GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 9:25 pm
As Peter noted, the thread isn't about trying to prove one theory or another, but rather what is people's best guess about how Marcion fits into early Christianity? I'm interested in reading the range of views people have developed based on their intuition, and not challenging anyone to 'prove' that point of view. There is a lack of clear-cut evidence anyway so any view is going to be speculative.
If this is what you want then I will go all out, put all of my chips onto the table, and give my definitive opinion, i.e. best guess, on Marcion, who he is, what he is, and how this fits into Christianity.
Marcion, Man of Pontus
Marcion must to be viewed under the lens of a radical new approach of Biblical criticism. Hitherto most New Testament scholars have failed in this call because they are require to pay, to a certain respect, lip service to the prevailing culture that allows them to work and live the way they do. I understand this completely. If the choice was between revolutionary hermeneutics and possibly being ostracized or worse, exiled from your profession (as has happened to many such scholars), or working within the system while occasionally offering milquetoast criticism of Biblical literalism and getting paid on top of it, then the choice is not only clear by relatable. I will be open: I am inwardly torn between an awe and respect for the work these men and women have done over the centuries as someone who, let's be honest, has no right or even reason to discuss this with the amount of arrogance or reckless abandon as I have in the past; and a frustration that knows no end over what I perceive to be a disconnect between things that are obvious to me while being ignored and dismissed by these yielders authority. Maybe this belies something about myself I haven't told.
My history with this subject began all the back in the halcyon days of my late teens and early twenties. Unemployed and with a lot of time on my hands, and just getting into real philosophy as opposed to the my sophomoric tryst with nihilism in high school. My first brush with what would be my passing interest in the field of Biblical history and scholarship was not some revered scholar of days long sense unspoken of, or even a mild mannered Superman of scholarship--for 2006 standards--like Bart Ehrman, No. It was Michael Tsarion and Jordan Maxwell. Yes. I was steeped in conspiracy theories about Illuminati, Federal Reserve, Freemasons, the architects of control, Rosicrucians, and the mass indoctrination of people into psychological slavery. I still have books by Tsarion, Maxwell, and Icke. (Yet strangely, William Cooper was always a bridge too far for me!) And you know what is the most alarming about all of this? Not that I believed it, but that I was able to rationalize all of these various and contradictory thoughts, ideas, concepts, and paranoid delusions. It all made sense to me! It made me feel that I had a sense of control over my life; and more alluring, a power no one else had access to: knowledge of things occult and esoteric. It made me feel like I was above others.
My reading, studying, and researching, was for no other purpose but to ingratiate myself by a standard only I could know and could hope to achieve, but more often than not fail to live up to. Of course I can look back and say, "hey! I was just a dumb 17 year old who didn't know anything about the world, let alone the lives and hardships of others. Now I do." But do I really? Surely that same neurological and synaptic network is still operating somewhere in my brain and influencing me still. I guess a question to take away from that, do people really change? and if so, to what degree?
So is my dissonance for mainstream Biblical scholars a continual symptom of my dogged youth as a conspiracy theorist? I no longer read Tsarion, Maxwell, or Icke; but the last couple years I have become enamoured with the post-structuralist philosophies that are no less conspiratorial of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, as well as Mark Fisher (and many others) and ideas about the consequences of vicious cybernetics as the artifical environments we have incubated for millennia are now taking over us, creating an apocalypse of our subjectivity and epistemology in the rhizomatic guise of "AI" and "AGI" which not only brings us face to face with the horror of the living uncanny that is hidden in the very molecular structure of the Real, but forces us to question and finally reject our own place in this economy of unRealness. We have created tools; now tools will recreate reality, and our sense of the real is emptied out of meaning; of quantative reference, and lastly of qualitative inference.
That, I think, is Marcionism. I am Marcion, the Man of Pontus, because we are all Marcion, Man of Pontus. Each of us attempts to recreate the world to fit how we can best economize it to suite our understanding of it so we can cope and survive. Marcion is human psychology. Marcion is human philosophy. The limits of Marcion is the limits of my world. Marcion is whoever you choose him/her to be. Marcion is the center and the peripheral, both blight and clear to all and to others.
You can see it here firsthand. Marcion is essentially this forum. Almost all subjects regardless of distance or scope, include Marcion in some compacity. He is inescapable. For Tim Morton, he is a hyperobject; for Deleuze and Guattari, he is the Body without Organs; and for Baudrillard he is watching us by our watching of him. A living, breathing simulacrum; not real, but not not real.
Marcion has become so replete that he seems to be devoid of any meaning now. I remember 10 years ago delving into the controversy over Marcion and Luke of being swept away by it. Not I am Marcion weary. I don't see what more can be said or discovered about him or how his existence undermines or reaffirms Christianity.
Maybe there is a greater point hidden in this stream of consciousness nonsense. I did earnestly what to summize my genuine thoughts about Marcion (probably related to traditions of Marcellina and Marcia; probably some Noahide symbology in his theological system; maybe he was Aquila of Sinope, a Jewish proselyte; perhaps there is more of him in Paul than there is of Paul; and maybe his gospel was a preexistent document rather than a biography of some guy named Jesus), but I've already made these arguments before and I scarcely doubt anyone would want to read them again and I think and hope this can offer a more interesting reflection.