Trespassing in the Wilderness: New Ventures in Canonical Criticism

Abstract

In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Marcion (d.c.160) is described in just one word — “heretic”. He was, according to Hippolytus, the son of a bishop who excommunicated him on grounds of immorality. Arriving in Rome about 140 ce, he attached himself to the church there until again he was excommunicated in 144. Earning the combined hatred of Irenaeus (who wrote of Marcion’s “daring blasphemy”), Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the historian Eusebius, Marcion taught that the Christian gospel was wholly a gospel of love, to the complete exclusion of the Law. He rejected in its entirety the Old Testament since its Jewish God was, according to Marcion, despotic, cruel and ignorant. He was, in short, utterly different from the God of love who is revealed in Jesus. Canonically all that Marcion acknowledged of the Bible was the Pauline epistles (excluding the Pastoral epistles, I and II Timothy and Titus), and an edited form of Luke’s Gospel. It comes as something of a shock, therefore, when a distinguished contemporary biblical scholar suggests that: “Christianity has become so systematically Marcionite and anti-Semitic that only a truly radical revival of the concept of canon as applied to the bible will, I think, counter it.”¹