Abstract
Most people who have heard of Marcion associate him with Christian rejection of the Old Testament. Some might add that he was the first to formulate a New Testament canon, others that he was very likely a radical interpreter of Paul. Certainly he would be seen as a catalyst for the ‘mainstream’ Church to define the canon of Scripture. The question is: do our sources permit any of this to be substantiated, or indeed any account of the ‘historical Marcion’ to be constructed? Certainly Judith Lieu prevents us from jumping to conclusions, as she painstakingly examines the sources and attempts to distil from them a plausible portrait. Even so her final sentence admits that ‘[t]his Marcion, who is no less constructed, still retains his secrets’ (p. 439). For conclusions overall are elusive, apart from the point that Marcion fits well into the emerging picture of Christian schools in second-century Rome.
The problem lies, of course, in the universally hostile reports that have come down to us. Marcion and the very notion of ‘heretic’ belong together. Part I is headed ‘The Polemical Making of Marcion the Heretic’; here the various extant accounts are subjected to sharp, critical analysis: Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, the heresiological tradition including Epiphanius, the anti-Marcionite theology and exegesis of Clement of Alexandria and Origen, the Syriac material. Time and again Lieu is able to show convincingly that all are shaped by their author’s concerns and cannot give us direct access to Marcion’s own prime interests or convictions.
Parts II and III, entitled respectively ‘Marcion through his Scriptures’ and ‘The Second Century Shaping of Marcion’, then endeavour to probe the evidence for what lies behind it, a project involving engagement with an impressive range of both primary and secondary literature. Key insights which materially shift our earlier caricatures of Marcion include:
It is anachronistic to attribute to Marcion any kind of ‘New Testament’ canon; all we know is that he used what he called ‘the Gospel’ and ‘the Apostolikon’. He probably did not ‘mutilate’ or edit either Luke’s Gospel or the Pauline material but, like others in the second century, had access to versions not yet textually fixed. The texts he engaged with were the Christian ‘received scriptures’ and his principal interest was salvation through Christ – he was ‘a thoroughly Christian thinker’ (p. 434). His gospel proclaimed that Christ came from a God other than the Creator; whether he arrived at that on exegetical or philosophical grounds cannot finally be ascertained, though cosmology seems not to have been his principal interest. His reading of Galatians, as well as other epistles, exploited the Pauline emphasis on the newness of Christ, along with the evident opposition to Paul from false apostles, to establish his dualistic framework; he produced the first reading of Paul as a coherent narrative. He discovered ‘a distinctive and even plausible solution to the fundamental challenge of the second century, namely of introducing the Christian message, rooted in the scriptures and received tradition, to a new audience whose worldview was shaped by the philosophical … tradition’ (p. 439); thus he can be seen as ‘apologetic- or mission-oriented’.
Altogether this is a weighty volume, which will set the scholarly agenda on Marcion for at least a generation.