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The Canon: Thoughts on the First-Generation
Christian Literature
7. Marcion and the Canon
By the end of the first century, long before anyone formally declared
it so, the Christian church had an Old Testament (although they didn’t
call it that) and a New Testament (although they didn’t call it that,
either) consisting of four Gospels (and by extension the Book of Acts)
and Paul’s letters and the Book of Revelation and a few other odds and
ends. Other writings were coming into view as well, and were read with
interest and enjoyment (1 Clement, Barnabas.)
Then two things happened, and they illustrate how the church
responded when someone proposed a literature other than the Old and New
Testaments. These are the rise of Marcionism, discussed on this page,
and the rise of Montanism, discussed elsewhere.
Marcion was born in Sinope, a port on the Black
Sea, near the turn of the second century. He was a ship
owner and apparently well-to-do. He became a Christian, or had perhaps
been raised as one. Through his reading of the letters of Paul, he came
to have a view of Christianity that rejected other views as judaizing
and erroneous. He traveled to Rome and joined the church
there and gave it a bundle of money. He explained his ideas to the
church leaders, and they expelled him from fellowship and gave him his
money back (July 144). So Marcion organized his own church. These
churches spread over the empire, and the movement lasted a few centuries
beyond Marcion’s death.
Marcion taught that the God of Jesus and the God of the Old Testament
were not the same God, but two separate Gods. The God of the Old
Testament had created the world and given the Law. He was a just judge,
but he was not loving. He was the God of the Jewish people and the God
of the prophets of
Israel. The other God was unknown until
Christ came and told us about him. This God is the Father of Jesus and
the God of love and goodness. Marcion’s driving concept was therefore to
eliminate the Jewish God from the faith, practice, liturgy, and
scripture of the true church.
Marcion was very clear in his opinion about what was Scripture and
what was not. The Old Testament was not, because Christians worshipped a
different God than the God of the Jews. Ten letters of the Apostle Paul
were Scripture, because Paul understood the truth and the other apostles
did not. Marcion called these books, collectively, the Apostolikon.
The Gospel of Luke was Scripture, because Marcion understood Paul to
refer to the Book of Luke when he wrote to the church in Galatia not to preach any
other gospel than the one he had preached (Gal. 1:8–9). Marcion called
this book the Euangelion. He rejected everything else that had
come from the
first generation of Christians, because Matthew and Mark and John and
James and Peter and Jude and the author of Hebrews and the letters to
Timothy and Titus didn’t understand the truth, but were still enthralled
to the old inferior God. In fact, even the ten letters of Paul and the
Gospel of Luke had been contaminated with Jewish ideas in textual
transmission, and therefore it was necessary for Marcion to edit these
books and publish “corrected” versions of them. So Marcion’s busy work
was not only to organize an alternative church, but to draw up a list of
acknowledged books and produce an approved recension of the text of
these books.
What did the Christians think who were not swayed by Marcion’s
arguments? Well, to judge by the volume of their polemic against him,
they took Marcion to be the heretic of the century. It is easy to see
why they thought so. Marcion departed severely from monotheism,
and monotheism was one of the last things to give up, not one of
the first. Marcion dismissed the entire theology and literature of
the people of Israel, and
rejected the idea that in their history we may see the determinate
counsel of God. Marcion made it hard to see how the promises of God
had reached their Yes and Amen in Jesus Christ, because for Marcion
it had been the wrong God who made these promises. Those who could not
accept the
basic Marcionite tenets could not agree that the Christian
literature functioning as canon for them could be as narrow and
restrictive as Marcion’s Euangelion and Apostolikon.
Therefore in their polemic against Marcion, they upheld the
legitimacy of the other books and letters that came from the earliest
church. In other words, they were prompted to think about which books
were canon for them.
Influences upon the canon flowed both ways. On the one hand, the
church’s wide literature made it necessary for Marcion to reduce
Scripture to a narrow band of permissible writings. On the other hand,
Marcion spurred the church to formalize, more or less, its
understanding of received books, and if the margins remained fuzzy, at
least to demarcate where the fuzziness was.
Then something else happened.
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