A Phantom Jesus: The Teachings of the Second-Century Marcion by Bart Ehrman. Includes an extract “Here is how I explain his views in my book How Jesus Became God.”
Bart says in his post:
- The best known docetist of the second Christian century was a famous preacher and philosopher who was eventually branded as an arch-heretic, named Marcion. It is much to be regretted that we do not have any writings from Marcion’s hand, as he was tremendously influential on Christianity in his own day, establishing churches throughout the Christian world that embraced his distinctive teachings. Unfortunately, we know of these teachings only from what his orthodox enemies said about them in their refutations.
- The classic study of Marcion is Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, translated by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990; German original of the 2nd ed., 1924). For a modern overview, see Bart’s Lost Christianities, pages 103-09.
Another Post by Bart Ehrman – Paul’s “Gospel” and Marcion
Why did Marcion think that Luke’s Gospel in particular was the one that was known to Paul? There are two leading theories about that: one that I *used* to hold (because it seems so logical) and one that is more widely held, and that *now* I hold (for reasons I’ll explain).
See Bart Ehrman’s post Early Christian Docetism. Below are extracts from that post reformated into a list for my purposes.
- A form of Christianity advanced by the second-century scholar and evangelist Marcion, who himself claimed to have uncovered the true teachings of Christianity in the writings of Paul.
- In sharp contrast to the Jewish Christians east of the Jordan, Marcion maintained that Paul was the true apostle, to whom Christ had especially appeared after his resurrection to impart the truth of the gospel.
- Marcion argued that Paul’s writings effectively set the gospel of Christ over and against the Law of the Jews, and that the apostle had urged Christians to abandon the Jewish Law altogether.
- Whereas the Jewish God punishes those who disobey, they claimed, the God of Jesus extends mercy and forgiveness;
- whereas the God of the Jews says “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” the God of Jesus says to “turn the other cheek”; and
- whereas the Old Testament God tells the Israelites to conquer Jericho by slaughtering its entire population—men, women, and children— the God of Jesus says to love your enemies.
- What do these two Gods have in common? According to the Marcionites, nothing. For them, there are two separate and unrelated Gods, the God of the Jews and the God of Jesus.
- Marcionite Christians maintained that Jesus did not belong to the wrathful and just God of the Jews, the God who created the world and chose Israel to be his special people. In fact, Jesus came to save people from this God.
- Moreover, since Jesus had no part in the Creator, he could have no real ties to the material world that the Creator-God made. Jesus therefore was not actually born and did not have a real flesh-and-blood body.
- How, then, did Jesus get hungry and thirsty, how did he bleed and die? According to Marcionites, it was all an appearance: Jesus only seemed to be human. As the one true God himself, come to earth to deliver people from the vengeful God of the Jews,
- Jesus was never born, never got hungry or thirsty or tired, never bled or died. Jesus’ body was a phantasm.
The Dark Age of Earliest Christianity by Tabor cites Marcion. A convincing case can be made that the rise and development of the teaching of Marcion, often ignored by students of the New Testament, provides a meaningful historical context to which the author of Luke-Acts most likely responds.
When and Why Were the Acts of the Apostles Written? by Joseph B. Tyson, April 2011
The three paragraphs below were extracted from his very good article and included on this page about Marcion as he cites how Acts is challenging Marcion’s points.
…the virtue of a late date for the composition of Acts lies in its ability to cite a known and datable historical situation which would provide a meaningful context to which Acts responds. In the first half of the second century, important Christian concepts were still in the process of being formulated. A major contributor to this process was Marcion of Sinope.
Marcion was one of the best known Christian leaders in the early church, and, in my judgment, Acts was written as, at least in part, a response to the challenge he presented.[5] It answers the Marcionite contentions point by point. Marcion stressed the distance between Jesus and the Hebrew Scriptures, but the author of Acts repeatedly showed that Paul and all the other Christian preachers maintained that Jesus fulfilled the predictions of the Hebrew prophets. Marcion claimed that Paul was the only apostle, but Acts portrays him as at one with Peter and the others, even subservient to them on some occasions, and it even defines apostleship in a way that excludes Paul. Marcion called Peter and the others “false apostles,” in contrast to Paul, but Acts not only characterizes them as in total agreement with Paul but even goes so far as to attribute to Peter the first conversion of a Gentile (Acts 10:1- Acts 11:18). Marcion maintained that Paul proclaimed a God of grace, who released humankind from the domination of the God of Torah, but the author of Acts characterized Paul as a Torah-observant Jew and a devout Pharisee. Marcion taught that Jesus brought Torah to an end, but Acts showed that the apostles and Paul agreed that some things from Torah were still to be required even of Gentile believers (see Acts 15:20).
Conceiving Acts as an anti-Marcionite text enables us to appreciate the contribution of its author. This author is not merely telling the story of the rise of Christianity, nor is he simply attempting to address the problem of Jewish rejection of the Gospel. He is defining the Christian movement in direct opposition to the Marcionites. For the author of Acts, belief in Jesus is in full conformity with the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures; Torah is not totally dispensed with; Jewish traditions are not absolutely jettisoned.
