Can We At Least Agree that the Marcionites Did Not Call Jesus "Christ"?

[Secret Alias]

I would argue the following:

1. certain types of people want to treat religion like gravity. Like whatever our forefathers have told us is a 'fact.'
2. I agree. We need to define and examine what "tradition" tells us. But it's just tradition. It's not gravity or acceleration or "facts" determined by experimentation in physics.
3. so there's all these things the Church Fathers say about "the true tradition" and "the false tradition" i.e. Marcionism. It's good to accurately report what the Church Fathers tell us about both. But in neither case are they "facts." We have to be "factual" when reporting what they say. But just because Irenaeus or Tertullian say X, Y or Z our only duty is to report what they say as best as possible and consider their veracity. We don't have to accept what they say without criticism.
4. Furthermore we know certain things about Jews, Samaritans, pagans, patterns in history, archaeological evidence etc. These help shape how we should approach what the Church Fathers tell us and what the scribes have preserved from the Church Fathers and the New Testament canon.
5. Indeed rather than accept the material that has come to us from "our family" i.e. the traditions of the West we should be merciless in our criticism. There is a bias towards the familiar and since what was familiar was at war with the Marcionites we should do our best to "make sense" of what they Marcionites believed, what they practiced how they approached the scriptures because our "family" was at war with them and wasn't necessarily interested in giving what they believed, what they practiced etc. a fair shake.
6. Our spiritual forefathers were above all else, in all things, trying to defend what they believed against what the Marcionites or other sects believed. So some effort has to be made to "fill in the gaps" left in our information because the Church Fathers were definitely not letting their audiences hear an objective account of why the Marcionites believed in what they believed. Either because they hated the Marcionites or because they were in some way affiliated with Marcionism and didn't want to be painted with the brush of heresy.

[Secret Alias]

The appropriate question would be, in what sense could Marcion have understood Jesus to be "the Christ" without having the Jewish prophesies to herald him. Because Stephen and KK aren't interested in Marcion, they are happy to leave the caricature of Marcion which appears in the Church Fathers. "The Marcionites were irrational so the fact that it doesn't make sense that they would have thought him to be the Christ without any appeal to the prophesies isn't important. Irrational people believe irrational things." This is their point of view. I on the other hand put forward the following.

1. there are literally dozens of references to the Marcionites rejecting the title THE Christ for Jesus.
2. there are at least a half dozen appeals to things said by the apostles in the "apostolic writings" where Marcion is identified as the "antichrist" who was "predicted" to deny that Jesus was predicted by the prophets. (Crazy).
3. the fact that the Church Fathers develop what seems to be an irrational opinion for Marcion that he denied that Jesus had anything to with the Jewish prophesies which the orthodox and Jews acknowledge witness the coming of THE Christ coupled with the repeated identification of Marcion denying the title of THE Christ for Jesus is suggestive that Jesus was not taken to be the Christ.
4. the fact that there is archaeological evidence for THE Chrestos among the Marcionites coupled with the repeated identification of a preference for Jesus as "kind" and "merciful" seems to imply to me at least that the Marcionites took Jesus to be Chrestos rather than Christos.

But it is worth pointing out that the reason why people think Secret Mark is a fake is similar to the acceptance of "ignoring" Marcion in favor of the certainty of the established canon. There is a psychological preference for "security" over danger, where "danger" means challenges to the security of the faith of our ancestors. This, I have argued, has always been why people make RIDICULOUS conspiracy theories about the Letter to Theodore being a modern forgery. We want Christianity to be a defined, stable and above all known commodity. Hence also the resistance to admitting what is clearly NOT A MODERN FORGERY, the Marcionite aversion to the Jewish messianic title "THE Christ" for Jesus.

Marcion is ignored, Morton Smith is disgraced but the same end game is at play. Building a fence, a hedge around the New Testament canon.

[Secret Alias]

Just think of the craziness for a moment regarding 1 John and the (original) version Irenaeus used.

1. John is the last link to the apostolic age who SUPPOSEDLY met Polycarp and passed on the authority of the apostles to Polycarp and Polycarp to Irenaeus (bullshit).
2. John however has a "prophesy." Stop the presses.
3. Someone supposedly wrote down a "prophesy" i.e. the Holy Spirit coming to John that "at the end of times" along will come the antichrist who will claim that "Jesus WAS NOT the Christ."
4. Irenaeus wants us to believe that "all this time elapsed" between John writing this down and Adversus Haereses or the Letter to Polycarp. But don't worry! The riddle is solved for you. The antichrist was Marcion. Yay! Now we can explain why all these contemporary Christians keep saying Jesus isn't the Christ. Hooray. Thank god the Holy Spirit came to John, John uttered the prophesy then it was written down by Polycarp and preserved for us, along with all the other New Testament material, by that "great guy" Irenaeus. Now we know the truth. Thank God!
5. So, working in reverse now, by 190 CE we can finally explain how "all these Christians" i.e. the Marcionites say that Jesus isn't the Christ. Satan came down and inspired their founder "Marcion" to claim sounding outlandish. That Jesus wasn't the Christ. So from this we get the understanding that the claim that Jesus wasn't the Christ wasn't owing to any link with Samaritan thought and thus back to the beginning of the religion of Israel but just the evil force in the world corrupting Marcion to believe wholly unreasonable things and then seduce people everywhere with his "evil seduction."
6. But clearly 1 John is a forgery. There never was a John who came from the apostolic age to teach the world about the truth and warn "prophetically" about the coming of Marcion. Instead Irenaeus probably forged the letter by John used it to deny a plausible Samaritan interpretation that THE Messiah isn't in the Pentateuch (it isn't) and that Jesus never claimed to be this figure.

[Secret Alias]

But no one looks at the canon this way. It's always:

1. the "New Testament canon" was established with 1 John.
2. 1 John was accepted by "everyone." (not true)
therefore
3. Irenaeus is citing a version of 1 John which may be "unusual" but it doesn't mean that the New Testament as we have it was invented against Marcionism.

But of course 1 John and Acts and the rest of the canon was invented as a "remedy" against Marcionism. How is it people don't see that? Irenaeus believes that John, the John that wrote the gospel and Revelations and - I would argue - established the four gospel canon to Polycarp, "foretold" the coming of Marcion. The reason this line that Irenaeus quotes from 1 John was altered later is because eventually the Church wasn't filled with complete lunatics and when they saw the ludicrous nature of what he was suggesting i.e. a prophesy delivered by John against the Marcionite rejection of prophesy regarding Jesus as the Christ, the realized "this is crazy, change the text of 1 John."

[Joseph D. L.]

Joseph, this is really ridiculous.

Every day several Marcion threads are opened in this forum, the starting point of which is exactly the opposite. This forum has now become the Marcionite Speculations Forum. Sinouhe is right: some people here are really obsessed with Marcion.

Not for StephenGoranson. it isn't. And not for the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars.

But that's the thing isn't it. It isn't just them, it's everyone including those who promote a Marcion priority because the sources that we have to go off are designed to lead in a certain direction. Our thinking about these texts and the evolution of church history is completely artificial, a simulacrum, and there is no way out.

Even saying the Catholics adopted the Marcionite texts doesn't reveal anything, either the 'why they did' or the 'what was Marcionism originally'. Unless we have access to a time machine or the very first edition of the Evangelion, nothing in New Testament scholarship is absolute. It's why we have pet theories and they all exist on an equal playing field and that is a scary place to be in.

What I am saying, to make my point clear, our thinking of this topic needs to be overhauled and reevaluated if we are to make any progress. Arguing for either a Marcion priority or a traditionslist standard isn't cutting it anymore.

[DCHindley]

Joseph, this is really ridiculous.

Every day several Marcion threads are opened in this forum, the starting point of which is exactly the opposite. This forum has now become the Marcionite Speculations Forum. Sinouhe is right: some people here are really obsessed with Marcion.

Not for StephenGoranson. it isn't. And not for the overwhelming majority of New Testament scholars.

But that's the thing isn't it. It isn't just them, it's everyone including those who promote a Marcion priority because the sources that we have to go off are designed to lead in a certain direction. Our thinking about these texts and the evolution of church history is completely artificial, a simulacrum, and there is no way out.

Even saying the Catholics adopted the Marcionite texts doesn't reveal anything, either the 'why they did' or the 'what was Marcionism originally'. Unless we have access to a time machine or the very first edition of the Evangelion, nothing in New Testament scholarship is absolute. It's why we have pet theories and they all exist on an equal playing field and that is a scary place to be in.

What I am saying, to make my point clear, our thinking of this topic needs to be overhauled and reevaluated if we are to make any progress. Arguing for either a Marcion priority or a traditionslist standard isn't cutting it anymore.

I can predict that the process will be painful and slow. We have been preprogrammed as we grew up to believe certain things, in a (mainly western) world that revolves around Jesus, the Christ of God. Even if one does not accept that Jesus was actually a divine being come to earth to free man from sin (or insert your favorite social gospel theology here), we are so effectively programmed to think certain ways that are designed to reinforce and support the view that the entire universe revolves around Jesus the Christ of God, that actually thinking outside the box is very difficult.

Went through this with my attempt to connect the argumentative dots WRT the Pauline corpus, to realize that the epistles were mainly about justification of gentiles before the Judean god on the basis of their faith in God's promise to Abram's seed that he would one day bless them with a fruitful land. Paul's believed that his gentile friends deserved to be included in this promise.

The problem was, all the "christological" statements (whether single sentence glosses, paragraphs of commentary, or random words sprinkled to make it seem that the subject of key verbs are redirected so as to refer to Christ theology), the Christ theology was haphazard and unconnected, and to me, clearly additive in nature.

It was the faith like Abram's faith theology that predominates and can be detected in just about every epistle, whether to communities or individuals. It does not require faith in Christ redemption theology to be valid. Abraham was justified before God simply by believing, before he ever circumcised himself and his household, and hundreds of years before Moses came down from Sinai with the Law. There was originally no place for Jesus there. Jesus, formerly a Judean end-times leader contender, evolved into a divine redeemer, so faith in Jesus as a divine redeemer didn't need faith like Abraham to be valid, as they formulated things.

Paul without Christ is a difficult concept to get one's head around. I know I had a very difficult time working out the details. Until that time when this all dawned on me, all I had heard was explanations where the (usually libertine, spiritualized) teaching of Jesus was pure, but was "Judaized." Goes back to 19th century critical scholarship. The thought that the relationship might be different than Christ teaches dazzling higher plane truths that Judean followers couldn't handle and incorporated them imperfectly into their existing schemata, never so much as entered the mind of man.

Critics of Gnosticism like E. M. Yamauchi Pre Christian Gnosticism: A Survey of the Proposed Evidences (1973, with ch 12 added in 1983 edition) and Simone Pétrement, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism, (English translation 1990, original French Le dieu séparé: Les origines du gnosticisme 1984), state flat out that they think the world revolves around the Christian Christ, represented perfectly by the NT, and that all other schools MUST be knock offs. Scholars like Grant gave Pétrement glowing recommendations.

Per a journal review,

"The subtitle (The Christian Origins of Gnosticism) states the thesis which the late author, well known for her philosophical studies ... comes close to proving."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... A18FDE3701

This seems to be how most established scholarship views things.

As out-of-the-box as I have become, I cannot come up with a scenario where Marcion invented the whole thing, and the orthodox party hijacked his gospel & epistles to create a counter gospel and Pauline letter collection.

The evidence I see suggests that the Paul movement and Jesus movement operated in different circles that probably never heard of one another in the 1st century, and only encountered each other in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE. Both movements had been knocked off kilter by the 1st Judean rebellion, prompting the gentile wing of the Jesus movement to evolve their concept of Jesus's role in history into a divine redeemer decided to make a commentary. Some early practitioner of the new Jesus, revised the Pauline letters (preserved by Pauline followers), to show how Christ redeemer theology was better, muuuch better!

S/he published them, with the commentary edited into the original narratives, in hopes of drawing the remnants of Paul's followers over to the evolved Jesus party's position (that he was really a divine redeemer, not just the Judean ruler of an end-times kingdom).

It wasn't done especially well, and the new Pauline theology took a while to gain traction in "orthodox" Christian circles, but by late 2nd century, it was the norm in orthodox circles.

DCH