1.B 10. Discarding the Old Testament?

Discarding the Old Testament? iii. But something happened which forced the hand of the Church. About A.D. 140 there came to the Church in Rome a man called Marcion. Marcion was a wealthy and much- travelled ship-owner from Sinope, and he was generous with his money to the Church at Rome. Marcion was a Gnostic, and a knowledge of the broad principles of Gnosticism is necessary to understand JMarcion’s position and the Church’s reaction to him. The Gnostics believed that they possessed a special and an inner knowledge which had come to them direct from the secret teaching of the apostles, or even from the secret teaching of Jesus Himself. It was an essential principle of the Gnostics that the whole universe was founded on a dualism. They believed that spirit and matter were both eternal. God is pure spirit, and altogether good. Matter is essentially flawed and evil. Since matter is eternal, the world was not created out of nothing; it was created out of this essentially flawed matter. God being altogether good could never directly touch or handle this flawed matter. So God put out a series of emanations called aeons. As each aeon was further from God, so each aeon was more and more ignorant of God. As the aeons proceeded down this scale, they became not only ignorant of God, but actually hostile to God. At last in the series there emerged an aeon so distant from God that he could touch and handle evil matter and so create the world. This creating aeon was called the Demiurge. From this it can be seen that the Gnostics believed that the God of creation is quite different from and quite hostile to the true God. It was in this way that they explained the sin and sorrow and suffering and evil of the world. This kind of belief had many serious consequences. It had serious consequences on their beliefs about Jesus. If matter is evil, then Jesus never could have had a real body, and was nothing other than a kind of spiritual phantom with only the appearance of a body. If the body is evil, one of two courses follows. Either, the body must be denied, and starved and kept down in a rigid asceticism, or, the body does not matter, and, therefore, its instincts may be sated and glutted in a wild antinomianism. But in the case of Marcion and in regard to the canon of the New Testament, Gnosticism had very definite consequences. The Gnostics identified the ignorant, hostile God of creation with the God of the Old Testament, who, they said, was a quite different God from the God of the New Testament whom Jesus had revealed. Sometimes this made them, as it were, turn the Old Testament upside down. If the God of the Old Testament is an ignorant and inferior God, hostile to the true God, then the people he punished are the good people, and the people he blessed are the bad people. So there were Gnostics who believed Cain and Koran and Baalam to be the heroes of the Old Testament, and who actually worshipped the serpent as the representative of the true God. In particular most kinds of Gnosticism obviously demanded the complete and total abandonment of the Old Testament and all those that had to do with the Old Testament as the work and the words of the evil God. In view of this attitude to the Old Testament Marcion very naturally produced his own canon of Scripture. In it the Old Testament was completely discarded. The Old Testament had held three parts the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. In place of the Law Marcion put the Gospel. He discarded Matthew, Mark and John as being far too much tinged with Judaism, and in place of them substituted an expurgated version of Luke, from which every Old Testament reference had been removed. In place of the Prophets he substituted the Apostle, in which he included ten letters of Paul, whom he regarded as the great enemy of the old Law and the great exponent of the new gospel. The ten letters were Galatians, i and 2 Corinthians, Romans, i and 2 Thessalonians, Laodiceans (arguing from Colossians 4:16 he regarded Ephesians as having been written to Laodicea), Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. For the Writings he substituted a book of his own called the Antitheses in which he compiled a list of Old Testament passages with the New Testament contradictions of them. This presented the Church with a real problem. Here was a heretic who had compiled a canon of Scripture for himself while the Church still officially had none. The greatest problem of all was the position of Paul, Marcion worshipped Paul barely this side of idolatry. As he saw it, Paul was the great enemy of the Law, and the great bringer of the gospel. For Marcion Paul was the supreme figure in the Chufch. He held that in heaven Paul sits at the right hand of Christ, who sits at the right hand of God. He held that Paul was the promised Paraclete, the Comforter whom Jesus had promised to His followers. Christ, he said, had descended from heaven twice, once to suffer and to die, and once to call Paul and to reveal to Paul the true significance of His death. As Tertullian ironically put it, Paul had become the apostle of the heretics. Of course, Marcion had to misinterpret Paul to make Paul fit his beliefs, but the impression was that Paul had been annexed and appropriated by the heretics. So, then, Marcion, as Tertullian put it, " criticized the Scriptures with a pen-knife," cutting off the parts which did not suit him, and forming his own canon. The Church had to act.