; the twelve apostles, in particular their gospel of Matthew, were tainted by legalism; the Jesus of the twelve belonged to the God of the Old Testament; and the Jesus of Paul represented the son of a loving Father who now accepted us by faith alone.

In Marcion’s book known as the Antitheses, which exists only in fragments quoted by others, we find endorse­ment of everything Pauline, including faith alone. Marcion’s primary antithesis involved faith and law. On one hand, there was the Law given Moses, which the apostolic twelve endorsed in Matthew’s gospel. On the other hand, there was the faith alone doctrine of Paul. To solve this antithesis, Mar­cion invented the idea that Christ had two personages — the one of the twelve and the one presented by Paul. The Jesus of the twelve represented the Creator-God of the Old Testament. The Jesus of Paul represented the Good God or the Father of the New Testament. The Antitheses of 144 A.D. reads:

18.The Jewish Christ [of Matthew et al] was designated by the Creator [i.e., the God of the Old Testament] solely to restore the Jewish peo­ple from the Diaspora; but our Christ [present in Paul’s writings] was commissioned by the good God [of the new testament] to liberate all mankind.

19. The Good [God] [of Paul’s Jesus] is good toward all men; the Creator [God of the Jesus of the twelve], however, promises salvation only to those who are obedient to him [i.e., legal­ism]. The Good [God of Paul’s Jesus] redeems those who believe in him, but he does not judge those who are disobedient to him; the Creator [God of the twelve’s Jesus], however, redeems his faithful and judges and punishes the sinners.

29. The Christ [of the Creator God represented by the twelve] promises to the Jews the restora­tion of their former condition by return of their land and, after death, a refuge in Abraham’s bosom in the underworld [i.e., Sheol/hell]. Our Christ [of the Jesus presented by Paul] will establish the Kingdom of God, an eternal and heavenly possession.

The Jerusalem church previously replied to anti-Law and faith-alone doctrine by saying Paul was an apostate and did not represent true Christianity. As Professor James Dunn notes: “The most direct heirs of the Jewish-Christian group­ings within earliest Christianity [i.e., the early Jerusalem church] regarded Paul as the great apostate, an arch enemy,” citing Epistula Petri 2.3; Clem. Hom. 17:18-19.

The Jerusalem church’s response is directly reflected in our New Testament. As Augustine noted in 413 A.D. in his treatise Faith and Works, the epistles of James (the first bishop of Jerusalem), Jude (the second bishop of Jerusalem), and Second Peter were specifically written to destroy “faith alone” doctrine as inferred from Paul’s epistles. (See page 523n supra.) Second Peter even said many would fall from their “steadfastness in Christ” by relying upon “difficult to understand” passages in the writings of Paul. These passages were seen as giving a “liberty” that Second Peter said was foreign to the true gospel. (See pages 500-504 supra.)

Tertullian, an orthodox church member in Carthage, Africa, wrote in 207 A.D. his famous rebuttal to Marcion. In it, Tertullian raised every ground possible to dispute whether Paul was truly an apostle of Jesus Christ. Tertullian even sug­gested Paul was a false prophet as warned of by Jesus Christ. We previously quoted this daring analysis from Tertullian. (See pages 395-400 Jesus Words Only at this google-books full view link.) In that passage, Tertullian says that Paul’s claim to apostleship is totally self-serving, and by Jesus’ standards is invalid. Scholars generally now recognize this is a valid criticism of Paul’s claims. In the end, Tertullian even suggested “[Paul] is the apostle of the heretics.” (Tertul­lian, Adversus Marcion 3.5, “haeritcorum apostolus”.)

Often, Protestant historians try to obscure the real nature of Marcion’s heresy. They focus on every other dispute than the problem of Marcion’s teaching of faith alone. While it is true that Marcion said there was a different God for the new versus the old testaments, and this claim was battled vig­orously by Tertullian, they ignore what was at stake. Mar­cion’s goal behind that argument was to justify two different salvation doctrines. Once he divided salvation into two dis­pensations — the old and the new, Marcion could defend the new is by faith alone and the old one is by obedience. Mar­cion hence was trying to rationalize Paul’s doctrine of faith alone as belonging to a distinct dispensation of Paul’s Jesus. Thereby, it could be valid despite contradicting Jesus’ salva­tion doctrine in the gospel of Matthew and John (properly translated). As Arthur Cushman McGiffert, in A History of Christian Thought (C. Scribner’s Sons: 1949) at 59 explains:

For the gospel of the free grace of God and sal­vation by faith alone had been substituted [by the twelve apostles in their gospels], so Mar­cion believed, [by] a legalism of a genuinely Jewish character.

Hence, to destroy the significance of the different sal­vation doctrine in the twelve apostles’ gospels, Marcion claimed Paul had the right to proclaim a superseding one.

Thus, Marcion represented a vigorous effort to erase any role of repentance and obedience in the Christian doc­trine of salvation.

Marcion expounded his main position in a work entitled Antitheses....[The God of the New Testament] was the God of grace who offered salvation to all by faith alone;.... (T. Alec Burkill, The Evolution of Christian Thought (Cornell University Press, 1971) at 42.)

After Simon Magus, it was Marcion above all whom the Fathers regarded as the arch-here­tic:... the law is discarded and salvation depends on faith alone. (Hans Kung, The Church (Image Books: 1976) at 316.)

Tertullian in rebuttal to Marcion conceded that the ceremonial law of the old testament was abrogated, but the moral commandments in the Law remained. To this end, Ter­tullian taught repentance and obedience remained absolutely essential to salvation.

When I encountered this history, I was shocked and in disbelief. David Bercot, a Protestant attorney like myself, was as equally startled by encountering Marcion as I was. After Bercot did a comprehensive survey of the doctrines of the early Church in his exhaustive 705 page Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs (1998), he wrote Will The Real Heretics Please Stand Up (1999). In that work, Bercot admits he dis­covered that the early church, in “contradiction to many of my own theological views,” taught doctrines that universally rejected teachings which we all recognize as part of modern accepted Pauline teaching. When Bercot discusses Marcion, he expresses the same shock I experienced when I first read what Marcion taught:

As surprising as all of this may be to you, what I’m about to tell you is even more bizarre. There was a religious group labelled as here­tics by the early Christians, who strongly dis­puted the church’s stance on salvation and works [i.e., that salvation depended on works]. Instead, they [i.e., the heretics] taught man is totally depraved. That we are saved solely by grace. That works play no role in salvation. And that we cannot lose our salvation once we obtain it.... (Will The Real Heretics Please Stand Up, supra, at 66.)(Emphasis added.)

It is obvious that Marcionism has revived. Many Prot­estants likewise today argue a dispensational division exists between old and new, so that Jesus’ contrary salvation doc­trine to Paul’s doctrine can be honestly dismissed as irrele­vant. (See dispensationalist claims on pages 209-210 supra.)

Jesus and the early church had a solution to prevent Paul’s teachings from overturning those of Jesus. They were:

• The release of the epistles of James, Jude and Second Peter;

• The release of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, with its heavy emphasis on works required for salvation, including a re-affir­mation of James’ principles in Revelation 3:1-3; and

• Tertullian’s brilliant examination in 207 A.D. of the lack of authenticity to Paul’s claims of apostleship and even Tertullian’s suggestion that Paul was a false prophet predicted by Christ.

These various attacks on Paulinism were vigorous and well-sustained. Marcion was defeated. These critical analyses must be re-published for a new generation. For four hundred years, we have been entrapped within revived Marcionism. Because Christ’s words were so powerful, Christianity lived on despite this albatross hanging on, weighing down His words in the wrong direction. Yet, by our dereliction of duty, Christ’s message is obscured. How did this happen?

What took place in the early Protestant Reformation is that this history about Marcion was forgotten. It was prima­rily Erasmus and Tyndale who initially realized that the refor­mation had made a significant major mistake. It had treated Paul’s doctrines regarding ‘faith alone’ as a necessity to fol­low even when at odds with the salvation doctrine of Jesus Christ. These two men bravely changed course. They even obviously caused Luther to change course. He too adopted double justification (i.e., salvation begins by faith but requires works and obedience for final salvation) which essentially matches Jesus’ doctrine. Unfortunately, Luther’s heroism of 1517-18 was not matched by a later bold declara­tion that he realized this error. Luther tried to make this change quietly, through an ecumenical conference with the Catholic Church in 1541. Upon Luther’s death, he left it to Melancthon to continue this effort. Melancthon did so, caus­ing the Lutheran church to adopt double justification as an official doctrine. It lasted until a short while after Melanc­thon’s death. And thus the true gospel expired from being present in any major Protestant denomination. It survives pri­marily only in the Pentecostal and Mennonite churches.

Consequently, we need spiritual and historical revival. We need to repent of the misleading ‘faith alone’ doctrine. We also need to refuse anyone else from taking Jesus/Yeshua’s place as our “sole teacher” (Matt. 23:10). We need to repent from the stain of Paulinism upon Christ’s mes­sage.

Further Studies