"Doubt felt about the Son" before Marcion

[Giuseppe]

These are, as I suppose, the different kinds of spurious doctrines, which (as we are informed by the apostles themselves) existed in their own day. And yet we find among so many various perversions of truth, not one school which raised any controversy concerning God as the Creator of all things. No man was bold enough to surmise a second god. More readily was doubt felt about the Son than about the Father, until Marcion introduced, in addition to the Creator, another god of goodness only.

(Prescription against her., 34, Tertullian)

What did Tertullian mean with the words "doubt felt about the Son" before the marcionite heresy?

If we link the marcionite boom with the first great PUBLIC diffusion of a written gospel in the Christian world (the first time when a written Gospel becomes a best-seller, and not the first time when a Gospel was written), then Tertullian is saying that before the common knowledge of that best-seller, the problem of the problems was not the nature benevolent or malevolent of the creator god, but the nature of the Son: was he a real man?

Said otherwise: did he exist?

Marcion was the first famous Jesus-literalist (not the first euhemerizer). With him the polemic was moved for the first time from the question of the historicity of the Son to the question of the identity of the true God.

[Giuseppe]

In another translation I read:

...doubt felt about the figure of the Son...

Can someone say me in the original Latin of the phrase what means "the figure of the Son" more precisely?

Thanks in advance.

[andrewcriddle]

The Latin is

Haec sunt, ut arbitror, genera doctrinarum
adulterinarum quae sub apostolis fuisse ab ipsis apostolis
discimus. Et tamen nullam inuenimus institutionem
inter tot diuersitates peruersitatum quae de Deo creatore
uniuersorum controuersiam mouerit. Nemo alterum
deum ausus est suspicari, facilius de filio quam de patre
haesitabatur, donec Marcion praeter Creatorem alium
Deum solius bonitatis induceret.

Tertullian seems to be saying that before Marcion some people doubted whether Jesus was the Son of God but they all accepted that God was the creator. It is only with Marcion that anyone suggests that the true God and the creator are different beings.

Andrew Criddle

[Secret Alias]

Two powers phenomenon - a literal reading of the original text of Exodus (preserved at Qumran and among the Samaritans).

[Giuseppe]

facilius de filio quam de patre

What does it mean "to doubt about the Son" ?

Tertullian is clearly meaning here not anti-Christian Jews who denied that Jesus is the Messiah. He is meaning always Christian heretics (from his pov). Therefore if the doubt about the Son is raised by the latter, what kind of doubt could it be? Docetism? The identity of the Son? His same existence? It is possible, since who doubts is a "school".

[Giuseppe]

An example of some who doubted "de filio" before the doubts of Marcion about the Father:

3:4 In turn, moreover, he supposedly confesses Christ by name when he says 'Christ is the great king.'43 But from the deceitful, false composition of the book of his foolishness, I am not quite sure whether he taught this of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he does not specify this either but simply says 'Christ,' as though—from what I can gather—he means someone else, or is awaiting someone else

(Epiphanius about the Ossaeans, Panarion 1:19)

[Giuseppe]

According to Epiphanius, the Ossaeans (who adored a Christ-not-named-Jesus) were pre-Christians:

5:4 And I shall pass this sect by as well. For again, Elxai is associated with the Ebionites after Christ, as well as with the Nazoraeans, who came later.

5:5 And four sects have made use of him because they were bewitched by his imposture: Of those that came after him, the Ebionites and Nazoraeans; of those before his time and during it the Ossaeans, and the Nasaraeans whom I mentioned earlier.

5:6 This is the sixth sect of the seven in Jerusalem. They persisted until the coming of Christ, and after Christ's incarnation until the capture of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus, Domitian's brother but Vespasian's son, in the second year of his father Vespasian's reign.

(Epiphanius, Panarion, 19)

They raised as proto-catholic reaction the following one:

22 Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. 23 No one who denies the Son has the Father; everyone who confesses the Son has the Father also.

(1 John 2:22-23)

The author of that epistle is talking about people, like the Ossaeans, who rejected Jesus as name of their celestial Christ. The effect, according to 'John', is that the Osseans should reject accordingly the Father too, since they reject the Son.

In this way, from the rejection to adore Jesus as Christ, they had more reason to abandon really the Father, also, by joining with the Gnostics.

[davidbrainerd]

No man was bold enough to surmise a second god. More readily was doubt felt about the Son than about the Father, until Marcion introduced, in addition to the Creator, another god of goodness only.

To me this clearly means unitarianism. Due to their scruples about monorheism, they denied the son was god...until Marcion came and made it easy to make the son god by ditching monotheism altogether. But for over-extreme monotheists Marcions two gods made them question the Father also and return to Judaism...at least so Tertullian wants to imply.