The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

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Secret Alias
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The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

I wish people actually read Against Marcion and had some familiarity with the Jewish beliefs in the first century. It was common to believe that Yahweh = judgement, Elohim = mercy, goodness. The Marcionites had a belief like this (= that the godhead was divided and thus that 'there were two gods'). The orthodox developed from a later (Imperially encouraged) position of monarchianism. This is how we find this (originally written by Theophilus in the second century and reworked in Latin by Tertullian.

Immediately following arguing against the apparent Marcionite position that the Creator should be blamed for the creation of the devil we read:
Therefore it is that God, who until the man had sinned had from the beginning been solely good, from thenceforth became a judge, stern and, since the Marcionites will have it so, cruel. The woman is straightway condemned to bring forth in sorrow, and to be in service to her husband. Previously she had been taught of the increase of mankind without any cause for grief, in the words of the blessing, Increase and multiply,a no more than that: she had also been intended for a help to the man, not for servitude to him. Straightway also the earth is cursed, which had previously been blessed: straightway there are thorns and thistles where before there had been grass, when it was fruitful of the green herb and of trees. Straightway there is sweat and toil for bread, though before from every tree there was livelihood without stint, and food in sure supply. From now on the man is bent down towards the earth, who before was taken out of the earth: from now on turned towards death, though previously towards life: from now on in coats of skins, who before had been naked and unashamed. Thus the goodness of God came first, as his nature is: his sternness came afterwards, as there was reason for it. The former was ingenerate, was God's own, was freely exercised: the latter was accidental, adapted to need, an expedient. For as it was not right that nature should hold its goodness in restraint and inoperative, neither was it seemly that reason should dissemble and escape its sternness. The former was God's duty paid to himself, the latter his duty to circumstances. Begin next to accuse the office of judge of being in kinship with evil. That is why you have dreamed up another god whose sole attribute is goodness: a judge, you cannot away with. Yet I have proved that this god also is a judge—or, if not a judge, unquestionably perverse and ineffective, establishing a rule of conduct he has no intention of enforcing, no intention, that is, of bringing under judgement. When you express approval of a god who is no judge, it is not the God who is a judge whom you express disapproval of: you will be forced, no question of it, to lay accusation against justice itself—for this it is that causes any man to be a judge—classing it as one of the varieties of evil: which means that you will have to include injustice among the subheadings of goodness. Justice is an evil thing only if injustice is a good one. But since you are compelled to pronounce injustice one of the worst of things, by the same method of reckoning you are forced to rank justice among the best things: for everything hostile to evil is good, even as nothing that is hostile to the good can help being evil. Consequently, in
so far as injustice is an evil thing, to the same extent justice is a good thing. Nor is it to be reckoned as merely a variety of goodness, but as the safeguard of it, because unless goodness is governed by justice so as itself to be just, it cannot be goodness: for it will be unjust. Nothing that is unjust can be good, and everything that is just is bound to be good. [Against Marcion 2:11]
I've always argued that most everything written about 'the Marcionite tradition' in a broad sense is complete garbage. Now it is confirmed.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
lsayre
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by lsayre »

Markus Vinzent published a paper awhile back titled "Marcion, The Jew".
Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

I've posted it a while back but this goes - I think - to something more fundamental.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Bernard Muller
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Bernard Muller »

I've always argued that most everything written about 'the Marcionite tradition' in a broad sense is complete garbage. Now it is confirmed.
Can you explain how this quoted text confirm your viewpoint?

Cordially, Bernard
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Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

The text is 'against Marcion' and the Marcionites apparently identify 'Elohim' and 'Yahweh' with 'goodness' and 'judgement' respectively.
... it is that God, who until the man had sinned had from the beginning been solely good, from thenceforth became a judge ...
The first references to the divinity are all 'Elohim' references and the appearance of Yahweh on its own is immediately following the expulsion from Paradise:
She said, “With the help of the Yahweh I have brought forth a man.” [Genesis 4:1]
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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Blood
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Blood »

If that was indeed the case, and it was known at the time, then why didn't the anti-Jewish polemicist Tertullian (among others) include that info in their diatribes?
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

The source I am quoting is Tertullian.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

And the question - as always - is, was the written Torah fundamental to Christianity and Marcionism? What I mean by that is, was Christianity at its core a commentary, an analysis, a statement - 'about' if you will - the traditional source of knowledge and governance for Jews and Samaritans. And the answer is, of course it was. This fundamentally changes the way that we can allow ourselves to think about Marcionism. Because the traditional way of looking at it - the exaggerated view of Moll for instance - is that Marcionites were 'critics' of the Law. To be certain this is how they were often portrayed. But it is hard to imagine that a movement which just 'bad mouthed' the Jews and their religion would have the durability that Marcionism had (lasting until the 6th or 7th centuries). It must also have been 'about something' and that productive 'something' developed out of the Torah as much as the 'criticism' that the Church Fathers and rabbinic sources love to emphasize. The critics of Marcionism love to focus on their negative statements about the Torah. They don't say much about their positive worldview in general though. So it is isn't all that surprising that we aren't told what they lived for. We are only told how they criticized about the Law - undoubtedly because it sounded scandalous out of context and helped marginalize the movement. But since little or no information survives about what the Marcionites lived for it is not surprising that the 'positive' aspects or 'near positive' (tolerant) views of the Law didn't survive either.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

And if you continue to follow the argument in the other books of Tertullian it is the same thing. In Book One for instance the Creator is assumed to the 'judge' and the 'other God' of Marcion, the divine attributes of 'greatness' and 'goodness.'

But I will briefly state my subject, and afterwards most fully pursue it, promising that God neither could have been, nor ought to have been, unknown. Could not have been, because of His greatness; ought not to have been, because of His goodness, especially as He is (supposed, by Marcion) more excellent in both these attributes than our Creator. [Adv Marc 1:9]

and again a little later:

Pressed by these arguments, they exclaim: One work is sufficient for our god; he has delivered man by his supreme and most excellent goodness, which is preferable to (the creation of) all the locusts. What superior god is this, of whom it has not been possible to find any work so great as the man of the lesser god! Now without doubt the first thing you have to do is to prove that he exists, after the same manner that the existence of God must ordinarily be proved— by his works; and only after that by his good deeds. For the first question is, Whether he exists? And then, What is his character? The former is to be tested by his works, the other by the beneficence of them. [Adv Marc 1:17]

The argument is not as straightforward as it may seem. The author originally argued clearly that the godhead can't be divided. There aren't two powers, in other words, only one God who is both good and just. Sounds suspiciously Jewish or like the things the Jews said against 'those who said there were two powers.'

Another frequent criticism is that the good God shouldn't have been hidden. As we see again a few lines later:

From creatures, with which as God he was indeed so closely connected (and the closer this connection was, the greater was his goodness), he ought never to have been hidden. For it cannot be pretended that there was not either any means of arriving at the knowledge of God, or a good reason for it, when from the beginning man was in the world, for whom the deliverance is now come; as was also that malevolence of the Creator, in opposition to which the good God has wrought the deliverance. [ibid]

But who was this knowledge hidden from? Surely some Jews did indeed hold that there 'were two powers.' The author is complaining in fact about the Jewish orthodoxy that existed in the late second and early third centuries. Philo knew this, so did many others. So the other criticisms of Marcionism are similarly rooted in arguments which could apply to Philo and the tradition of two powers including how the good god could have allowed for Adam to fall:

Let us therefore next take the very person of God (dei personam) Himself, or rather His shadow or phantom, as we have it in Christ, and let Him be examined by that condition which makes Him superior to the Creator. And undoubtedly there will come to hand unmistakeable rules for examining God's goodness. My first point, however, is to discover and apprehend the attribute, and then to draw it out into rules. Now, when I survey the subject in its aspects of time, I nowhere descry it from the beginning of material existences, or at the commencement of those causes, with which it ought to have been found, proceeding thence to do whatever had to be done. For there was death already, and sin the sting of death, and that malignity too of the Creator, against which the goodness of the other god should have been ready to bring relief; falling in with this as the primary rule of the divine goodness (if it were to prove itself a natural agency), at once coming as a succour when the cause for it began. [ibid 22]

But is the author attacking Marcionism per se or the concept of a separate 'person of God' (dei personam)? It is amazing how closely aligned Marcionism and Arianism is in this regard. The traditional Catholic way of viewing priests is as 'the person of God.' Similarly we read in old English law:

Magistrates “have a commission from God, and are invested with a divine authority, and in fact represent the person of God, as whose substitutes they in a manner act” (ac omnino Dei personam sustinere cujus vices quodammodo agunt).

The question then has nothing to do with a particularly unique heresy that promulgated a heretical god but the fact that the author viewed the whole idea of there being a 'person of God' distinct from the Father heretical (i.e. he was a monarchian or a radical monist).
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Secret Alias
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Re: The Marcionite Tradition was Jewish

Post by Secret Alias »

Your conduct is equally unreasonable, when you allow indeed that God is a judge, but at the same time destroy those operations and dispositions by which He discharges His judicial functions.

Proinde est enim cum deum quidem iudicem admittis, eos vero motus et sensus per quos iudicat destruis. [Adv Marc 2]

The Marcionites didn't deny that a 'just god' existed. It wasn't as if they identified him as the devil. He was exactly as described in the Jewish tradition which identified two powers in heaven.
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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