This is a long post where the majority of the sources are by Dr. James Tabor and follow the first by Dr. Sebastian Moll.
Talking Points about Marcion from the material below:
- Marcion was, in short, a Docetist but not likely Gnostic.
- Marcion arrived in Rome in the immediate aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt of 132–135.
- His teachings survived for several centuries as a Marcionite bishop was among those executed during the Diocletianic persecution in Palestine between 309 and 311 CE — more than a century and a half after Marcion’s own death.
- Marcion’s central theological conviction — the one from which everything else followed — was that the God described in the Jewish scriptures could not possibly be the same God that Jesus called Father.
- The mainstream church’s response to him — insisting on the unity of Old and New Testaments, affirming the God of Israel as the Father of Christ, developing creeds and a broader scriptural canon — was in significant part a reaction to the challenge he posed. The Christianity that emerged from the second century was defined, at least partly, against him. In that sense, even those who consider him entirely wrong must acknowledge that the faith we know was shaped in the crucible of the argument he started.
A Review – THE ARCH-HERETIC MARCION. By Sebastian Moll. WUNT, 250. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Pp. xiv + 181.
This iconoclastic dissertation seeks nothing less than to overturn Harnack’s venerable proto-Lutheran portrait of Marcion. It argues that Marcion’s dualistic theological system was founded on the distinction not between “Law” and “Gospel,” but between an evil and a good God, the former revealed in the Jewish Scriptures and the latter in the gospel of Jesus, the Messiah of the good God (the antithesis of the evil god). “It is exactly due to this antithetical relation of the two Gods in his system that Marcion could never have actually excluded the Old Testament from his church”—it in fact “forms part of Marcion’s canon of Scripture.” Indeed, the Jewish scriptures are so crucial to his theological perspective that—contrary to Harnack’s claim—it was in light of them that Marcion interpreted early Christian writings such as Paul’s letters. Marcion was, in short, a biblicistic dualist who was also a Docetist but not likely Gnostic. After surveying previous scholarship and the problem of sources, Moll analyzes, in chapters 2-7, Marcion’s Life, Gods, Bible, Works, Church, and Time, concluding that Marcion was not a reformer ahead of his time but instead an influential person whose contribution nonetheless proved to be “purely negative” and to whom, furthermore, one may apply the term “heresiarch” without anachronism. Overall, a provocative and frequently persuasive dissertation that repeatedly forces one to reassess both the sources and traditional formulations.
Michael W. Holmes
Bethel University
Marcion’s Apostolos…
James D Tabor from a post at the TRC Circle site. Posted 10/24/2026.
I think I have already said more than I need or want to say regarding Marcion’s reconstructed ten letters of Paul being the authentic, original, version of Paul’s letters—as contrasted with our Greek NT mss in our best copies. I am bowing out of further comments, posts, and discussion here on Circle for the reasons I cover below—along with the attachments. Everyone is free here to discuss as they wish of course, but I will not be responding. Here’s my take:
I covered this in my Christianity Before Paul course, posted some documents in creating the topic under Texts and Manuscripts, mainly for Ali Rowan and others interested, see Marcion Bible. Marcus Blue has offered a valuable summary analysis of the core problems of even “reconstructing Marcion’s version of the letters in a related topic he created called Marcion Continued . . . .
All points of view, shared respectfully, are welcome here in my TRC, and that includes the view that Marcion’s Apostolos preserves the earliest form of Paul’s letters. Keith P. Myers and I created the Marcion Bible topic when one of Ali Rowan’s early posts on Marcion was lost in a thread no one would likely find. And Ali, out of great passion for her work, has repeated the basics of her take on things in hundreds of comments on Patreon and Circle over the past many months.
As many of you know, my major academic work, Paul’s Ascent to Paradise, focused on Paul’s understanding of his unique mission and message. Yes, “his gospel,” which he calls the “mystery” now revealed to him by the heavenly Jesus, not received from any of those “apostles” before him. To have had Jonathan Z. Smith as my dissertation advisor, chapter by chapter through many drafts, and Morton Smith as outside reader, let’s just say it was a trial by fire. My more general work, Paul and Jesus, or even my “baby” course on the historical Paul, in which I work through the seven early letters in detail form the basis of my understanding of the Greek NT letters we have—plus numerous articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos. The idea that some unnamed and unknown Orthodox Christian interpolator has corrupted Paul’s letters simply does not hold up in my understanding of the historical Paul. After forty-five years with these texts, I know Paul’s ideas, how they flow, how they connect, and how they form an integrated whole. That comes from a close reading of the letters as a whole, not from intuition, beginning with Malherbe when I was seventeen, a freshman in college.
I had to read widely in the history of scholarship on Paul, almost all of it books and authors I had never heard of when I arrived at Chicago thinking I knew quite a bit. It took me eight years to finish my doctorate, because I had no grasp of the history of scholarship and had to begin from scratch—and I had an M.A. when I arrived! Sigh…. Of course, since then much more has come out. Foundational for me are: Albert Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters (German 1911; ET 1912), and most of all The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (German 1930; ET 1931); W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948); Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation of Mankind (German 1954; ET 1959), as well as Christ and Israel: An Interpretation of Romans 9–11 (German 1956; ET 1967); H. J. Schoeps, Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History (German 1959; ET 1961); Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem (German 1965; ET 1992); Keith F. Nickle, The Collection: A Study in Paul’s Strategy (1966); Günther Bornkamm, Paul (German 1969; ET 1971); Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (1976); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977); J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (1980); Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians (1983); Alan F. Segal, Paul the Convert (1990); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans (1994); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew (1994); James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998); John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (2000); Udo Schnelle, Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology (German 2003; ET 2005); David J. Downs, The Offering of the Gentiles: Paul’s Collection for Jerusalem in Its Chronological, Cultural, and Cultic Contexts (2008); E. P. Sanders, Paul: The Apostle’s Life, Letters, and Thought (2015); and Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017). I might also add Jason A. Staples’s two books, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism (2021) and Paul and the Resurrection of Israel (2024). I list these because others might be interested in the paths I have taken.
On Paul’s apocalyptic thought, as I have often written and said, Albert Schweitzer’s The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle is the pioneering work for me on Paul’s apocalyptic eschatology. It is also the pioneering work on the utter failure of the “appointed time has grown short” (1 Cor 7:29) presupposition that underlay all Paul proclaimed and did. This Daniel 9–12 countdown to the End is not one theme among others in Paul. It is the framework that holds everything else together, and the wellspring of Paul’s understanding of his own utterly failed messianic mission. One can’t “save” the good apostle by trying to show that his core faith is the same as that reflected in the double tradition (Q), the book of James, or the Didache.
What is missing in a reconstruction like the Apostolos (I am relying here on Bilby’s Greek/English volume from last year) is, in my view, his unique and specially revealed gospel and his pivotal messianic calling as he understood it from the Hebrew prophets. He IS Isaiah 49…or so he thought. The collection was not an incidental fundraising effort. It was among the things most vital to Paul, the concrete confirmation of his prophetic mission to bring the nations to Zion. In his fertile imagination it fulfilled Isaiah 2, 11, and 49, and guess who was the “kingpin” on which the entire plan of God rested, from Adam to his own day—not Jesus but a man named Saul. Quite some shoes to fill. That gospel and calling rest on a linear eschatology unfolding toward the culmination of history. Paul expected the imminent arrival of Christ from heaven and the resurrection and glorification of the new cosmic “genus” of the children of God. He expected the full number of the nations to come in, and then the salvation of “Kol Yisrael,” all Israel. He anticipated the liberation of the whole creation from its bondage to decay, and God being finally “all in all.” This is a utopian vision of the redemption of Israel, the nations, and the cosmos. None of it can be removed from Paul. Take it away and you do not have an earlier Paul; you have a different figure altogether. And none of his hopes, dreams, or fantasies, regarding himself or a transformed cosmos, ever came about. Quite the opposite. To quote Bob Dylan’s “Song to Woody”: Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ alongm Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn, it looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born
As for Marcion’s version of Luke, I will say only that Sebastian Moll’s The Arch-Heretic Marcion makes the point abundantly clear, and I will leave it at that. I have written only one article that touches these issues: “Israel and the Plan of God: Luke’s Theological Understanding of the Future of Israel,” Journal of the Radical Reformation 2 (1993): 22–38.
Tabor-Israel-and-the-Plan-of-God-JRR-1993.pdf107.26 KB
My study of Paul is motivated by a desire to shed light on the “foolishness” of what he preached, to use his language in an opposite sense. It is a flimsy foundation, yet he remains the most influential figure in human history, far beyond Jesus, unfortunately, at least as I am able to see through the fog of the canonical overlays. I hope I am not idealizing him—that is Jesus— because I somehow want to cling to him out of my cultural upbringing. I am somewhere between Allison and Crossan on that score. But I can live with the tension and ambiguity.
P.S. I (JT) am adding a comment I posted below:
I want to add my own short comment here. I would be more than pleased if it it could be determined that there was in fact in an earlier and more “original” or “authentic” set of ten letters of Paul that directly went back to the historical apostle Paul, and significantly differed from what is missing in Marcion’s collection, though I should add I have only looked at Bilby’s Greek/English 2025 Apostolos in detail and read through BeDuhn and Litwa. I am in regular touch with BeDuhn, we had him visit UNC Charlotte some years ago when I was chair of the Dept. and he and I have worked together on the Reeves festshrift coming out with Brill next year. Litwa wrote me last week that he is moving to NC—so we plan to get together soon. He and I did a program with Derek Lambert three years ago, here is the link:
Marcion and Paul The Central Question.pdf156.7 KB
Against Marcion Priority-A Summary.pdf98.42 KB
Approaches to Marcion Priority Ideas.pdf84.17 KB
Marcion Antitheses Outline.pdf126.48 KB
Bilby Marcion Data Mining Setupdocx.docx17.48 KB
Uta Heil Marcions_Gospel_Editorial_for_special_is.pdf85.43 KB
Robert M. Grant Marcion Biographical Sketch.pdf162.82 KB
End Tabor’s Post and its attachments.
