In these modern times, the term “rabbit hole” is used to describe a conversation that can quite easily spill into many different directions. This is usually because all parties in the conversation may have widely opposing views, and that trying to find areas of agreement is often futile at best.
The first few centuries of Christianity contained a bonanza of rabbit hole type challenges to the faith, with an array of splinter Christian movements – Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Marcionism – all claiming to have truth that traced back to Jesus and the first apostles (Irvin and Sunquist 88, 116, 128). Meanwhile, one particular movement, the Catholic Church, had slowly been building a more unified body of believers, while also facing off with the splinter movements — some of which were also trying to unify as well.
One of these movements, Marcionism, posed a major challenge to Catholics and other Christians who accepted the story of salvation taught to them, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures. The Marcionite claim was that Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was not the same God related to Jesus (Irvin and Sunquist 81). This paper will further explore what led Marcion, the founder of this movement, to forge ahead with this claim, how other splinter movements helped support it, and how the Catholic Church proved that these movements were heresies from the original Gospel. All of this will ultimately show why the Catholic Church’s approach was more grounded in rational thought and became even more unified as a result.
First, a short overview of Marcion’s early years: Having lived during the first half of the second century, Marcion, who hailed from Asia Minor, was born into the Christian faith and its leadership: With his father serving as bishop of Sinope, Marcion’s status afforded him a good education, which he channeled into a successful shipping business, and then drew from his earnings to study and teach theology (MacCulloch 126).
Marcion’s studies paid off in his adult years, beginning with his move to Rome in 140. There, he soon became a top teacher of Christian belief and was nearly elected as bishop of the church in Rome (Irvin and Sunquist 72). However, his reputation went sideways because of a vast departure from the theology the church was then teaching. Namely, he not only did not see Yahweh as a good God, he also further concluded that Yahweh deliberately created a corrupt world, thus requiring Jesus to come and rescue humanity from spiritual prison (Irvin and Sunquist 116). What’s more, because this God was the God of the Jews, this meant they were just as corrupt. It also meant cutting out any teachings from the apostles, who were Jewish and therefore not trustworthy in Marcion’s eyes. (Irvin and Sunquist 80, 81).
Because of his disdain for any connections between Jesus and the God of the Jews, Marcion weeded out all Gospels and epistles that saw the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as harmonious. His main gripe was that Yahweh was a judgmental tyrant; therefore, this God could in no way be related to the Jesus’ father, whom Marcion saw as the God of love (McCulloch 126).
To help support his position, Marcion whittled down his choice of New Testament books to Paul’s letters and parts of Luke’s Gospel (Irvin 81). From there, he published a book called Antithesis, which he used to justify why he narrowly chose certain New Testament scriptures and threw out the Hebrew books (MacCulloch 126). This, combined with his polished teaching skills, and his flair for the eccentric, helped him launch a well-coordinated, increasingly influential movement of Marcionites (Irvin and Sunquist 80, 81; MacCulloch 126).
This eventually spawned the construction of Marcion churches, which spanned all the way east to Persia and possibly west to France (Irvin and Sunquist 72; MacCulloch 126). McCullough points out that had the Marcion churches taken the upper hand over other movements – especially the early Catholic church – they would have been well-organized and uniform in nature (126, 127). And though a small number of Marcion churches stood the test of time for the next several centuries, the Catholic movement in the second century took notice of Marcion’s radical approach, and then spent the next few decades refuting Marcion, even having him driven out of Rome for his heresy (MacCulloch 126).
But it was not just Marcion who was making bold claims about the rift between the God of the Jews and the God of the Christians: Gnostics, who had formed their own prominent movement, also believed that a lesser, yet tyrannical God had created a material world trapped in sin. And like Marcion, Gnostics believed that Jesus was the answer to the problem, though they saw ignorance as the culprit and the search for knowledge as the path to the answer (Irvin and Sunquist 116).
Over in the Catholic Church, it was more than time to hit Marcionism head on. And the individuals involved in this effort did not pull any punches – and perhaps rightfully so. Why would Marcion insist on straying so far from three of the four Gospels, many epistles, and other church documents that showed a theological continuity from Judaism and into Christianity?
The outwardly obvious answer is a major contempt for Yahweh and Jewish belief. Yet when looking at this issue through the eyes of Marcion’s Catholic contemporaries, such as Tertullian and Irenaeus, their arguments for why Marcion’s belief is a heresy, and how they are able to show the theological bridge between Judaism and Christianity, leads to a more sound, more unified conclusion. In fact, to counter the well-coordinated uprising of Marcion’s church, Catholics essentially fought fire with fire, with apologists weaving together their own orderly, uniform system — which linked theological terms from ancient Israel with Paul’s universal message that salvation is for both Jews and Gentiles (MacCulloch 127).
And because of the increasing support among second century Catholic churches to have such a system, Tertullian and Irenaeus, two of the most influential apologists within the Church, set out to set the record straight. In his treatise, Prescription Against Heresies, Tertullian does not mince words in his criticism of Marcion: Tertullian first targets Hellenistic / pagan philosophy as having started the theological confusion in the first place. He traces every Christian heresy at that time back to the most influential Greek scholars, such as Plato, Epicurus, and Aristotle. Tertullian sees a possible mix of Stoic and Epicurean philosophies in Marcion’s worldview; and to circle back to the term rabbit hole, Tertullian saw philosophy as a never-ending rabbit hole of tired, existential questions with no new arguments to add: “What is the origin of man? In what way does he come? Where comes evil,” etc. (Tertullian ch. VII).
Tertullian then calls out Marcion for having originally aligned with the Catholic Church, but then turned around and flipped the entire script on Christian theology. Tertullian sees this as a hypocritical move on Marcion’s part, and that separating the New Testament from the Old Testament was just a way for Marcion to push his own authority and build a following based on a false sense of power. Tertullian calls the bluff of Marcion’s authority and then throws down the gauntlet with this question: “If it be some other God they preach, how comes it that they employ the things and the writings and the names of that God against whom they preach? If it be the same God, why treat him in some other way?” (Tertullian ch. XXX). Ironically, Marcion did in fact draw on certain Old Testament prophecies to support his position (MacCulloch 126), which all the more reinforced Tertullian’s claim that Marcion was a full-on heretic.
This opened the door wide open for Irenaeus’ flagship contribution to Catholic apologetics and church unity: Against Heresies. Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons in the late second century, uses Against Heresies as a universal way to refute the esoteric-based heresies at that time, prove the Catholic Church’s authority, and establish a clear line of apostolic succession to support the unified Catholic Church (Coakley and Sterk 58).
In thorough detail, Irenaeus explains how the four common Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John) form the definitive corpus of Christian belief, while also paving the way for how the Church grew over time, beginning with Paul and Peter “laying the foundations” (ch. 1, 11). From there, Irenaeus lists the line of apostolic succession up to that point; he ties this to the authority that the Church had established in both the East and West, (ch. 3, 4); and then he combs through several Old Testament books – Exodus, Isaiah, Psalms and Jeremiah, to name a few – to show the clear, divine relationship between Jesus and the God of the Jews (ch. 6).
For example, Irenaeus explains that the God who reveals himself in Exodus 3:14 as “I AM THAT I AM” is the Father of Jesus Christ; and that in Exodus 3:8, when God says to Moses “I am come down to deliver this people,” it is through Jesus that God’s will has always been done, thereby making Jesus an appointed Savior who has always existed, including throughout God’s interactions with the Patriarchs (Abraham, Moses, David, etc.). Irenaeus sums it up this way: “Therefore God has been declared through the Son, who is in the Father, and has the Father in Himself…” (ch. 6.) Irenaeus later relates this summary to John 1:1-3, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God…” (ch. 11).
By showing the harmonious relationship between the Old Testament and the more common New Testament scriptures, Irenaeus levels Marcion’s position as a work of “fiction” (ch. 2). Further, by keeping in step with Tertullian, Irenaeus also points out the flaws in Marcion’s limited view of what qualifies as correct Scripture (ch. 11). And to put a cherry on top, Irenaeus essentially challenges his audience with this argument: If the proof is clear that Jesus revealed the correct Gospel to the apostles, and the apostles in turn successively carried on this message, then those who follow Marcion believe in a later invention and not the Gospel itself. As Irenaeus puts it: “For, prior to Valentinus, those who follow Valentinus have no existence; nor did those from Marcion exist before Marcion” (ch. 4).
All this said, Marcion’s case for “evil Yahweh versus Jesus” does not hold water. Even if the Catholic position among Tertullian, Irenaeus, and their peers might have its own flaws, the case that these apologists make for their belief is, by far, more cohesively developed than the fringe view that Marcion espoused as truth. As the saying goes that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” Marcion was, without a doubt, in an extraordinary position to prove his claims. At the minimum, the Catholic Church separated fact from fiction in the context of how Christian theology was formed. Therefore, the Marcion heresy is one rabbit hole to scratch off from the list of competing theologies.
Works Cited
Against Heresies. Coakley, John W., and Andrea Sterk. Readings in World Christian History, Volume 1: Earliest Christianity to 1453. New York: Orbis Books, 2004.
Irvin, Dale T., and Scott W. Sunquist. History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Penguin, 2011.
Tertullian. Prescription Against Heretics. Translated by Holmes, Rev Peter. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tertullian11.html