Rendezvous at Rome
6
The promise to Abraham and his descendants, that they should inherit the world, did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression. That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants — not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, for he is the father of us all.
— Romans 4:13–16
Tantalizing Possibilities
It’s not really surprising that there should be blank stretches on the timeline as we examine the lives of our canon makers. Nothing like a real biography exists for any of them, and everything we know about the trio has been gathered from accidental data fossilized in their writings or from the scattered notices preserved by a handful of ancient historians. What is a little surprising (and more than a little frustrating) is that one of these periods, for Marcion and for Justin, comes at just the point where we might most wish to have clarity; a five-to-ten year patch of historical fog that apparently obscures a vital turning point for both.
When, for instance, we last looked in on Justin, he was happily representing the church at Ephesus in a debate with Trypho the rabbi, circa 135. Marcion was last seen headed out to sea during the late 120s, having been expelled from his father’s church in Pontus. Yet, when the curtain rises again, we find that both men, pretty much inexplicably, have reemerged in the same place, at roughly the same time: the capital city of Rome in or around 140. Justin has become a lay apologist and Bible teacher at the church there, writing books and helping a talented group of disciples, it seems, to compose the first ever “harmony of the Gospels.”124 Marcion’s advent at Rome is much more surprising: our disgraced junior bishop seems to have turned up at the Roman church sede vacante (upon the death of Pope Hyginus) making a credible claim to be considered for the papacy himself — and with an enormous cash contribution in hand to sweeten the deal!
In between these two improbable states of affairs, we find only a collection of seemingly random facts — random, but singularly rich with tantalizing possibilities. We won’t be insisting here that this grab bag of disconnected particulars proves anything; only that the list, when put into context and arranged in chronological order, certainly does suggest a great deal. The effort, at any rate, seems worth the making since it offers at least some small hope of illuminating the hidden watershed and of rendering Marcion’s very bizarre turn of mind during the decade ahead just a bit more understandable. (And yes, we will be catching up with Aquila, too, along the way.)
The Sea Lord
The first of these factoids is Marcion and his money!
If our runaway bishop thought he could drown his theological troubles with success, he was mistaken, but it wasn’t for lack of success. Marcion, in fact, may well have become the first Christian millionaire! Whether he simply inherited a head for business (and perhaps the family firm as well) or merely reaped the benefits of a grim determination to silence his doubts in work, Marcion ended up turning his maritime career choice into spectacular achievement. Good luck undoubtedly played a role as well. His career as a shipping magnate corresponds to the period when Trajan’s long running two-front war in Dacia and Mesopotamia was making unprecedented demands on the annona — the empire’s military supply command. Gigantic quantities of foodstuffs, as well as weapons, uniforms, shoes, and so forth, had to be shuttled continually to both ends of the Black Sea at once — with the port of Sinope situated almost exactly between them. For a man running his shipping business out of Pontus, this must have been like hitting the lottery. On top of this we may add an additional stroke of good fortune. When Hadrian succeeded Trajan as emperor, he rewarded the great “sea lords” (domini navium, as Tertullian refers to Marcion) with a valuable piece of corporate welfare: a total tax write-off for any ship regularly employed in the transport of war materiel. Cicero tells us, too, that the distinguished shipowners were already “greatly respected” in Roman society and were assigned special seats in the theaters just like senators and other dignitaries. The magnificent corporate offices of the great shipping guilds were located at Ostia on the Tyrrhenian coast, where the beautiful mosaics of their ships can still be seen among the ruins of the arcade. There’s little reason for skepticism then, about the huge gift of money that Marcion is alleged to have brought later to Rome, nor about the source of the funds involved.
The record of Marcion’s activities goes strangely silent just about the time Bar Kokhba’s revolt erupted — and this fact, too, may well be significant. He may, of course, have simply refused to continue his career as a war profiteer now that it was “the apple of God’s eye” in the crosshairs once again. He may have turned his ships onto other less profitable routes instead, his fortune having already been made, or possibly retired from business altogether to set his sights on “church work” again. All the same, the news out of Judea cannot have failed to affect Marcion deeply, especially as the war began to go dramatically south for the Jews.
The scale of the Second Jewish Revolt and the ferocity of the fighting simply dwarfs the events of A.D. 70 — a fact due, more than likely, to the greater unity of the Jewish nation and its much higher state of readiness at the time of the outbreak. Two whole legions of Caesar’s army were destroyed — Legio XXII Deiotariana and Legio IX Hispana — both of which had to be disbanded after the war because of decimating losses. The turning point in the conflict appears to have been the Battle of Tel Shalem in the Beit She’an valley, close to what is now identified as the legionary camp of Legio VI Ferrata. A bust of Hadrian was discovered there recently, along with a triumphal arch raised (most likely) to commemorate the final victory over Bar Kokhba’s forces. The routed rebels fled to the fortress of Betar, that last remaining Jewish stronghold in the nation and whose ruins are located near the modern Israeli town of Beitar Illit, southwest of Jerusalem. This, as it happens, was Bar Kokhba’s headquarters — today’s Arab Palestinians call it Khirbet al-Yahud, meaning “the ruin of the Jews.” A passage from the Talmud seems to affirm their judgment: “There were eighty thousand Roman soldiers who beseiged Betar, [the city defended by] Bar Koziva, [he of whom R. Akiba declared] ‘he is the Moshiach [Messiah]!’ . . . [But] R. Yochanan told him: ‘Akiba! Grass will grow on your cheeks and the son of David will not have arrived [i.e., Bar Koziva is not the Messiah]!’ . . . The Jews’ own sins thus brought it about that Betar was captured and Bar Koziva was put to death. . . . His head was brought to Hadrian.” According to Jewish tradition, the walls of Betar were breached and the fortress destroyed on the fast of Tisha B’av — yes, the Ninth of Av — a day of mourning and the anniversary of the burning of the temple sixty-five years earlier.
What followed was not only a wholesale massacre of the rebels themselves (the Talmud speaks of rivers of blood flowing from Betar’s sewers and other drainage channels) but also a ferocious rampage of ethnic cleansing against the civilian populace. Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, says that 580,000 Jews were killed all told, with 985 villages and at least 50 larger towns burned to the ground. “For seven years,” the Talmudic sages taught, “the gentiles harvested their vineyards without having to fertilize them, because of the blood of Israel.” Those who were not slain were rounded up and sold into slavery abroad. The revolt of 70 could be squarely blamed on one violent faction of agitators, the Zealots; factionalism, contrariwise, had played little part this time around: the nation itself had risen, proving (at least in the minds of the Romans) that the Jewish people were hopelessly refractory by nature. They had, after all, now instigated two extremely bloody uprisings within one human lifetime, during which, as Cassius continues, “many Romans perished.” Hadrian, therefore, now proposed to erase the very memory of the Jewish nation — not only physically, but culturally and religiously as well. He completely abandoned his Samaritan model of mixed populations; now, he ordered what little remained of Jewish Jerusalem razed to the dirt, fulfilling at last Christ’s dreadful prophecy that not one stone would be left atop another.
Not only was a new pagan city built in its place, but Hadrian barred all Jews from the region in perpetuity, wiping the name Judea completely off the map and replacing it with Syria Palaestina, the ancient Greek designation used by Herodotus. Captured Torah scrolls were ceremonially burned atop the Temple Mount, after which two statues were erected on the Foundation Stone; the first bearing an image of Jupiter, the second of Hadrian.
Most noteworthy piece of news for Marcion? — the spreading word that Moses’ Law had been banned now in Judea, along with the Hebrew calendar, which regulated its feasts and fasts, and that the Romans had closed the school at Jamnia and executed every Judaic scribe, scholar, and Bible teacher they could get their hands on. It is very likely that Aquila was among them. We know that he did manage to complete his Bible translation — the Christian scholar Origen included it, about a hundred years later, in his monumental side-by-side comparison of Bible texts called the Hexapla125 — but other than that, Aquila simply vanishes from the pages of history at this point. Nothing more is heard from him after the era of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Probably he became, for the Romans, simply one more rebel carcass on the pyre.
How would Aquila’s old churchmate have taken such news (if, in fact, he ever got word of it)? We can only judge by his subsequent actions. There would have been grief, of course, if our guesses about a friendship are true; and perhaps a dose of what we now call “survivor’s remorse” at the thought of how similar Aquila’s path had been to his own, how easily he himself could have been at Jamnia if things gone a little differently. But there would have been shock as well at Aquila’s rejection of our Lord — and anger at his tempters for bringing it on. We’ve already noted Marcion’s unwillingness to follow the Ebionites into apostasy from Christ; this never changed in the years ahead, and it remained his personal lodestone until the end. Yet he never escaped his scruples about Moses’ Law, either. If, as we must imagine, he had been making a serious effort to keep it all this time, Marcion might already have become so vexed and worn out by the effort that news of its fall brought a terrible secret relief. We know, at any rate, that he did come eventually not to love the Law with King David but to loathe it. And paradoxically, this may have increased the pressure to renounce Christ rather than lessening it. If Moses had sufficed before Christ, if Jesus came not to repeal the Second Legislation but merely to reveal it yet more fully, then Jesus was just another lawgiver, adding even more weight to an already impossibly burdensome yoke. To someone already groaning under the load of the whole Deuteronomic Code, any offer to add bonus precepts “so marvelous and great that it’s doubtful anyone could possibly keep them” would have been a “so-called gospel” indeed.
We can also deduce from later developments that Marcion must already have been moving from eager, obedient Judaizing during this period to a more restless, unhappy form of the same condition. Yahweh was to be feared and obeyed, to be sure, but there seemed little to love in His character by this point. Too many terrible new questions had arisen in the wake of the disastrous revolt. Were the Romans right after all? Were the Jews simply warlike and confrontational by nature? If so, they certainly came by it honestly. Had it not been Yahweh Himself who called for the original invasion of Canaan — and genocide against its former inhabitants? Had not the Hebrew children praised their God as “a man of war” whose “right hand shatters the enemy,” who “sends forth his fury and consumes his adversaries like stubble” (see Exod. 15:3, 6, 7)? And had He not set up bloodstained heroes for the people to emulate: the brutal, mercurial Samson, for instance, hacking off heads with the jawbone of an ass, and the treacherous polygamist David, praised above Saul for the tens of thousands he had slain? Had not Bar Kokhba, more recently, preached salvation through violence? Was it not their jealous God who had driven the Jews to cast out the Roman idolaters — and be destroyed in the attempt? “Whoever, as Marcion, reads the Old Testament as literal and true and does not engage in allegorical interpretation is not obliged to but can naturally push toward the thesis that [the Deity depicted therein] is zealous for war (holy war!) and inconstant, subject to emotions.”126 The Bar Kokhba revolt, in other words, may have pushed Marcion toward the conception of an Old Testament God indifferent to human suffering or to normal ideas of good and evil, or else lusting for war, even for the destruction of His own supplicants.
And this brings us to the third pertinent fact on our list. Yes, Justin’s debate with Trypho happened at about this time, and listening to it might very well have helped Marcion — but it took place in Ephesus, hundreds of miles from both Sinope and Rome. And Justin’s written account of it was not published until the late 160s when both he and Marcion were either already dead or soon to be so. There is one book, however, that did appear during or just before the Bar Kokhba revolt and seems to represent a more-or-less orthodox attempt to answer the same questions. This one — the so-called Epistle of Barnabas — was widely disseminated in the 130s and 140s and may very well have been read by our struggling sea lord; for it contains just the kind of false steps and gross overstatements that could easily trigger a violent “Marcionite” reaction in an unstable inquirer.
No one knows who wrote the Epistle of Barnabas. The third-century Fathers Clement and Origen associate it with that name, but the letter is anonymous. If we’re correct in dating it to the Bar Kokhba era (the book mentions Hadrian’s plan to rebuild the temple), then it was composed far too late to have been the work of the biblical Barnabas.127 Also, its author shows very little accurate knowledge of the Jewish ceremonials and a great familiarity with the allegorizing methods of the Alexandrian Diaspora — neither of which could have been true of the apostolic Barnabas, who was very much a Holy Land Jew, in fact, a Levite. Ultimately, the timing of the document is more important than its authorship.
Hadrian’s friendly period toward the Jews coincided with and made space for the rising Jamnia movement — the first concerted effort to collect all the Jesus-free elements of Israel’s once-crowded denominational scene and amalgamate them into a single, new “Stay the course with Moses” form of Judaism. Akiba may even have inaugurated a propaganda campaign that began to affect the churches directly. And certainly there would have been very serious pressure on Christians to apostatize once Bar Kokhba’s conscription drive kicked into high gear. All of this helps make sense of the tone of crisis we find in the Barnabas letter (“The times are evil and the Agent is in the ascendant, and so we ought to watch over ourselves and . . . carefully study the present situation. . . . Let us scorn the error of the present time. . . . [Jesus] did not want us to suffer shipwreck by being, as it were, proselytized to their Law”) and also the bizarre vehemence of the Epistle’s rhetoric. With Akiba’s “reformation” on the march, with the Christian Bible under attack and his flock under new pressure to Judaize, “Barnabas” simply allows himself to get carried away and falls into abusing the very same Alexandrian methods Akiba pinpointed as the original source of the problem.
The Epistle of Barnabas contains some wonderful material. And it may have sprung from the same roots of tradition that gave rise to the Didascalia Apostolorum, for the Epistle incorporates a large block of text that appears in that document as well. But the Epistle goes far beyond the Didascalia by appearing to insist that the children of Israel were rejected entirely after the calf apostasy and lost their covenant with God permanently:
Keep watch over yourselves now and do not imitate certain people by heaping sin after sin upon yourselves and saying: “Their covenant is ours also.” Ours, indeed; but in the end they lost it without more ado when Moses had already received it. For the Scripture says: And Moses was on the mountain fasting forty days and forty nights, and he received from the Lord the covenant — tables of stone inscribed by the finger of the Lord’s hand. But they turned to idols and lost it. For the Lord says as follows: Moses, Moses, descend in haste; your people, which you led out of Egypt, has broken the Law. Moses understood: he flung the two tables out of his hands, and their covenant was shattered, that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed in our heart through the hope which the faith in Him holds out.
According to Barnabas, the Second Legislation was not only transitory by nature but had never really been intended to be taken literally in the first place. That entire body of Law existed, in his view, not just primarily but almost exclusively as a storehouse of symbols for the Christ to come. Yes, Justin, too, found many types and allegories in the codes and rituals of Israel — yet without denying their primary or literal meaning. To Justin, these things were types as well as laws. Yet for Barnabas, it would appear, the whole history of Hebrew law-keeping amounted to nothing but a gigantic (but nevertheless culpable) misunderstanding: “The Lord says in the Prophet . . ., Let your hearts be circumcised . . . [but] the circumcision in which they put their trust has been superseded. In fact, He did not speak of a circumcision to be performed in the flesh; no, they went against the commandment, being deluded by a bad angel.” Whether Barnabas means by this simply that the devil tempted humanity to approach the Law in a carnal way; or whether he is linking it to St. Paul’s statements about the second set of tablets (“ordained by angels through an intermediary”); or whether he is simply blaming the Jews metaphorically for following the worse rather than, as Lincoln would put it, “the better angels of our nature” — no one really can say. All we know for sure is that Christians, in Barnabas’s view, “ought to appreciate our Father’s kindly purpose,” not being “devoid of understanding” as the Jews were. “He speaks to us from a desire that we should find out how we are to approach Him without going astray as they did.”
At times, Barnabas uses the more circumspect tone of the Didascalia: “These things, then, He has superseded; it was intended that the New Law of Our Lord Jesus Christ should dispense with yoke and compulsion, and that its obligation should not be a man-made one.” But then the urgency of the hour drives him to overstate his case again, often grotesquely: “Concerning food, then, Moses received . . . moral precepts and spoke, as I have shown, in a spiritual sense; but the people, carnal-minded as they were, accepted them as referring to real food.” In reality, Barnabas teaches, all of Israel’s dietary codes were actually allegories and meant to be understood as such: “Do not eat swine” means do not associate with gluttons and other swinish persons; “Do not eat predatory birds” really means do not live like those human predators who plunder other people’s property; the prohibitions on the eating of hares, hyenas, and weasels are actually symbolic reminders (based on zoological notions that must have been outdated even in the second century!) to shun various forms of sodomy. It’s all very strange. And yet Barnabas follows it up immediately with this: “Alas, how could those people grasp and understand these things? But we rightly understand and explain the commandments in the sense in which the Lord intended. He circumcised our ears and hearts for this very purpose that we might understand things like these.”128 The old Catholic Encyclopedia confines itself to saying that Barnabas “represents a unique point of view in the struggle against Judaism.” We might stick our necks out a bit further here and admit that he represents, at best, a solicitous Christian pastor with a great deal more zeal than knowledge.
Despite what we’ve said about his negative reaction to the book, Marcion may have found a lot to like in the Epistle of Barnabas; the genesis, in fact, of several elements in his own system could very well reside there.129 The idea of turning the Tanakh on its head, for instance, of performing yet another normative inversion — this time on Moses’ Law itself, so that what always seemed a command is actually a temptation — appears to have taken root in Marcion’s mind. The letter may also have introduced him to another unaccustomed train of thought: a new willingness, from here on out, to take any Jewish interpretations of the Jewish Scriptures with a grain of salt. What Marcion didn’t buy, however — what he seems to have rejected with contempt (and who can blame him?) — is Barnabas’ central contention: namely, that the actual keeping of Moses’ laws had never been required by Yahweh at all. In this, Marcion remained, with Justin, quite entirely orthodox. “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, by doing which a man shall live: I am the Lord” (Lev. 18:5). But lacking (or else consciously rejecting) Justin’s sounder instincts going forward, Marcion also retained his old insistence that the Second Legislation must be accepted as permanent and as a perfect revelation of the character of Yahweh.
And if Yahweh’s character, in consequence, was beginning to look a bit puzzling or even repellent — well, who was he, a mere mortal, to question the immutable decrees of his Creator? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord” (Isa. 55:8). Or, as St. Paul once put it: “Who are you, a man, to answer back to God?” (Rom. 9:20). If God’s Laws were not corrective or curative in nature but simply and solely a punishment — a perpetual unremitting punishment destined to last forever — would this be so out of character for a Being whom Jesus Himself warned us to fear, as “able to destroy both body and soul in hell” (Matt. 10:28)? Perhaps, come to think of it, it had been God Himself who sent Barnabas’s “bad angel” — just as he sometimes sent “an evil spirit upon Saul” to drive that ancient king to further wrongdoing!130 After all, hadn’t Ezekiel concluded his recapitulation of the Exodus with a passage along these very same lines? “I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the countries, because they had not executed my ordinances, but had rejected my statutes and profaned my sabbaths, and their eyes were set on their fathers’ idols. Moreover I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life; and I defiled them through their very gifts.”131 This thought would end up looming very large indeed in Marcion’s nascent system (and don’t worry — we’ll have occasion to discuss it much more thoroughly in the pages ahead).
The last two items to consider in Marcion’s “missing period” are an overlooked date and a nearly forgotten stop on his itinerary. The date is 138 — which the Chronicle of Edessa, an early Syriac Church history, identifies as the beginning (in some sense) of the movement called Marcionism. Clement of Alexandria, writing even earlier (the final decades of the second century), agrees with this date, asserting that Marcionism began “during the reign of Hadrian” — who died in 138. This means that Marcion, just three years after the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt, had already crystallized these doubts of his into some recognizable semblance of the doctrine for which he would later become famous. The trouble with this idea, however, is that Marcion’s definitive break with orthodoxy is dated even more exactly — and quite a bit later. Tertullian tells us that Marcion was received at Rome (though not as bishop!) and enjoyed fellowship with the church there until July of 144, when he provoked a heated debate with the leadership over the proper interpretation of Matthew 9:16–17 (the passage about the new wine). These facts suggest that Marcion must have developed his ideas by 138, yes, and earned some notoriety for them, perhaps even a following based on them — but not yet in so extreme a form as to constitute out-and-out heresy.
Some idea of where his head was may possibly be gleaned from his most famous written work, Antitheses, or The Contrast. Here, Marcion’s growing emotional distance from the Author of Moses’ Law has given rise to doubts — or questions, at least — about that Divine Person’s relationship to His beloved Jesus Christ. Why, to put it shortly, did Jesus and Yahweh seem so completely different in character? Why had the apple fallen so far from the tree? The Hebrew God was a slave driver, a hard taskmaster, reaping where He did not sow and gathering where He did not scatter. Jesus came to free the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Christ’s law of forgiveness (“turn the other cheek”) is almost the mirror image of Moses’ old law of retribution (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”). Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me” and took them on his knee for a blessing (Matt. 19:14–15). His ostensible Father, on the other hand, once sent bears to devour some children merely for getting a little sassy with one of His prophets (2 Kings 2:24). This same celestial Potentate declared all lepers unclean in Moses’ Law and banished them; but Jesus took pity on lepers and healed them. The Old Testament God promises happiness to the rich; Christ promises it to the poor.
Marcion, at this point, probably did little more than highlight these contrasts (as the name of the book implies). In fact, he may have risen to prominence as an “edgy” or “challenging” preacher on nothing more alarming than the pop version of Marcionism, which can still be heard from time to time in churches, even from Catholic pulpits: “The prophets pictured God as a stern, unbending judge, more interested in obedience than a relationship; whereas Jesus came to reveal, for the first time, the true nature of God — a God of love.” There’s just enough truth in that caricature to account for both Marcion’s rise to popularity and also the early tolerance he appears to have enjoyed at Rome. Just as Luther’s errors did not become really radical until after his excommunication, so Marcion appears to have kept things broadly within the pale for the first few years of his revived ecclesiastical career. Only someone like Justin, having already thought deeply and carefully through all the issues involved, would have been able to discern the true, profound danger to the Church at this point. This brings us to that forgotten spot on the map we mentioned.
That neglected stop was Asia — a province that, in Roman and biblical terms, referred to the western end of the Anatolian peninsula, what is today southwestern Turkey. Papias, one of the apostolic Fathers, and Philastrius, one of the great anti-Arian champions, both record the detail that Marcion was in Asia before he came to Rome. Not in his home city of Sinope, headquarters of the family business; nor yet in Rome, where the sea lords seem to have congregated — but in Asia, during that very narrow window of time between the rise of his heresy (138) and his dramatic appearance as a claimant to the See of Peter (140, according to Tertullian).
And the largest city in Asia — and by far the most important Christian city there — was Ephesus.
Justin versus Marcion
Why did Justin go to Rome?
There is, once again, no proof (this is a silent period for Justin as much as for Marcion) but it certainly seems plausible that he might have pursued the sea lord there in an effort to counter his unwholesome influence, much as St. Peter is said to have left his original See at Antioch in order to contradict the influence of Simon Magus at Rome. Three years is a short time for Marcion to have made a splash in the Christian pond, but some kind of splash is necessary to account for his credibility as a papal claimant. He arrives at the Eternal City not just with money in hand but with a “name” as well, for nothing else can explain the kerfuffle he appears to have provoked. And that name had to be earned someplace: probably in a city with a large, long-established Christian population, home by this point to enough casual or hereditary believers for the unhealthy thirst for novelty to have appeared.132 Ephesus fits the bill — better than any other place in the province.
Ephesus, as we’ve said, was Justin’s home diocese, sacred to him as the site of his conversion. If that church really was the birthplace of Marcionism, then Justin would have been an eyewitness to the delivery. It’s no stretch then, to believe that the Church’s “go-to guy” on law issues would have taken the matter personally. And if Marcion did go to Rome seeking the papacy, the development would have been alarming enough for Justin to want to bear witness against him there as well. This interpretation is bolstered, surely, by the fact that he wrote a book in Rome called Against Marcion — the sourcebook used by Irenaeus and Tertullian to fight the movement several decades later.133 This book, sadly, hasn’t survived, though these later dependent works are said to mirror its contents pretty closely, just as Tertullian’s Against the Jews mirrors the Dialogue with Trypho (more on this a bit later).
A mere suffragan, disgraced by having been turned out of his diocese by his own father, wouldn’t even have been considered for leadership at Rome, no matter how many ducats he brought with him. Marcion came, surely, as the head of a trendy movement, “the latest thing,” a refreshingly forthright anti-Jewish viewpoint for which there may well have been a genuine popular appetite at the time, in view of the recent catastrophe and its accompanying persecutions on the part of the antichrist Bar Kokhba. No longer Judaizing — the thing that likely got him into trouble at Sinope — Marcion may have come preaching a harder line now against Jewish influence in the Church; something more like the tone, in fact, taken by the Epistle of Barnabas. We can even imagine him becoming popular by means of a dramatic personal testimony, a conversion story of the surefire “I saw the light” variety. Lured to the very brink of a holocaust by his youthful dalliance with the now totally passé Judaistic heresy, we can see Marcion counseling his listeners to save themselves by the same method that saved him: by minimizing the traditionally tolerated Jewish element in his faith as much as humanly possible, to the very limits, indeed, that orthodoxy would allow — and perhaps just a little further.
Tertullian tells us that Marcion was welcomed at Peter’s church to begin with, while Epiphanius says he was turned away immediately, having been told by the elders that they were not competent to rehabilitate a clergyman expelled by the bishop of another diocese. The best explanation for this contradiction is that the Roman See was vacant at the time (a sitting bishop of Rome would not have confessed to such an incompetence), and the elders accepted him conditionally, to lay fellowship only, to begin with. Marcion immediately made a gift to the Roman church in the amount of two hundred thousand sesterces. The poet Martial informs us that two hundred thousand sesterces would have purchased a “manor near Patrai”; other calculations indicate that the same sum would have bought fifty thousand square meters (fifty hectares) of choice land in Italy. According to Tertullian, Marcion signed an orthodox confession of faith134 at the same time but found his hopes to become bishop of Rome disappointed anyway; his generous “offering” was returned to him, a fact that seems “more natural if it was made with a tacit condition, than if it was absolute and the outcome of pure charity.”135 St. Pius I was elected pope instead. Marcion stayed salty about this for the remainder of his time at the Roman church, but he did stay.
Justin came to Rome as a layman and remained such until the end of his life. His entire ministry there was that of a powerful, influential lay apologist with a wide readership and popular appeal, rather like a second-century C. S. Lewis. “This writer,” as Eusebius records nearly two hundred years later, “has left us a great many monuments of a mind educated and practiced in divine things, which are replete with profitable matter of every kind” and he specifically credits Justin with having written against “every known heresy.”136 He also began teaching a famous Bible study at this time, based in a private home, scrupulously orthodox with only minimal ecclesiastical oversight. Whether he and Marcion could have locked horns previously in Asia is certainly up for debate; but there’s little reason to think their paths would not have overlapped to some degree in Rome, since all the evidence shows both of them active there by the mid-140s at least. It’s easy, at any rate, to imagine the constant contradictions Marcion might have suffered from a man like Justin as being the cause of his considerable frustrations during that period. He seems, for example, to have been expelled from fellowship at least once and then reinstated even before the final face-off during the summer of 144.
Justin was a layman; Marcion was merely forced to live as one during his time at Rome, and there’s no question that his opinions grew more extreme as he seethed and sulked those five or six years. This can be a least partially attributed, we think, to the influence of another shaky Roman exegete of the day, Cerdo the Syrian. Cerdo arrived at the Church of Rome a few years earlier than Marcion, and he, too, had trouble staying on good terms with the authorities. Unlike Marcion, however, who hungered by this point to share his “insights” with the Church at large via the Roman papacy, Cerdo was a very reluctant heretic. Irenaeus insists that he never intended to found a sect apart from the Church and experienced terrible remorse after being turned out of it, leading to repeated instances of public confession and reconciliation. Yet Cerdo, too, allowed the Jesus-Yahweh “contrasts” to drive him a little nutty over time. In an effort to reconcile what he perceived to be the characters of each as revealed in Scripture, he latched on to St. Paul’s memorable phrase in Acts 17:23; the Apostle’s claim, that is, to have come preaching a previously “unknown god” to the Greeks at Mars Hill. The bad God of the Tanakh, the barbaric, blustering Yahweh, as Cerdo decided, must then have been the local deity of the Jews only, who sent harsh puritanical prophets like Moses to demand unconditional obeisance. Christ, on the other hand, had been sent by a good God, the God of mercy, previously unknown not just to the Jews but to the whole human race.
Marcion, to his credit, did see the absurdity of this conception in at least one respect: he never did embrace the philosophically incoherent notion of an evil God to counterbalance the good one. To most Roman citizens, this kind of Eastern dualism would have had the stink of the Persians on it, Persia being to the empire what Soviet Russia was to America in the 1950s. What Marcion gradually incorporated, however, was his own refinement of the same idea. And here we arrive, at last, at full-blown Marcionism in the historical sense. No, Yahweh wasn’t merely a local god or tribal deity; he was, indeed, the Creator of this world, full of woe as it is. And He did lead the Israelites out of Egypt and did give a Law at Sinai that really does express both His own personality and His perfect, everlasting will for mankind. This God wasn’t so much a bad God, Marcion began insisting, as merely a just God — a God who demands strict and remorseless justice for each and every infraction and who knows nothing at all of mercy. It was Paul’s Unknown God who became the Father of Jesus Christ, not this stormy, blustering demiurge,137 and Jesus was His prophet. Thus, Marcion sought to sever completely the Savior he loved from any taint of connection to the implacable Lawgiver who had tormented him so long. “Marcion’s main work,” as Scott Hahn explains it,
was to separate the law from the Gospel; the God of justice and creation from the God of grace and redemption; the God of the Old Testament from the Father of Jesus Christ. This new God, revealed by Jesus, His eternal Son, offered release from the God of the Old Testament and His strict economy of law and justice. The grace of redemption meant that the God of the Old Testament, the Creator, and all His fleshly works, had simply been left behind, with the whole of the Old Testament, as irrelevant.138
Marcion’s system, as it finally crystallized, may perhaps be best understood by distinguishing it carefully from the modern form of Marcionism we noticed earlier. Those who would, in our own times, like to set “the Old Testament God” against “the New Testament God” are usually offering a piece of biblical criticism in disguise; they are, in reality, simply denying that the Old Testament writings represent revealed truth. When these critics speak of “the barbaric God of the prophets,” they mean that the prophets had barbaric ideas about God . . . and that the New Testament writers did better. They are not saying that there really are two Gods and that the Old Testament writers correctly represented the one who actually is barbaric! But this, believe it or not, is just exactly what Marcion came to mean in time. This is why Marcion really was a Judaizer and, in a sense, remained one — maybe the ultimate Judaizer. What if a man became convinced that Moses’ Law is perpetual — but hated it anyway? What if such a man felt forced to choose between Yahweh and Jesus, while full conceding the divinity of both? We wrote earlier of Marcion caught between the Rock of Christ and the Hard Place of Moses’ Law; actually, it became far worse than that. For Marcion, Jesus was an Irresistible Force crashing against Moses’ Immovable Object — and something had to give. And what gave eventually, there in July of 144, was monotheism itself.
What was our lay apologist’s response when he first heard Marcionism expounded in its full vigor? Irenaeus may have recorded it for us in his own book Against Heresies: “Justin well says in his work against Marcion, that he ‘would not have believed the Lord himself if he had preached another God besides the Creator.’ ”139
The Mirror Image
Tertullian says he was ejected, others that he walked. It may be that the whole thing was a bit of an “I quit; you’re fired” situation. Either way, Marcion took his two hundred thousand sesterces and went home to Asia. Once there, he immediately started his own church of which to become pope. This, in fact, is one of the most important truths about Marcion’s church: it copied the Catholic Church in every way possible, short of renouncing Marcion’s doctrine. Marcion founded a new order of bishops, priests, and deacons. He used his vast financial resources to plant Marcionite churches and schools and made them look as much as possible like the real McCoy. His large fleet of ships was practically predestined to put him at the head of a vast missionary expansion. All these things help to explain the movement’s explosive growth and the seriousness with which Catholic leaders were eventually forced to take it. Justin is soon writing about Marcion as having overshadowed all previous heretics, “with a following spread over every race of men.” Epiphanius says Marcion turned his back on Rome with a curse on his lips which he came very close to realizing: “I will divide your Church and cause within her a division which will last forever.” More recent historians agree that the threat was perhaps unprecedented: “Marcionism, because it arose in the very infancy of Christianity and adopted from the beginning a strong ecclesiastical organization, parallel to that of the Catholic Church, was perhaps the most dangerous foe Christianity has ever known.”140 Eusebius refers to Marcion, shortly and memorably, as “the Wolf of Pontus.”
Marcion’s church had a creed as well, a catechism rooted in its founder’s personal struggles against despair and scrupulosity. Since neither the Hebrews nor any other race of men could keep Yahweh’s impossible Law code, the whole of humanity fell under a curse, destined to be damned. Their situation was hopeless, irremediable by any measure yet revealed to man. And it was just then that a higher God — whose existence had previously been a complete secret, even to the secondary demiurge Yahweh — stepped in and took pity on humanity. “The good God is all love, the inferior god gives way to fierce anger. Though less than the good god, yet the just god, as world creator, has his independent sphere of activity. . . . They are not opposed . . . but the good God loves mercy more than punishment.”141 This newly revealed, truly supreme Supreme Being sent His Son down to earth clothed in the appearance of human flesh142 but the Jewish people, carnal-minded as they always were, misunderstood his message completely, even his own disciples. They all mistook him for the Deliverer promised by Moses and the other prophets, the warlike military Messiah on whom all their hopes had always been fixed, and they counted on him to reestablish the Jewish monarchy in the City of David. When Jesus would not accept this trifling, tribal role, they turned on Him. “The Demiurge himself did not suspect who the stranger was; nevertheless he became angry with him, and, although Jesus had punctually fulfilled his law, caused him to be nailed to the cross. By that act, however, he pronounced his own doom.”
In a fanciful, though admittedly dramatic scene, the risen Christ stands before the demiurge in all his transfigured glory and argues him out of his pitiless plan for humanity, much as TV’s Captain Kirk used to short-circuit some implacable alien machine by checkmating it into an inescapable dialectical corner. Jesus charged the Just God with having acted contrary to his own Law and demanded that he make amends by delivering up the souls of the elect to the Good God in payment, His own death having bought their release. In Marcion’s system, then, the Most High stepped in to destroy the Law, not because it had now been fulfilled or had reached its “sell-by” date, but simply because it had been given by the wrong God in the first place. The fact that literally thousands of baptized Christians bought into such a wacky scenario over the next two to three hundred years is an indication, surely, of just how strong the anti-Jewish reaction really was in the wake of the two disastrous (and anti-Jesus) revolts of the interregnum period.
There never was any hope, of course, that such a radical reimagining of Christianity could be maintained without recourse to conspiracy theory; and, indeed, Marcion’s custom version of the Great Apostasy is woven into the very warp and woof of his theology. According to Marcion, Jesus, once ascended to heaven, stepped in to redeem mankind’s misunderstanding by sending Paul as His Apostle, the only one of the famous band who understood the gospel message. He alone recognized that the God who sent a loving Savior and the God who had terrorized the Jews for so long were two entirely distinct entities. Inspired by his mission, Paul confronted Peter and the others (as he himself recounts in the Letter to the Galatians) and tried to make them realize the truth. When he was rebuffed, he took to opposing the original Apostles and began to found Pauline churches to oppose the Petrine. Unhappily, the false “Judaizing” Apostles got the upper hand — to such an extent, indeed, that they were soon able to issue their doctored-up Gospels and eventually, to falsify even the writings of Paul! And this, of course, is the point at which Marcion’s unwillingness to accept the cessation of the Second Law bled over into difficulties about the biblical canon — just as it had done for Akiba and Aquila.
To Marcion, the Tanakh was now nothing but a stumbling block. He wanted it gone, purely and simply. Once the cords finally snapped, as a matter of fact, Marcion became as harsh a critic of the Old Testament as any pagan apologist of the era. He sounds for all the world like the village atheist when he begins setting forth all the usual puzzles about herem warfare, about Yahweh’s “repentance” in Genesis 6:6, and the cruder versions of the problem of evil (if good, then not omnipotent; if omnipotent, then not good). Notice, however, that the clumsiness and barbarities Marcion now perceived were not, as they would be for the modern critic, evidence that the Tanakh isn’t all it’s cracked up to be (i.e., a divinely inspired message). Marcion does not reach the conclusion that the Old Testament writings are merely man’s words about God rather than God’s word to man. No, the Old Testament tells the truth for Marcion but tells it about a God with whom Christians are to have nothing further to do. Moses and the other prophets were messengers of the demiurge and to the Jews only. The Hebrew Messiah they prophesied is sure to come one day, to lead a successful revolt at last, to sit on David’s throne in Jerusalem and begin lording it over the Gentiles again, but this Jewish Deliverer has nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus, the Christ of the Most High God. And thus, the Old Testament books are to the Christian (and especially to the Christian of Gentile descent) little more than a series of dead letters.
Marcion also took drastic measures against the commonly received New Covenant books. Very much like our own Thomas Jefferson, who simply took for granted that all the miracle stories in the Gospels are later interpolations foisted upon the underlying originals through the wiles of “priestcraft,” Marcion set about producing his own “certified fresh” versions of the apostolic books by taking a scissors to any passage that seemed contrary to his dogma. “The mantle of St. Paul had fallen on the shoulders of Marcion in his struggle with the Judaizers. The Catholics of his day were nothing but the Judaizers of the previous century. The pure Pauline Gospel had become corrupted,”143 and it was now Marcion’s job to reclaim it. First, he set aside Matthew, Mark, and John entirely, as too hopelessly dependent on the Tanakh ever to be redeemed. Luke’s Gospel, less Jewish in tone for having been composed with a pagan readership in mind, Marcion felt able to save but only by purging it, too, of many “Judaizing” interpolations. The Pauline Epistles fared better, of course — Marcion retained ten of the fourteen — but even these had to be carefully censored in spots so as to remove the disfiguring marks imposed by the apostate Petrine churches. “O Christ, most enduring Lord,” as an exasperated Tertullian calls out, “who bore so many years with this interference with Your revelation, until Marcion forsooth came to Your rescue!”
It’s important to recognize at this point that such a system as this is totally impervious to any kind of “Bible alone” argumentation. No one who denies the authority of the Twelve Apostles will feel bound to accept the judgment of the churches that claim to be passing down their traditions; and no one who denies the authority of the apostolic churches is likely to roll over in deference to a list of books held by them to be apostolic — their only claim to canonicity at this point. Any given proof text, should it prove too formidable, becomes an interpolation; anything that differs from Marcion’s idea of “Gospel” is just another part of the conspiracy. The scheme can, of course, be attacked on purely logical grounds, and several orthodox writers attempted just that: “Marcion’s creator or Jewish god was too inconsistent and illogical a conception. He was inferior to the good God yet he was independent; he was just and yet not good; his writings were true and yet still to be disregarded; he had created men and done them no evil, yet they were not to serve and worship him.”144 But conspiracy theories seldom give way to logic alone, being rooted more in the passions and the will than in the intellect. “I mean,” as G. K. Chesterton once put it, “that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air. . . . And it must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy but simply to snap it like a spell.”145
No, Marcion’s claims had to be uprooted at the base: by simply reaffirming, that is, the Church’s immemorial claim to be “the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone . . . a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Eph. 2:20–21, 22). No, Christ’s own disciples had not misunderstood everything He taught them, nor had the whole of Christian history thus far, with all of its martyrs and miracles, been based on a lie. No new evidence had turned up leading Marcion to charge Peter and the others with fraud, any more than Jefferson had new evidence in the eighteenth century against the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection; nor had any variant Bible manuscripts been discovered that might lend credence to the changes Marcion alleged. And no, the Apostles were not misreading the Old Testament books by finding proofs there for their new, law-revoking covenant.
“You will find no church of apostolic origin,” as Tertullian soon retorts, “but such as reposes its Christian faith in the Creator . . . [and] if the churches shall prove to have been corrupt from the beginning, where shall the pure ones be found? Will it be among the adversaries of the Creator? . . . Our previous position is accordingly made good, that no god is to be believed whom any man has devised out of his own conceits. . . . [Since it is] evident that there was from Christ down to Marcion’s time no other God in the rule of sacred truth than the Creator, the proof of our argument is sufficiently established, in which we have shown that the god of our heretic first became known by his separation of the gospel and the law.”146
This last phrase is perhaps the crux of the whole matter: the Gospel and the Law cannot be simply separated, whether one prefers Gospel alone, like Marcion, or Law alone, like Aquila.
Still, Marcionism merited an answer, even if there seemed little hope for Marcion himself. At least some of those who dallied with his system — not Christian bishops raised in the bosom of the Church, but mere neophytes and even unbaptized persons — appear to have stood genuinely confused at this great crossroads in history. Judaism as it had always been understood was visibly passing away. There was every reason for believing that some kind of negative judgment had been passed on it by heaven. What kind of a judgment was it? Did it imply, as Marcion suggested, that the Old Testament might be dangerously outdated at this point and ought not to be treated by Christians as Scripture any longer? Did it suggest, as even the orthodox Barnabas implied, that any Jewish ideas about God are likely to have been marred in the handling? The danger now, in other words, was the Judaizing instinct in reverse — a growing inclination to look on the Israelite element in Christianity as the least trustworthy and most worrisome part. Both Judaism and Marcionism, after all, were created by producing a faulty answer — two equal and opposite answers — to the same problem: the appearance of discontinuity between the Old and the New Covenants. If the Judaizers used the Law as a weapon against the Son, the Marcionites now wished to use the Law as a weapon against His Father. And while the Judaizers were asking, “How can your Catholic Christ be Israel’s Messiah when your religion looks so little like Israel’s?” the Marcionites began to pose the same question in mirror-image form: “How can the Catholic religion be true when it looks so much like Israel’s?”
After the Wolf
Just as it was with the Judaizers, it was imperative that orthodox apologists should not to try to sweep these appearances under the rug — and it remains important today. When modern atheists such as Richard Dawkins describe the God of the Old Testament as “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser . . . a genocidal . . . capriciously malevolent bully,” they are responding to the same material that gave rise to Marcionism. Whenever someone rejects a Bible-based argument for traditional marriage simply because it comes from a book that once sanctioned some pretty strange alternative unions of its own (polygamy, concubinage, and the forced marriage of rape victims to their attackers [see Deut. 22:28–29]), they are acting on an essentially Marcionite objection. And a recent volume, The Old Testament Is Dying, by Brett Strawn, concludes that modern Christians are developing a dangerous ignorance of — or even a Marcion-like allergy to — the books of the Tanakh simply through neglect. Well-meaning homilists are either consciously or semiconsciously avoiding Old Testament lessons purely out of fear that their hearers might be scandalized if given too close a look at the actual contents. There’s no use pretending, then, that these critiques aren’t still hitting their mark, just as they did for those thousands who sought answers from Marcion so long ago; and the Church has now, just as it had then, a great responsibility to give an honest answer.
In the second century A.D., God’s appointed answerer was — once again! — Justin of Neapolis. This, in fact, is one of the best proofs that Marcionism really is a variant form of the Judaizing heresy; our knowledge, that is, that the man who blazed the apologetic trail against Judaism happens to have performed the same service versus the error of Marcion. Not only does the book we mentioned earlier — Justin’s Against Marcion — stand in relation to later works on the subject just as the Dialogue with Trypho stands to Tertullian’s Against the Jews, even the Trypho dialogue itself, in its written form, is as much against Marcion as it is against the Judaizers. Set to parchment near the end of Justin’s life, more than two decades after the event, The Dialogue with Trypho appeared publicly at a time when Judaism within the Church per se had largely ceased to be a major issue; Marcionism, on the other hand, was reaching its peak.147 The Dialogue also includes passages that are very plainly directed against Marcionism; as, for instance, when Justin hastens to assure Trypho that “we [Christians] do not claim that our God is different from yours, for he is the God who, ‘with a strong hand and outstretched arm, led your forefathers out of the land of Egypt,’ ” or when Justin agrees with the rabbi that “there never will be, nor has there ever been from eternity, any other God except him who created and formed this universe.” Another passage anathematizes Marcionism by name, along with the similar heresies of Valentinus, Basilides, and Saturnilius, none of which movements had yet arisen at the time the dialogue took place. Justin, in fact, puts an anti-Marcion outburst on the lips of the rabbi himself! This isn’t so much an indication (as some have suspected) that Trypho might be a fictional character as it is merely a sign that Justin was now recounting the original debate loosely, adjusting it in response to more contemporary concerns: “We would not have listened to you thus far [Justin], had you not constantly cited the Scriptures in your attempts to prove your point, and had you not stated that there is no God superior to the creator of the world” (56). From these facts we can conclude that the written Dialogue with Trypho was intended as a one-stop clearinghouse for answers to all Judaizing, Law-based errors — including the one most ascendant at the moment, Marcionism.
There’s also reason to think Justin may have led the campaign against Marcionism in other ways while in Rome. He may have been moved to set the Trypho dialogue in writing, for instance, as a corrective to the growing influence of the Epistle of Barnabas, having seen what Marcion did with the faulty ideas contained in it; scholars have demonstrated a number of unmistakable literary dependencies between the two works. Justin may also have played an active role in shaping what we know today as the Apostles’ Creed into its final form. Though that Creed may have roots in tradition going all the way back to the Cenacle, it appears to have been altered significantly at Rome during the time of Pius I — during the time of Justin, that is. In much the same way that the Apostles’ Creed was later amplified at Nicaea into a weapon against Arius, so the earlier form known as the Old Roman Creed may have been shaped into our current Apostles’ Creed in response to the errors of Marcion. The Apostles’ Creed, for instance, insists that the Father of Christ created the universe, rather than any secondary demiurge; that there is only one God, not two; that Jesus had a human birth through Mary, rather than appearing, as Marcion would have it, full grown at the synagogue in Capernaum; and that Jesus, not the demiurge, will be humanity’s judge in the end. And the very title itself — “Jesus Christ” — assigned by the Creed to our Savior asserts the unbreakable bond between the two Testaments: the Jesus of the Gospel stories is also the Christ of the prophets (the word “Christ” is derived from the Greek Christos, the Septuagintal translation of “Messiah” or “Anointed One”).
Justin seems almost providentially predestined for this role he was given — he had one foot so firmly planted in each camp! Should the Jews accuse him of prejudice toward the Gentile viewpoint, he can point to his having been converted by the prophets first, who then led the way to Christ. Charged by Marcion with believing in a God too primitive or vulgar to be trusted by an intelligent man, Justin can remind the heresiarch that he had mastered Plato and Pythagoras before he ever heard of Moses or Ezekiel. A Greek born in the land of Jonah and Elijah, now a defender of the Law against a Judaizing heresy, Justin’s life itself is almost a parable, an image of the new Household of God. “Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). Almost fanatically devoted to continuity in the Church, Justin yet accepts and defends the apparent gulf between the Testaments. He insists, in fact, that no part of Scripture can contradict any other, and that the two Testaments are the two complimentary halves of a whole. As St. Augustine would later put it: “The new is in the old concealed; the old is in the new revealed.”148
Marcionism outlived Marcion himself. Remnants of his movement, in fact, were still alive in the sixth century. Justin, too, saw only the beginnings of the Marcionite heresy, having earned his vernacular surname “Martyr” sometime before the decade of the 150s was over. But when the Sage of Samaria set out after the Wolf of Pontus, he forged a tradition for the Church — a tradition of saving both the prophets and the philosophers, both the tribal Deity of the Hebrews and the Prime Mover of Aristotle, and of refusing to abandon either. Irenaeus and Tertullian continued the hunt when their master was gone and established interpretive traditions employed in the coming centuries by Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, and many others — traditions that helped to stamp Justin’s character firmly upon the whole Church he served so well.
And the beginning of that chase — the exciting sequel to “Justin versus the Judaizers” — makes for a theological adventure story of the highest caliber.
124 Many of the Gospel citations in Justin’s apologies seem to be harmonizations of multiple sayings from the Synoptics at once. “[One of Justin’s most famous disciples was] . . . Tatian, the brilliant Assyrian . . . author of the first harmony of the Gospels. Justin’s school may well have engaged in literary production — indeed, may have provided the material from which Tatian was later to compose the Diatessaron. The question of whether the harmonized gospel materials found in Justin’s writings came from a preexisting gospel harmony or were assembled as part of an integral process of creating scriptural prooftexts is an ongoing subject of scholarly investigation.”
125 The Hexapla itself no longer exists, but a good many extracts from it (including readings from Aquila) have been preserved as footnotes in several ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint.
126 Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch, 249.
127 It is just possible that our existing Barnabas may be a later rescension of a genuinely apostolic work marred by interpolations resulting from the crisis.
128 All quotations in this section are taken from the Epistle of Barnabas, in Ancient Christian Writers, vol. 6, The Didache, trans. James A. Kleist (New York: Paulist Press, 1948).
129 One of the best arguments, in fact, for a pre-140 dating of the Epistle is that no one trying to remain in any way orthodox could have written such a letter after the rise of Marcionism, anticipating what evil use that movement would make of its phraseology.
130 1 Sam. 18:10. Most early writers interpret “God sent” as an expression of God’s permissive will, a withdrawal of divine protection merited by Saul’s sins of envy and rage.
131 Exod. 20:23–26. In its chronological context, this “swearing in the wilderness” appears to come after the sin at Beth-peor. Likewise, Ezekiel’s reference to the inevitability of the scattering shows that these “statutes that were not good” can be only the Second Legislation imposed there by Moses, since this detail is unique to the book of Deuteronomy.
132 If this seems to contradict the picture we sketched out earlier, of Ephesus as a unique storehouse of saintly wisdom, it might be well to recall that the same itch for novelty plagued several of the apostolic churches (Galatia, Corinth, Pergamum) while their founders were still alive to express disappointment via the New Testament writings.
133 Irenaeus refers to Justin’s Against Marcion in bk. 4, chap. 14, v. 26.
134 This fact would seem to bolster our contention that Marcion’s original error at Sinope was the garden-variety Judaizing Christianity so prominent at that time. No one holding anything like the developed error called Marcionism could have signed such a confession without committing an outright act of deception — and there’s nothing in Marcion’s recorded character to give us warrant for assuming him capable of such hypocrisy. An ordinary Christian Judaizer, however, with a high Christology, might very well have been able to affirm a simple orthodox creed during this era with a perfectly clear conscience.
135 Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), s.v. “Marcionites,” by J. Arendzen, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09645c.htm.
136 Eusebius, Church History 4, 18, 1.
137 In Platonic terms, a demiurge is a craftsman-like figure responsible for the creation and upkeep of the physical universe but not necessarily an uncreated being himself as in strict monotheism.
138 Scott Hahn, Consuming the Word (New York: Image Books, 2013), 67.
139 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4, 6.
140 Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Marcionites.”
141 Ibid.
142 Marcion’s Christology appears to have become vaguely modalist by this point — and Christ’s human body as unreal as in Docetism.
143 Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Marcionites.”
144 Ibid.
145 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, 1908), 34, 36.
146 Tertullian, Against Marcion, trans. Peter Holmes, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 3:86.
147 The Dialogue with Trypho document is believed to have been composed between 160 and 164. By way of comparison, the peak of Marcion’s own activity was 155–160, while Judaism within the Church became largely passé after 135.
148 Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 2, 73.