Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy. From this source came the AEons, and I known not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in the system of Valentinus, who was of Plato's school. From the same source came Marcion's better god, with all his tranquillity; he came of the Stoics... The same subject-matter is discussed over and over again by the heretics and the philosophers; the same arguments are involved. Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? What is the origin of man? and in what way does he come?

But (once for all) let Marcion know that the principle term of his creed comes from the school of Epicurus, implying that the Lord is stupid and indifferent; wherefore he refuses to say that He is an object to be feared. Moreover, from the porch of the Stoics he brings out matter, and places it on a par with the Divine Creator. He also denies the resurrection of the flesh,--a truth which none of the schools of philosophy agreed together to hold. But how remote is our (Catholic) verity from the artifices of this heretic, when it dreads to arouse the anger of God, and [the orthodox] firmly believes that He produced all things out of nothing, and promises to us a restoration from the grave of the same flesh (that died) and holds without a blush that Christ was born of the virgin's womb! At this, philosophers, and heretics, and the very heathen, laugh and jeer.

I would argue that our earliest evidence for ‘Christianity’ maps perfectly onto the above typology of freelance religious experts, one area of which consists of writer-­intellectuals—the authors of the Chaldean oracles, diviners or interpreters of Judean sacred writings, and also, I would argue, figures such as Paul, Marcion, and Valentinus—another area of which captures non-‐textual diviners, inspired prophets, exorcists, and authorities on Christ whose practices might not emphasize writings (more along the line of the man who exorcizes in Christ’s name in Mark 9:38-­‐39 and the depiction of Simon Magus in Acts 8:17-­‐19).
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Locating early Christians within this class of religious activity also makes sense of why so many of our sources depict varieties of specialists as direct antagonists to Christian figures. Acts portrays the apostles clashing with and ultimately winning over a slave girl with a divinatory spirit, Judean exorcists, various philosophers, and practitioners of magical arts, who spontaneously burn their books upon learning about Christ.23 The author of the Didache uses writings to instruct his readers in specialized practices, while enjoining them from teachers of contrary claims, pseudo-­prophets, enchanters, astrologers, and sorcerers. Elsewhere the reader is admonished not to practice divination, nor to use incantations or astrology or rites of purification, nor even to wish to see or hear these things.

"Rome’s suppression of the uprising in Alexandria and the Bar Kochba uprising in Palestine, in AD 115–117 and 132–135 respectively, shattered all hope for the restoration of a “Jewish” state of the sort imagined above, as well as any hope that the Temple might be rebuilt. The latter was probably more intensely desired, or at least more looked for, in Rome than in many other places. This, along with his own inner conflicts, may have been the last straw for a man who had in the meantime also settled in Rome: Marcion of Sinope, a shipowner from Asia Minor.

"Marcion organized his group of followers of Christ as a decidedly non-Jewish entity. He was perhaps not the first to undertake such a project, but he was certainly the first to give it a durable form, which in this case proved capable of persisting at least into the fifth century AD. He found a theoretical, easily memorizable justification for his anti-Jewish position by reversing a prevailing dualistic narrative: evil was not to be identified with any kind of demon, but with the creator god as depicted in the Pentateuch. The god of Jesus Christ, as described in the available texts by Paul, was the positive antagonist of that ancient figure.

"The most influential aspect of Marcionism, however, was neither the institutions it created nor any accompanying rituals, but its historiographical groundwork. In outlining a simple biographical schema, replete with current anecdotes and quotations—here I am following the increasingly mooted, even if still radical position of a second-century date for the canonical gospels and the Acts of the Apostles—Marcion’s portrayal of the life of an apocalyptic visionary and peripatetic preacher, from his first emergence to his rather unusual execution, could be seen as the model of a life turning away from Judaism. He thus orchestrated a rupture that he relocated a century into the past, carefully keeping his narrative free of contemporary references.

"If the stunning absence of earlier biographical narratives of Jesus’s life is not just an accident of transmission, but rather the consequence of such earlier narratives being non-existent, the reason might be that there was no interest in biographies of “angels,” “sons of god,” or “names of gods,” the identities most often ascribed to Jesus in Jewish contexts. The form chosen by Marcion for his writings depended neither on orally available narratives fed by biographical memory, nor on any form of oral transmission, which would have had to survive across more than the normally (barely) permissible three generations or seventy years.

"Instead, Marcion invented something new. In the literary environment of the Roman Empire as described, nothing was more natural than to write a Greek-language “biography” as a founding document for a new religious network. Marcion’s opponents reacted immediately with a weighty intellectual exchange of the sort that a metropolis like Rome made possible; and, as was usual in historiography, they reacted with competing versions ..."

Jörg Rüpke (2018) Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion. Princeton University Press.

"By their choice of where to set their beginnings and their endings, authors—or rather their circulating texts—not only determined a theme; they also defined conflicts, and specified whether these were to be regarded as resolved or as awaiting a solution. In his story of the banishment of the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud, Ovid uses his subject matter to point to an example. He does not begin the narrative, in his commentary on the calendar, with Tarquin’s plans for the immense Capitoline Temple, or with any instance of pride (or any other flaw of monarchy). Instead, he has the son Sextus Tarquin steal away from the battlefield with the intention of raping Lucretia, thereby already setting the context for our assessment of the deed. The consequences: the rape, the victim’s suicide, the revenge—and the rather incidental removal of the monarchy—communicated clear norms and exhortations to action. The producers of gospels and stories of martyrs and saints similarly offered conclusions that were readily comprehended by their readers and listeners. With their shaping of scenes, with suspense and plot twists, they made the stories entertaining and created the desire for more of the same. Stories of the martyrs, on the model of interrogation and execution, and often enough with a voyeuristic treatment of violence—and especially violence toward women—were churned out like penny dreadfuls.

"In more sophisticated texts, however, multiple framings might increase the complexity of the narrative, and so prepare the ground for new approaches. A generation after Ovid, Valerius Maximus wrote nine books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, beginning this collection of short tales with a treatise on religion. Surprisingly, where the reader might have expected at most something like an invocation of the Muses, Valerius opens with a prayer-like invocation of Augustus Tiberius. The end of the work again makes reference to the ruler or, more precisely, to his virtues of “imperial rectitude” and “the Caesar’s unconquerable fortitude.” By this means, Valerius inserted into the new monarchic order a text that presents countless examples of commendable acts and virtues. For him, the new order of the Principate, reflecting a Republic that he could only imagine, as it already lay beyond his own power of recollection, allowed a glimpse of a kind of treasure house of solid values and individual initiative.

"An unknown author, writing in Rome in the first half of the second century AD, provides a similar and equally surprising framework for his so-called First Epistle of Clement. He opens with a formula in which the community in Rome recommends the text to the community in Corinth, and understands both of these “people’s assemblies” (ekklesiai) as ephemeral groupings sanctified by God through the Lord Jesus Christ. In a substantial closing prayer, the author seeks safety and protection, with a nod also to terrestrial rulers and leaders (60.4). Their dominion is then justified theologically (61), before the writer eventually returns to the themes of insurrection and peace (63.1, 3). There is a matter that he initially tries to downplay, but then proceeds to address in his opening remarks, with sadness and inner turmoil (1.1), where he almost unwillingly concedes that the entire retelling of the biblical story, with accompanying ethical reflections, is framed by the imperial reality that both sender and addressee, in Rome and Corinth, share.

"Perhaps a good decade later, Marcion in his “gospel” tells the story of Jesus’s ministry, execution, and reappearance. The narrow timeframe of the narrative extends from the descent into Capernaum to the return to Jerusalem. This timeframe is expanded by an elaborate synchronization that aligns the fifteenth year of Tiberius’s rule with Pontius Pilate’s governorship of the province of Judaea. Marcion, working in Rome, thus not only provides a dating, but also situates these provincial events within the Roman imperium.

"All of these authors created fundamentally new texts. All fitted their religious ideas deftly into the framework of the Roman imperium. What was at work here, however, was not a ruler cult, but rather an effort by individuals to appropriate for themselves the political identity that was central to their world. When numerous individuals had accepted this conceptualization, however, it altered perceptions. Above all, it tended to the view of the Augusti as omnipresent. In their texts, these authors linked religion firmly to the imperium; and they proceeded to explore that relationship with care ..."