Chapter 11 : Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity
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Chapter 11: Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity
Despite two centuries and an accusation of heresy that separated him from the State religion, Marcion might well pass for the true father of the Catholic Church, a father maladroitly abandoned to the world, a runt that only his enemies brought to maturity.
Missionary zeal; the eagerness to found communities; the hope for divine authority, the investment of which he would receive in Rome; the monarchal organization of the ekklesiai; virulent anti-Semitism; the conception of a Christianity purified of its Judaism; a theology inspired by Greek thought: these compose a great many of the fundamental traits of the future Catholic Church.
With Marcion, Christianity — scorning historical truth — arrogated for itself a Hellenic genesis propagated by the myth of Paul, “apostle to the Gentiles.” And today, many historians still brazenly ratify the act of birth from Greek origins.
Marcion’s talent was that of a businessman. Due to the events of his time, he understood that Christianity renounced any possible future if it didn’t break all ties with Judaism, which was disapproved of in the Greco-Roman world because of the endemic state of insurrection in Palestine and [the cities of] the Diaspora.
In 115, the Jews destroyed the temple of Zeus in Cyrene. An agitator named Luknas or Andre (a name annexed by the apostolic legends) took power and was acclaimed King of the Jews. Andre called for the destruction of all the monuments of idolatry before the arrival of the Day of the Savior. The rumor was propagated that insurgents ate their enemies and bathed [s’oignent] in their blood. The massacre of non-Jews struck good Greek and Roman consciences with horror; one possessed a letter — emanating from the mother of a general sent to put down the rioters — in which she prayed that her son would not be “roasted by the Jews.” One knows how the violent acts of tumults of this type nourished — over the course of two thousand years of religious criminality — the grievances of Catholic, Protestant, Byzantine and atheist mobs that unleashed their pogroms against peaceful ghettos.
The same year, the insurrection of the Jews of Alexandria spread to the Delta and Thebaide, and gained in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Chypre. In their holy war against the goyim, the Jews destroyed Salamine. Around 117, Trajan moved to end the revolts. Ten thousand Jews were executed.[202]
Nevertheless, Simeon Bar Kochba took up arms in 132 and fought against Rome. In 135, he was beaten and killed in his fortress at Bethar. The Jewish nation was banned by Greco-Roman “civilization,” in which nobility of thought so easily accommodated itself to the circus games.
Well before the new insurrection, the Judeo-Christians had — unlike the Essenes of the First Century — distanced themselves from the holy war. They refused to give their cooperation to the Messiah Bar Kochba: one of their letters condemned the attitude of the “Galileans.” Thenceforth, the Christians would accentuate what separated them from the Jews: the profession of pacifist faith; nonviolence; the virtue of sacrifice; the rejection of the Jewish ritual observances and circumcision (all the more because Hadrian, basing himself on the Roman law that prohibited corporeal mutilations, formally prohibited it).
After 135, the persecution pitilessly struck the Jewish communities. Rabbi Hannaniah was burned alive; Rabbi Akiba was skinned alive. In his Contra Celsum, Origen would recall the great massacres of the “circumcised.” Even if this Christian refused the cult of idols and abstained from offering sacrifices to the Emperor, he loudly claimed his Greek or Roman citizenship and proclaimed his difference from the Jews in an absolute manner.
The anti-Judaic reforms of Marcion survived in the disorder propagated by the political embrace at the heart of the Judeo-Christian churches that were prey to struggles for influence. They advocated an ecclesiatical politics centered upon Rome and strong from its rupture with “Jewry.” The rare biographical elements confirm this.
Marcion would have been born in the last years of the First Century in Sinope, on the Pont Euxin (around 95 or 100, according to Harnack[203]).
Marcion soon entered into conflict with the Judeo-Christian communities. His father, the Episcope of an Ekklesia, hunted him for having supported opinions hostile to the faith that were, no doubt, inspired by Saul and his disciples. Marcion went to Asia Minor, where he clashed with the local Christian churches, which appear to have been Elchasaite.
A rich ship-owner, Marcion had the practical intelligence of a businessman. His rationality, seduced by Greek philosophy, felt repugnance for the analogic spirit of the midrashim and the play of Hebrew words that the Greek translations reduced to absurdities. The bloody and inhuman character of the biblical texts furnished him an argument that was opportunely confirmed by the violence of the Jewish revolts. In place of the larval dualism of the Esseno-Christians, Marcion substituted the irreconcilable character of YHWH, God-creator of a world of war and misery, and a Good God to whom the schools of Jacob, Simon-Cephas, Thomas, Clement and Saul/Paul referred.
Marcion bet upon anti-Judaism, hostility for the people of the Temple, for Jerusalem, for the Pharisians and for the murderers of the Master of Justice. He supported his doctrine with the help of peremptory reasons, promises of a beautiful future in the Church, but, at the moment of struggle, he insulted the voluntary poverty of the communities: he offered 200,000 sesterces to the Roman Churches so as to subject them to his authority, with an eye on an international federation.
Marcion was the first to comprehend that Rome, constituting the center of a civilization that was proposed as an example for the whole world, was the axis of gravitation from which Christianity, purged of its barbarity, hoped to radiate a “universal” glory (the word catholicon comes into play towards the end of the Second Century and was popularized in the Fifth. Tertullien would avow: “The Hermetic tradition of Marcion has filled the universe.”)
Around 140, in the Roman city in which the churches — still Judeo-Christian — were torn by rivalries for power (according to the contemporary novel by Hermas, The Pastor), Marcion met Cerdan, disciple of Satornil of Antioch. He composed two works, which were lost or destroyed by the Church.
The Apostolicon is nothing other than a compilation of letters attributed to Saul, Romanized into Paulus. The Evangelion expounds the Good News, the unique Gospel, that of Paul, to which both the Marcionites and the anti-Marcionites referred. Basing himself on the letters that he re-copied and rewrote by stripping them of their Semitisms, Marcion thus drafted the evangelical message of Paul.
Resch believes the canonical Gospel attributed to Mark to be the work of Marcion, which was then corrected by the anti-Marcionites.[204] He notes that Jesus’ childhood is not mentioned in it, that the staging of the remarks or logia doesn’t break with the conception of an angelos-christos incarnated in a being of wisdom, that is, an emanation of the Sophia.
In the reaction against Marcion, anti-Marcionite prologues would be added to the Gospels attributed to Mark, Luke and Matthew. Conceived to combat the idea of the Angel-Messiah, they borrowed the traits of a historical Roman person for the allegorical material. The Montanist propagandistic accounts of Pilate, Paul and Peter (the Gospel of Nicodeme, the Acts of Paul and Thecle, the Apocalypse of Peter, etc) contributed to the eventful decor of the drama.
Marcion died around 165, after an adventurous life, in which the journeys of Paul probably represent the antedated marking out [jalonnement]. Did he not derive his apostolic legitimacy, everywhere that he presented himself, on the simple assertion that Paul was present several generations previously?
His disciple Apelle followed his work to Rome and Alexandria. He demonstrated the absurdity of the biblical texts in his Syllogisms (lost). He seemed, however, to have broken with the Marcionite doctrine of the two Gods. He admitted only one, a good one, the creator of the angelic world, from which would escape a perverse angel, the Demiurge that inclined all things towards evil. Apelle resembled the Christianity of the New Prophecy: he gave to Jesus not a simple human appearance, but a real body and the mission to correct the unfortunate work of the Demiurge. His Revelations (lost, if it is in fact not the apocalypse of Paul or Peter) re-transcribed the visions of a prophetess called Philomena. A polemic would oppose her to Rhodon, disciple of Tatian.
* * *
Marcion invented a Western Christianity, one without a Jewish past. He rejected the midrashim of the Nazarene and Elchasaite Churches, the elements of which would much later enter into the Greek Gospels attributed to Matthew, Thomas, Jacob, Andre and Philippe. According to Joseph Turmel,[205] Marcion — using the short notes by Saul — gave to his churches, which were “Catholic” before the advent of Catholicism, a Roman master, a citizen of the town of Tarse, which was Romanized in 140 or 150.
His ascetic renunciation did not contravene the morality of Christianity in its entirety (except for the sects in which Naassene or Barbelite syncretism dominated). The New Prophecy, still hostile to Marcionism, abounded in the same practice, if not the same meaning. Marcion refused sexuality, pleasure and even marriage, which was judged propitious for the work of the Demiurge. The New Prophecy limited itself to encouraging detachment from the body to the profit of the spirit.
In its violent rejection of Judaism, this same dualism did not yet assume the scandalous character that State Catholic monotheism would imprint upon it. Does one need an example? In his Dialogue with Tryphon, Justin the Apologist — a determined anti-Marcionite — gave to his interlocutor a remark that evoked the trouble that the belief in a Good God aroused:
We know your opinion on these subjects, but it seems that what you say is a kind of absolutely unprovable paradox; because your assertion that the Christ was God, preexisting all of the centuries, and condescending to become a man and to be born, not as a man from a man, seems to me not only a paradox but an absurdity. Respond to me at first how you could prove that there is another God alongside he who is the Creator of all things and then show me how this God also condescended to be born from a virgin.[206]
Marcion’s missionary activity and his determination to implant non-Jewish and unified churches everywhere did not in itself offer any reason for reprobation because, under the cover of a special effect [trucage] proper to the Catholic Church, and to all power, the glory taken away from Marcion would be reflected upon the personage of Paul, the sacred “apostle to the Gentiles.”
Marcion’s activity displayed such efficacity that in 400 there still existed Marcionite churches in Rome, in all of Italy, in Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Armenia, Chypre and even Persia, where Manicheanism developed. He propagated the unique Gospel inspired by Paul as well as the appellation adopted by Catholicism: the Old Testament, to which he opposed the New Testament, translating in this fashion the expression New Alliance, which, according to the manuscripts of Qumran, defined the Church of the Master of Justice.
Leisegang summarizes the conceptions of Marcion as follows:[207]
The Gospel of the Christ teaches merciful love, while the Old Testament teaches a malevolent punitive justice. The Christ is the Son of a God of love and the faith in this God is the essence of Christianity. The history of the whole world, described in the Old Testament, from Adam to Christ, forms an immoral and repulsive drama, staged by a God who created this world, who is as bad as possible and who, consequently, cannot be better than his lamentable creation. Thus it is impossible that the Christ is the Son of the Creator revealed in the Old Testament. This creator is just and cruel, whereas Jesus is love and kindness personified. Therefore, Jesus is, by his own avowal, the Son of God. He thus can only be the Son of a God completely different from that of the Old Testament. He is the Son of a Good God, residing until now unknown to man and a stranger to this universe, because he had absolutely nothing in common with it. This God is the Unknown God that Saint Paul announced at the agora of Athens. The Christ is his Son.
The Old Testament lost its quality as the Holy Scriptures of Christianity. It did not know the True God and did not know anything about Jesus. The words of the prophets and the psalms, until then considered to be prophecies relative to the Christ, must now submit to a literal reinterpretation, after which they no longer apply to Jesus. The Law and the prophets ended with John the Baptist. John was the last Jewish prophet; like his predecessors, he preached a Demiurge of cruel justice, he knew nothing of the Good God, who remained foreign to all the Jews. That he was also good, Jesus himself confirmed it. He [Jesus] did not cease, in his language as well as in his conduct, to violate the Law of the Old Testament, to disobey the God who instituted it. He declared an open war on the Law, the scribes and the Pharisians. Jesus welcomed the sinners insofar as they had corrupted themselves with those who passed for just in the sense of the Old Testament. Jesus had seen in the last prophet of the Old Testament, John the Baptist, an ignoramus and an subject of scandal. John himself had said that the Son was the only one to know the Father and that, by consequence, all of those who had come before him had known nothing of him, but had preached another God [...]
When Jesus spoke of the bad tree that could only bear bad fruit and the good tree and its good fruit, he understood the bad tree to be the God of the Old Testament, which had only created and could only create what is bad. The good tree, on the other hand, is the Father of the Christ, who only produced good things. And, by defending the stitching of a new piece into an old frock and putting new wine into old bottles, Jesus expressly prohibited the establishment of any kind of connection between his Gospel and the religion of the Old Testament, with its God.
And when Marcion wrote, “O marvel of marvels, rapture and subject of amazement, one can absolutely not say nor think what surpasses the Gospel, there is nothing to which one can compare it,” he provided the tone for generations of historians for whom Christianity was the product of the Greek civilization and had nothing to do with the Jews.
Nevertheless, Marcion stirred up a lively reprobation in his lifetime. Is it necessary to incriminate his authoritarianism, his extreme rigor, the envy of the other church leaders, the hatred of the Judeo-Christians for whom anti-Judaism did not imply the rejection of the Bible?
The response resided in the reactions and polemics engendered by his theses. Against him were drafted Gospels and Acts that reported that Jesus was a Jewish agitator, put to death by the Jews, certainly, but nourished by the milk of biblical wisdom. The Gospel placed under the name of Luke details the childhood of the Christ, a man born from a woman, even if the sperma was called pneuma, “Spirit.”
Paul, the Marcionite apostle, penetrated into the anti-Marcionite texts in which his “veritable existence” was attested to. Thus, the Acts of the Apostles, a novel that presented itself as a historical chronicle, reconciled the apostles Simon-Peter and Paul.[208]
Other texts by Paul were written: the so-called “pastorals.” Joseph Turmel has established that the letters of Ignacius of Antioch — the same ones that the tradition cite as the [first] appearance of the word “catholic” — reveal the existence of a Marcionite version (135, at the earliest); before being revised, around 190–210, by another bishop of Antioch, Theophile, who, despite his hostility to Marcion, complacently based himself upon the inspiration of the Novum Testamentum.[209] This Theophile did not hesitate to speak of the letters of Paul as the “holy and divine Word [Verbe],” not without ridding them of the Marconite word [parole]. He also borrowed from Theodotus the notion of the trinity and he would undertake the “harmonization of the Gospels, which thus appeared to him nearly deprived of harmony,” Deschner remarks.[210]
So as to demolish Marcion, Theophile was joined by Denyse of Corinth, Philippe of Gortyne, Hippolyte of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyon, Justin the Apologist, Bardensane of Edessa, Tertullien, Rhodon and Modestus; these were mostly men who enjoyed a certain power as leaders of Christian communities.
But the worst enemy of Marcion was Marcion himself. How did a founder of churches, engaged in politics and temporal and spiritual affairs, hope to build the power of God upon the assises of a world that he condemned because it was the work of a Demiurge, a bloody and pernicious God? How could he succeed in planting a Universal Church in an odious society, which simple faith invited one to renounce right away? And to which authority could a bishop refer to durably legitimate a Jesus who had not lived the life of the humble people whom he ruled?
By breaking with Jewish mythology, did Marcion not remove his credit from a Christianity that was completely borrowed from biblical exegeses? Justin understood quite well who condemned Marcion and explained to Tryphon that — the Jews having lost the key to its interpretation — the Bible thenceforth belonged to the Christians, who were the only ones in a position to confer upon it its true meaning.
Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, was no longer in sympathy with the inventor of Paul, because the Epideixis explained Christian doctrine by speaking of the biblical prophecies. Neither was Tertullien, however close he was to he who called marriage filth and an obscenity. Because, if Marcion, despite his dualism, was not a Gnostic — for him, faith (pistsis) excelled over gnosis, and the adhesion to the Christ was not founded upon knowledge (gnosis) — nevertheless he stripped the marytrdom of Jesus of its penitential meaning, because he separated it from the tradition of Esaie and the biblical prophets. Therefore, deprived of the sacrificial model of the man dead upon the cross, the Church lost meaning and usefulness.
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