The Rock and a Hard Place
2
Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make men stumble, a rock that will make them fall; and he who believes in him will not be put to shame.”
— Romans 9:33
The Argument from Prophecy
Justin and Aquila ought to have had as much in common as Marcion and Aquila. Roughly the same age, both men were converts to Christianity directly from paganism, with no halfway house in between at which to accustom themselves to any form of Hebrew law-keeping. Justin calls himself frankly an uncircumcised Gentile brought up in “heathen customs.” Also like Aquila, he seems to have been a bit of a restless idealist in his youth, having spent time among philosophers of the Stoic, Pythagorean, and Platonic varieties before discovering a truer path with the Christians. Most significantly, the anonymous old man who converted Justin to the faith did so mainly by means of the Old Testament — by the fact that the words of the prophets (especially Moses) were written long before those of Socrates or Pythagoras and contain a revelation directly from God, as opposed to the mere reasonings of men. These exotic Eastern writings, in other words, produced in Justin precisely the same kind of awe and attraction that they did in Aquila. Yet as it played out in real life, these two thoroughgoing Judeophiles were destined to pursue paths that only diverged more and more in the stormy years ahead.
In his writings, Justin refers to himself as a Samaritan — a term that, taken at face value, would make him a Semite, a son of Abraham and one of the children of Israel. Samaria had been the larger portion of the Divided Kingdom that resulted from Israel’s great schism of the tenth century B.C.: the Northern Kingdom of Israel proper, that is, as opposed to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, home of the Jews. Justin lived at Shechem, a city that was holy to the Hebrews at a time when Jerusalem was still a naked crag occupied by a tribe of Canaanite squatters called the Jebusites. Shechem was built at the spot where Abraham first sacrificed to Yahweh inside the Promised Land, where the covenant God made with him in Haran first began to be fulfilled: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great . . . and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves” (Gen. 12:1–3).
Justin also tells us, however, that his home city was called Neapolis, which is the later Roman name for Shechem. Why did they change it? Well, like Istanbul (not Constantinople) it was changed on account of foreign conquest. After passing through the hands of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Greco-Syrians, Shechem became finally, after the death of Herod the Great in A.D. 6, a Roman colony completely resettled by Gentile Jupiter worshippers. This transformation was so complete, in fact, that Justin shows no evidence of any Hebrew ethnicity at all; he claims, for instance, never even to have heard of Moses prior to his conversion. He was a Roman colonialist, then, probably of European descent, living in an alien outpost much as the English did in India under the Raj.
Given these similarities, we might wonder how exactly Justin was able to keep his footing as a Christian whereas Aquila began to falter. Certainly, he would have noticed the same issues, asked the same questions about trans-testamental continuity. But where Aquila saw mainly disproportion and incoherence, Justin perceived the deeper unity that Peter once wrote of. In an important passage from his conversion account, Justin reveals his own ideas about the nature of this underlying link: “In their writings, [the prophets] gave no proof at that time of their statements . . . but the happenings that have taken place and are now taking place force you to believe their words.”27 Which happenings were these? Mainly, they were the many examples from the life of Christ (to which Justin was simultaneously introduced) and in Church history, in which Old Testament types and predictions appear to have found their fulfillment. Justin’s unnamed elderly evangelist, in other words, won him by means of what more recent apologists call “the argument from prophecy.” Later in his career, Justin restated the argument in mirror-image form. Asked how one could be sure that Jesus hadn’t simply been a magician, performing His miraculous cures through trickery or use of the dark arts, Justin answered with the same line of reasoning in reverse: just as the miracles later proved the truth of the Old Testament, so the Old Testament provides proof for the miracles, since it gave detailed prophecies leading us to expect them in advance. For Justin, then, the whole Bible was Christocentric. The underlying link between the Testaments wasn’t just essential; it was the very thing that made him a Christian to begin with. And he only welcomed the Tanakh itself (as the Jews call the Old Testament) because he saw its message fulfilled in the Gospels.
Aquila was doubtless familiar with the argument from prophecy but perhaps he hadn’t encountered it so early nor allowed it to become so formative. And as he began to waver, he surely encountered the pushback arguments from the Pharisees that began to appear. In their eyes, these so-called prophecies depended mainly on thin allegories of the type pioneered by that very marginal Jew of Alexandria, Philo. The twelve bells hanging from the robe of the high priest, for instance, were supposed to represent the Twelve Apostles. The two goats he offered on the Day of Atonement were Christ figures; the first splayed out over the altar in the shape of a cross and put to death, the second representing the Second Coming. But it was all a bit of a reach, wasn’t it? — the Christians reading their own ideas into the Tanakh rather than finding them there naturally.
The Jesus rejecters paused longer, perhaps, over the Christian citation of Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Yet it helped to notice that Hebrew versions of Isaiah used a much less specific word than “virgin” (the very unambiguous term parthenos employed by the seventy Greek translators of the Septuagint). Older, Palestinian Bibles used almah — a word that did, it’s true, normally imply an unmarried or recently betrothed young woman in her virginal state but didn’t literally say so. Some Jesus rejecters, in fact, began to look at the entire Septuagint with a more jaundiced eye during this period. Even though portions of it were already 250 years old on the first Christmas morning, it began to be suspected of having some kind of undefined pro-Christian bias — probably because so many of those steeped in it (the God-fearers and the Dispersed) had fallen so easily into the Church’s arms since that day. Illogical as this idea might be, it acquired for some a surface plausibility merely because one of the more damaging of these allegedly prophetic passages came from the Septuagint book known as the Wisdom of Solomon:
Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions. . . . He professes to have knowledge of God. . . . He calls the last end of the righteous happy, and boasts that God is his father. Let us see if his words are true, and let us test what will happen at the end of his life; for if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Let us test him with insult and torture, that we may find out how gentle he is, and make trial of his forbearance. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for, according to what he says, he will be protected. (Wisd. 2:12–13, 16–21)
Wisdom (probably the most recent of the Ketuvim, composed as late as 100 B.C.), was originally written in Greek — just like the hated Christian books. This prejudicial datum — combined with the fact that some Jewish communities afforded the book of Wisdom only a provisional welcome to their jar of scrolls or else questioned its inspiration altogether — pioneered the way toward another useful “avenue of escape” from the prophetic argument that Justin found so compelling.28
However much of a stretch the skeptics may have found it, the fact is that Justin was following our Lord’s own method by finding these allegorical foreshadowings. Indeed, we might even say that the first Christian apologist from prophecy was Christ! Arrogant as it undoubtedly seemed to those who rejected him, it was Jesus who first took ownership of the Tanakh in this way, who started Christians looking for Christ in pre-Christian books. He did so at the very outset of His public ministry at the synagogue in Nazareth, when He took up one of the sacred scrolls there and read out an excerpt from one Isaiah’s most messianic prophecies:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. (Luke 4:18–21)
Later, when the unbelieving Pharisees sought to explain their rejection of His message on the basis of continued loyalty to Moses instead, Jesus cut their argument off at the roots: “It is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me” (John 5:45–47). Nor were all of Jesus’ interpreted prophecies entirely free from the loose or liberal brand of exegesis objected to by later critics. When asked, for instance, how he could possibly be the promised Messiah in light of Malachi’s fairly explicit prophecy that a “Second Coming of Elijah” must take place first (Mal. 4:5), Jesus replied: “ ‘Elijah does come, and he is to restore all things; but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not know him, but did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of man will suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist” (Matt. 17:11–13). It was Christ then, and not Philo, who originated the “Alexandrian” method of Bible interpretation.
Finally, when Jesus began appearing to His disciples after the Resurrection, we are told that He “opened their minds” and “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Jesus, in other words, explained the meaning of His own mission using these methods, boldly laying claim to all of the Scriptures, not just those written by Christians. In short, Peter’s trans-testamental unity — so vital to Justin’s whole outlook — was revealed to him by God in Christ in all His resurrected glory.
The Gathering of Eagles
It seems unlikely that Aquila would have accepted his new job at Jerusalem had he known from the start exactly what the position was going to entail. Simply put, the emperor sent his kinsman to Judea to help “de-Judaify” the Holy City, to integrate the Jewish capital into the peaceful family of Roman vassals by doing to it what had earlier been done to Justin’s home city of Shechem, now reinvented as Neapolis. A large pagan population would be resettled in Jerusalem to live alongside the Jewish one, and a new municipal government, loyal to Rome, would be put in place. The Samaritans had recently shown themselves pliable enough to allow Hadrian to rebuild their schismatic Hebrew temple for them, demolished during the same Roman crackdown that destroyed the Jerusalem edifice sixty years earlier. The catch? The new temple at Shechem was dedicated to Zeus Hypsistos (the Highest), a syncretistic mash-up of Jupiter and Jehovah, inspired, probably, by Philo’s attempts to rationalize Judaism as Plato and Plutarch had previously rationalized paganism. Hadrian, no doubt, saw this as a successful model that might now be copied in Judea to the south, a more enlightened alternative to the endless military action that still had not fully suppressed Hebrew unrest in the East. To Aquila, however, the emperor’s plan for Jerusalem must have seemed like nothing but a symbol for the very nightmare he feared was overtaking the revealed faith: God’s laws watered down, God’s truth compromised, floodgates flung open to the half-converted, the whole plan aimed at papering over the difference between believer and unbeliever for the sake of a patent-medicine peace.
In describing the experiences of another visitor who toured the Holy City around the same time, Epiphanius gives us a vivid sense of what Aquila would have found when he arrived there in the 120s:
And he went up to Jersualem, the famous and illustrious city which Titus, the son of Vespasian, overthrew in the second year of his reign. And he found the temple of God trodden down and the whole city devastated save for a few houses and the church of God, which was small, [located] where the disciples, when they had returned after the Savior had ascended from the Mount of Olives, went to the upper room. For there [the Jerusalem church] had been built; that is, in that portion of Zion which escaped destruction, together with blocks of houses in the neighborhood of Zion and the seven synagogues which alone remained standing in Zion, like solitary huts, one of which remained until the time of Maximona the bishop and Constantine the king, “like a booth in a vineyard,” as it is written.29
“Zion” in this account is a reference to Mount Zion,30 the Hebrew name for the Temple Mount where Solomon’s original edifice stood until 586 B.C. and where Herod’s second temple — the one frequented by Christ and the Apostles — stood until A.D. 70.
It’s easy to imagine that Aquila, like so many Christian visitors to come, must have toured the ruins of Herod’s temple not long after his arrival — but in his conflicted state of mind, it would probably have been more of an ordeal than a source of spiritual inspiration. During the early second century, this was a desolate, haunted spot, redolent of recent tragedy. The enormous scattered blocks lay just where we see them today, and the huge Western Wall was the only portion of the original structure still standing. Quite unlike today, however, the Temple Mount itself was a bare, windswept plateau, lacking shrines or memorials of any kind. The iconic Dome of the Rock, which has sheltered what was the holiest place in the temple for thirteen centuries, wasn’t built for another five hundred years or more after Aquila’s day — but the rock itself was there, of course, just as it has been since the creation of the world.31 This rock, according to the Mishnah — this great stone table some twenty-two feet square — is the same rock on which Abraham offered his son Isaac to God for sacrifice, the same rock on which Isaac’s son Jacob had dreamed of a stairway to heaven, causing him to cry out “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17). Here, the Ark of the Covenant once stood with its Mercy Seat where, by God’s command, the blood of sacrificial animals was offered so that the people might obtain forgiveness for their sins. This rock had been the Holy of Holies, once screened from the eyes of mortal man by vast bejeweled curtains, entered only once a year and even then only by the high priest. Now it stood exposed to the elements, naked and desolate; any rank pagan or other impious man, as Aquila must have noted with horror, could, if he liked, have made a picnic lunch on top of it. And yet (as another early pilgrim tells us) “Jews came every year to anoint it, and bewail themselves with groans, to rend their garments and depart.”32
Aquila knew very well how his fellow Christians accounted for the loss of the temple: it was destroyed as an expression of God’s judgment upon the faithlessness of Israel at the time of Christ. They quoted the prophecy of Daniel centuries beforehand: “An anointed one shall be cut off, and shall have nothing; and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. . . . Upon the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator” (Dan. 9:26–27). The Hebrew word rendered as “anointed one” is Māšîaḥ — Messias or Christos in Greek — and the “people of the prince to come” turned out to be the Romans, specifically the X Fretensis legion of the Roman army acting at the command of their emperor. The temple, in other words, was destroyed in the Christian scheme, because Jesus the Messiah received nothing from the watchmen set to welcome Him but had His life cut off instead via crucifixion. He, in fact, prophesied the fall of the temple — or did so in the Gospel books venerated by the Church, at any rate: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” He cried, as He turned to exit Herod’s Temple for the last time, “killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate’ ” (Matt. 23:37–38). “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:42–44).
As a matter of fact, what the earliest, primitive churches believed about the topic at hand Aquila now found himself in a uniquely perfect position to learn. The Jerusalem church described by Epiphanius happens to have been the oldest church in Christendom, originally pastored by that very St. James who issued the decrees of the apostolic council! And however doubtful or searching he might have been, Aquila did, according to Epiphanius, present himself for membership there, as any believer in good standing with God’s larger family would have done:
So Aquila while in Jerusalem saw the disciples of the disciples of the apostles flourishing in the faith and working great signs, healings, and other miracles. For they were such as had come back from the city of Pella to Jerusalem and were living there and teaching. For when the city was about to be taken and destroyed by the Romans, it was revealed in advance to all the disciples by an angel of God that they should remove from the city, as it was going to be completely destroyed. They sojourned as emigrants in Pella, the city above mentioned in Transjordania. And this city is said to be of the Decapolis.33
This, according to those involved, had been the warning for which Jesus had put them on alert at the time of His prophecies against the city: “When you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle” (Matt. 24:15–18). Thus miraculously preserved, the apostolic church at Jerusalem — “mother of all churches” according to the ancient Liturgy of St. James — had no eyewitness knowledge of the catastrophe, but she certainly would have had a lot to say about the conditions that brought it about.
Seen from St. James’s church, the “Great Revolt,” as it was commonly called, was a Jewish civil war before it was a Roman crackdown. Their own founder, for instance — head of the “Jesus party” in Jerusalem — was, according to Josephus, assassinated by the party of the Pharisees in the very shadow of the temple “on a charge of breaking the law”: and this, despite the fact that James personally seems to have continued keeping all of the Mosaic ceremonials even after publishing the council’s verdict. Yet James had welcomed Paul to the city a few years earlier — that “apostle to the uncircumcised” who had recently been tried in Greece for “persuading men to worship God contrary to the law” (Acts 18:13) — and had refused to dissuade the people from following Paul’s opinions. Both Origen and Eusebius cite a passage from Josephus wherein the great historian of the Jewish Wars identifies James’s murder as the last straw that brought judgment upon the city.34 Even without such spiritual insights, however, it had been perfectly clear to all that factional chaos among the Jews had brought down the hammer of Rome.
When, in A.D. 66, a relatively minor tax revolt drew unexpectedly vigorous Roman intervention, a makeshift Jewish army tried to unite in resistance, much as the widely separated American colonies united to create a single Continental Army in response to the “Intolerable Acts” of 1774. But such unity proved wholly impossible. The Zealots were soon fighting with the Sadduccees over control of the army; the Pharisees wouldn’t join forces with either group, considering them both to be made up of lawbreakers and heretics. The Idumeans took the part of the Zealots. The Essenes seem to have withdrawn from the fight altogether and taken their extensive library to the secret caves of Qumran. Had the ancient Davidic monarchy been restored at this time under King Jesus — Son of David and Son of God — the Israelites would have united under His glorious rule and marched on triumphantly as God’s missionary people, a nation of kings and priests carrying healing to humanity in fulfillment of the covenant promise made to Abraham. And yet a large part of the people’s rejection of Jesus had, in the eyes of the Church, been rooted in just such political issues. Had the Nazarene come as a military messiah — a second Joshua or another Judas Maccabeus — he would have been embraced wholeheartedly, since the Romans, sad to say, were the worst problem most Jews could think of at the moment. To Jesus’ offer of spiritual release, of holiness, rebirth, and liberation from their sins, the people had largely shrugged their shoulders, preferring to hang on a while longer and give the next messianic candidate a look instead.35
If Aquila sought less “biased” information about the final battle, it would have been easily obtained from the handful of non-Christian survivors still living in the city. These told a grim tale indeed. Titus besieged Jerusalem early in 70, at a time when its population was artificially swelled by Passover pilgrims. All food shipments were stopped; all streams bearing water into the walled city were dammed up. Hardship turned to starvation within weeks. The Zealots, incredibly, in an apparent effort to stave off surrender and compel the inhabitants to open the gates and fight the thing to a finish while some bodily strength yet remained, deliberately burned the city’s remaining food stocks. Some Jews later maintained that this had been done to force Yahweh’s hand — to insist that He reveal the military Messiah they had thus far been denied. And yet no new Messiah appeared.
When the city was finally entered, the Romans found that the inhabitants had sunk to an animal state, having resorted at last to cannibalism. The final stand took place in and around the temple. The factions were battling the invaders shoulder to shoulder at this point, and yet still they hated each other so deeply that one group paused to murder the leader of a second in the very midst of the struggle. Soon, God’s own house was ablaze. Josephus tells us that Titus had not originally intended it to be destroyed; he preferred to leave Herod’s recently renovated wonder standing so that it could be transformed afterward into a pagan shrine dedicated to the emperor and the Roman pantheon. Yet “as the legions charged in” Josephus records,
Neither persuasion nor threat could check their impetuosity: passion alone was in command. Crowded together around the entrances many were trampled by their friends, many fell among the still hot and smoking ruins of the colonnades and died as miserably as the defeated. As they neared the Sanctuary they pretended not even to hear Caesar’s commands and urged the men in front to throw in more firebrands. The partisans were no longer in a position to help; everywhere was slaughter and flight. Most of the victims were peaceful citizens, weak and unarmed, butchered wherever they were caught. Round the Altar the heaps of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the Sanctuary steps poured a river of blood and the bodies of those killed at the top slithered to the bottom.
Finally, as the sun began to set on the ninth of Av (the first day of August that year), the Holy City fell; and the Temple Mount supported a temple no longer. Nothing stood at the sacred spot but the standards of Rome against a smoky sky, each topped with its brazen bird of prey, the Roman eagle. Aquila would not have heard the opinion of St. John Chrysostom on this matter, for he expressed it some 250 years later; but it was, in the judgment of that great Doctor of the Church, the raising of these standards that had been “the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be.” He linked it to Christ’s words when asked where the end would begin: “Where the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together” (Luke 17:37). We should also add that General Titus, for his part, refused the customary laurels of victory, avowing (according to the Greek historian Philostratus) that he saw “no merit in vanquishing a people forsaken by their own God.”36
It was all so neat and tidy for us Christians, Aquila must have thought; so clear that even the man who had done the butchery saw its significance. God took his vengeance upon those who rejected His Son and stepped in Himself to help overthrow the Old Law. Ironically, Aquila’s very name happens to mean “the Eagle” in Latin; his face and his manners, he likely meditated, were those of the incendiaries, not of God’s chosen. Even when he spoke Hebrew — a rare talent for a Roman citizen — he probably spoke it with a heathen accent. Now, that hard-won talent had made him fit for little more, apparently, than further to interpret the emperor’s will for Judea. Even Josephus, thoroughly Jewish himself, concluded that God’s favor had now been transferred to the Romans, who merely acted as the rod of the Lord’s anger. And yet what, really, Aquila wondered, had the people been guilty of but refusing to abandon the ways of their fathers? What was their crime except continued allegiance to a code that — as even the Church admitted — had expressed God’s own will for a whole millennium and half again more? Is this what paganism always ends up doing when it runs up against God and his people? Is this what paganism was now dragging with it into the Church?
Still, he would not quickly forsake the Nazarene. And the miracles Aquila had witnessed among the Christians were surely powerful proofs — of something, anyway. Yet how could he forget what he had so often read in the Hebrew Scriptures?
And you established for yourself your people Israel to be your people forever. And you, O Lord, became their God. (2 Sam. 7:24)
You are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. (Deut. 14:2)
When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them, (Deut. 4:30–31)
The Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret. (1 Sam. 15:29)
Bright as he was, Aquila cannot have missed the exquisite irony of it all: sent here to “de-Judaify” Judea, the emperor’s man now looked to have a job of work on his hands just trying not to turn Jewish himself.
Marcion in Trouble
Marcion, meanwhile, was in theological trouble himself back home in Pontus.
Though the evidence isn’t quite clear, he seems to have risen quickly to the episcopacy, having been made a kind of junior suffragan bishop to his father at Sinope37 — an example, it would seem, of unwise nepotism in the Church. How unwise is illustrated, perhaps, by the fact that he found himself, not long afterward, turned out of the ministry altogether. Epiphanius tells us that Marcion, with tears, begged his father for reconciliation, but the bishop refused. His son left the Church and took up a secular career in the always-thriving Pontic shipping business.
What caused Marcion’s downfall at Sinope? We ought to confess frankly that nobody really knows. Epiphanius tells a tale of sexual sin with a young maiden, something earlier writers know nothing of — writers who, as a matter of fact, confess that Marcion was noted for chastity and an austere lifestyle. Some scholars think the story is a metaphor misunderstood (either by Epiphanius himself or by his later translators) and that the image of a crafty deceiver cheating a virgin out of her purity was meant as an allegory for the purity of the early Church’s doctrine now spoiled by the introduction of heresy. And since we know that Marcion did, in fact, turn heretic later — indeed, that he soon became the arch-heretic of his generation — it’s easy to accept this less salacious (but ultimately more destructive) explanation.
If Marcion had, indeed, become a teacher of false doctrine, what errors was he espousing this early on? No one knows for sure. We can note only that whatever his false step was, it was not, apparently, novel enough at the time to warrant special comment. This book, in any event, is going to suggest simply that Marcion, like his fellow parishioner Aquila, was Judaizing in the 120s — a movement that was nearing its peak of influence in that era but was destined to burst like a bubble during the following decade. For the truth is that what would later be called “Marcionism” parallels the Judaistic system step for step nine-tenths of the way. In fact, the characteristically Marcionite element comes in only at the very end, as a kind of Twilight Zone twist to that familiar story. But we’re getting far ahead of our story now and will, at any rate, need to lay some more groundwork before such a counterintuitive assertion becomes really understandable.
Let’s simply assert for the moment only what can be shown from Marcion’s later statements: that he did, somewhere along the way, learn to endorse every single plank in the Judaizer platform. The Creator of humanity did appear to Abraham and to Moses; He did give the Hebrews the law system laid out in the Torah and wants it kept as a condition of His friendship. Marcion agrees: the book of Genesis calls the rite of circumcision “perpetual,” and Abraham, in response, circumcises not only his own relatives but his entire household as well. Deuteronomy regards its laws as unconditional and curses anyone who “does not persevere in all that has been written” (27:26, LXX). The book of Leviticus explicitly denies that Sabbath observance is temporary: “It shall be an everlasting ordinance in all your dwellings and generations” (Lev. 23:21, Douay-Rheims). All of the laws and ceremonies in the Tanakh are illustrative of Yahweh’s character and cannot, therefore, by any means be reformed. Any attempt to wriggle out of their requirements or explain them away by means of some tortuous theological sleight of hand is simply man’s everlasting adolescent lawlessness at work, always looking for an out. Marcion and the Judaizers are lock-step in agreement up to this point in the telling. And though, as we’ve noted, law-keeping alone would not have been enough to get a clergyman in trouble with the Church at this stage, any insistence on it as necessary to avoid sin and damnation certainly would have been — constituting, as it does, a direct repudiation of the Apostles’ authority and their rulings at the Jerusalem Council.
Yet the essence of the Judaizing position, remember, is that it seeks to keep both the Mosaic Law and Jesus; this is the difference between a Judaizer and just an ordinary Jesus-rejecting Jew. That was the whole trick one had to pull off — and whatever they themselves may have said about torturous theology, it took quite an act of mental gymnastics for the Judaizers to manage successfully their chosen tightrope act. One of the groups that Marcion might easily have joined, for instance, was a loose association of dissident churches called the Ebionites. This movement (which, according to several ancient historians, started as a splinter group from James’s original church at Jerusalem) was more than happy to recognize Jesus as the Messiah and showed Him great reverence. Some of them even accepted his virginal conception. But they denied His divinity, along with any idea that His death or Resurrection had altered man’s obligations under the Law in any way. The so-called Apostle Paul had, in their system, been nothing but an apostate from Moses’ Law, a pied piper trying to lead Israel to destruction. They even had a wild conspiracy theory (according to Epiphanius) alleging that Paul was never a Jew at all, but a Greek who had sought to marry the daughter of a Jewish high priest by means of an insincere conversion and then apostatized when she spurned him. Most intriguingly, the Ebionites came forward with “alternative” scriptures purporting to prove their stance on the issues at hand. Eusebius says the Ebionites used a book called The Gospel of the Hebrews, which Epiphanius thinks was a faulty translation of Matthew’s Gospel, “not wholly complete, but falsified and mutilated.”38 Other books, such as The Apocryphon of James and The Ascents of James, picture the Lord’s kinsman as having received fuller, secret instruction from Jesus not given to the other Apostles. Both of these books blame Paul for Christ’s failure to convert the entire Jewish people to Ebionite Christianity; had not this “hostile person” poisoned the well by speaking against the Law in his name, Jesus would have been accepted as the mighty but merely human prophet that He was.
Marcion shows every indication of having read this material . . . and scorned it. The Jesus he found there was but a pale imitation of the Divine Being he himself loved and served. Whatever else we may say about Marcion and his later career as a teacher of theology, the person of Jesus Christ remained paramount to him throughout. As fully as for Justin, the miracles of Christ were, for Marcion, an irrefutable proof of His divinity. It was perfectly clear to him as well, from the sublime teachings of Christ as recorded in the four great Gospels received by the Church (especially that of St. Luke, Marcion’s favorite), that the Nazarene had been no mere prophet. Jesus’ doctrine was as far above that of Isaiah or Elijah or Jeremiah as the brightness of the sun is compared with that of the moon. While the Ebionites were slandering St. Paul, Marcion was glorying in his great confession to the Colossians: “For in [Christ] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (Col. 2:9–10). Perhaps a newcomer such as Aquila, converted from paganism, could see Jesus as simply one more name in a long list of newly discovered Jewish heroes; the whole thing, after all, must have come to him at once, as a single package. But Marcion had been raised in the Church as the son of a bishop. He saw a clear process of development in the Scriptures: each prophet or wise man building on the work of those who came before; each outgrowing, little by little, some of the barbarism and ignorance in which God so clearly finds even His most promising subjects sunk at the time depicted in Genesis or Exodus. The idea of editing Jesus then, as these Ebionite works wished to do, so that primitives such as Joshua and Samson and David might not look so out of joint in comparison — never!
Marcion, at any rate, must have decided early on that Ebionism or any other Jesus-minimizing option was no option for him. Just because he had come to believe that the rulings of the Jerusalem Council were a mistake was no good reason to fall away from Christian belief altogether! And yet, though there was no real organic connection between law-keeping and the demotion of Christ, Marcion couldn’t deny — and surely it troubled him — that law maximizers almost always did end up “going there.” Though they usually blamed Peter or Paul, or both, for the “error” itself, they constantly gave the game away by moving quickly ahead to Christological heresy. Law-keeping Christians who stayed sound on the divinity of Christ were rare as raindrops in the Sahara. This, in fact, may well have been what got Marcion into trouble at Sinope: his kind of Judaizing talk was so universally the prelude to Christian apostasy that his father and the other elders of the church likely expected their junior bishop soon to follow suit.
Marcion fooled them, though. He never did stop proclaiming the majesty of Jesus the Savior, Divine Son of the Most High God. But his simultaneous inability to escape the logic (as he saw it) of the Judaizing position drove him, eventually, to an error stranger still — whipped him into it mercilessly, like an ox before the lash. In fact, as Marcion took to sea to forget his troubles (probably as an officer on one of his family’s commercial vessels)39 he likely brooded on these matters instead — long days and weeks in the sun and salt and spray, caught between the Rock of Christ and the Hard Place of Moses’ Law.
27 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 7, 2. Hereafter, citations for Justin’s Dialogue will be given in parentheses in the text.
28 We’ll examine this issue much more closely in later chapters; for now, we should simply reaffirm that no single, authoritative Jewish canon had yet been published in the second century A.D. The book of Wisdom was probably questioned for having been written so late perhaps and composed in Greek, rather than in Hebrew. Wisdom was probably the only book of the Bible for which this was true until a new group of inspired Jews — the Apostles and their associates — began to write the New Testament books in Greek.
29 Epiphanius of Salamis, Weights and Measures 14. Maximona was bishop of Jerusalem and Constantine the Roman emperor when St. Helena arrived at the city in A.D. 328, hoping to preserve the holy sites there.
30 Not to be confused with the hill that currently bears that name, west of the Temple Mount.
31 The Talmud, in fact, asserts that the Foundation Stone atop Mount Zion was the first portion of the earth to be created and that God gathered dust from there to use to make the first man, Adam.
32 The Pilgrim of Bordeaux recorded the details of a visit to Jerusalem in the years 333 and 334.
33 Epiphanius, Weights and Measures 15.
34 This passage of Josephus is not present in surviving manuscripts. Origen cites it, however, in an account dating from about 248.
35 In fairness, we should note that the Apostles appear to have cherished this same hope to a degree. Even after the Resurrection, one of their first questions was, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6).
36 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6, 9.
37 The evidence for Marcion as a bishop is indirect but strong. Tertullian tells us that the Marcionites called him their “first bishop”; Adamantius accuses them of being named after a bishop instead of being called Christians after Christ. Optatus says Marcion went from being a bishop to an apostate.
38 Epiphanius, Panarion 30, 13, 1.
39 Rhodon (a student of Justin’s disciple Tatian) refers to Marcion as “sea man” — i.e., a man of the sea.