What Marcion said

The Marcionite church became well-established around Asia Minor and around 140 AD was a formidable challenge to the early church. It counted time from the date when Marcion had broken in Rome with the Judaistic church and called Marcion ‘The Bishop.’ Tertullian wrote, Marcion’s heretical teaching has filled the whole world.’ (adv Marc. 19, Harnack p19) Marcion believed in a Duality – on the one side malicious, petty and cruel punitive deity, and on the other hand merciful love. Even from the most elevating and comforting words of the OT ‘there peers forth, now unmasked, the frightful countenance of the cruel god of the Jews’ (A Harnack, Marcion Gospel of the Alien god 1990, p22)

Ah, how true!

Marcion was a native of Sinope, a Greek commercial city on the Black Sea, born around 85 AD. There is a rumour that he was excommunicated by his own father because he had seduced a virgin. He journeyed to Asia Minor maybe Ephesus and met Bishop Polycarp, who said ‘I recognize you as the firstborn of Satan,’ thus rejecting Marcion’s dualism. He then journeyed to Rome, in his own ship. He gave the Roman Christian church 200,000 sesterces. He wanted to purge the new church of undue Judaistic elements. It is probable that he began composing his great work Antitheses while in Rome, to argue for two different gods. A formal hearing was held in AD144 where Marcion based his argument on Luke 6:43 (‘the good and the corrupt tree’)and 5:36 (new wine, old wineskins’) concerning how the new gospel was not a fulfilment of the OT but stood in antithesis to it. His argument was rejected as ‘the worst kind of heresy’ and his 200,000 sesterces returned.

His church spread through all the provinces of the empire – he was no sectarian, but he established one great church. His Antitheses probably began with the gripping cry of jubilation: ‘O wonder beyond wonders, rapture, power, and amazement is it, that one can say nothing at all about the gospel, now even conceive of it, nor compare it with anything’ – which text, because of its fairly meaningless content, was presumably allowed to endure. Otherwise all trace of his writings have vanished forever from the world. From his critics however it is reckoned he often used the word ‘new’ as in: ‘new God’ ‘the new kingdom’ Christ as ‘new master and proprietor of the elements,’ ‘new miracle’  ‘a novel institution of Christ’ in cancelling the Sabbath commandment, ‘new benevolence of Christ’ etc.

 Marcion would allude to the theft of Egyptian gold and silver vessels by the departing Hebrews as showing the ethically-depraved deity guiding them. His view of the OT was that it did have some things in it that were inspired by Christ, however in general a fiery angel who fell away from the deity and became ‘superintendent of evil’ (‘praeses mali’) had spoken to Moses out of a burning bush and led astray the Jewish people: The same fiery angel, the gainsayer and lying spirit, is the source of the book of lies, the Old Testament, which is full of fables, absurdities, contradictions and factual and logical impossibilities.’ (Harnack p.120)

It required all of the energy of the early church to suppress the Marcionite churches. Still in the 5^th century there were whole Marcionite villages in Cyprus (E. Blackman, Marcion and his Influence, p.4). Marcionites allowed women to hold office in a church. His church was anti-heirarchical, all members were equal. Almost every prominent Christian writer in the 2^nd half of the 2^nd century, from Justin to Tertullian, felt obliged to publish a book against Marcion. It was the greatest heresy! Tertullian wrote five books against Marcion.

NB -somebody reckons Marcion is Canonized as a saint, in AD 2012! Quite right too...
Under Covenant of One-Heaven (Pactum De Singularis Caelum) by Special Qualification shall be known as a Saint, Seymour Light is glad that someone agrees with him..... That site is an

"Organisation for the unified understanding, revelation and truth of Evil" - nothing is more important than that, that is for sure!

There is a Marcionite Research Library with relevant scriptures.

Simone Weil

The great Marcionite dualist of the 20^th century has to be Simone Weil. We quote some of her words here -

     I have never been able to understand, how it is possible for a reasonable mind to regard the Jehovah of the Bible and the Father who is invoked in the Gospel as one and the same being. 

      She refused baptism into the Catholic church because ‘Roman Catholicism was too Jewish.’ She had ‘vainly sought for a Catholic priest who disavowed the God of Saul:’ ‘Do you know that if Saul is punished by the Eternal, it is not because he killed all the Amalekites, including the children and women who passed over the tip of his dagger, but because he killed all except one; he pardoned the king.

     The curse of Israel weighs upon Christianity. Atrocities, inquisition, extermination of heretics … that was Israel. Capitalism, that was Israel.

    The Jews – that handful of uprooted individuals – have been responsible for the uprooting of the whole terrestrial globe. The part they played in Christianity turned Christianity into something uprooted with respect to its own past…The Jews are the poison of uprooting personified.

      The church ‘owing to its historical origin, has been unable to purge itself of its Judaic element.’

      …But Israel had, nevertheless, to have some part in God. All that part in God that is possible without spirituality, without the supernatural (there can be no supernatural life without the Incarnation). Israel’s spirituality was exclusively collective. It is because of this ignorance, this darkness of understanding that it was the ‘chosen people.’ Thus it is possible to understand the words of Isaiah: ‘I have hardened their hearts so that they shall not understand my word.’

      It is for this reason that everything in Israel is contaminated with sin. 

      Solomon: Everything is of a polluted and atrocious character, as if designedly so, beginning with Abraham inclusive, right down through all his descendants (except in the case of some of the prophets: Daniel, Isaiah; and others???) = as though to indicate perfectly clearly: Beware! That way lies evil. A people chosen in order to be rendered blind, to be the executioner of Christ.

Here’s a longer and more obscure quote by her:

      God makes Moses and Joshua purely temporal promises, at a time when the Egyptians were intently concerned with the soul’s eternal salvation. The Hebrews, having rejected the Egyptian revelation, got the god they deserved – a carnal and collective God who never spoke to anyone’s soul, up to the time of the exile. (Unless in the Psalms…?) Among all the characters in the Old Testament accounts, Daniel’s is the only pure one (apart from Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisidek and Job). It is not surprising that a people composed of fugitive slaves, or rather the children of fugitive slaves, led forth to take possession by a series of massacres of a land whose soft climate and natural fertility gave it a paradise-like quality, and which had been organised on a flourishing basis by civilisations in whose labours they had taken no part, and which they proceeded to destroy – that such a people was unable to produce anything very good. This was certainly not the way to establish the reign of good on this little portion of earth. To speak of ‘God as educator’ in connection with this people is a heinous sort of joke.

      Is it surprising that there should be so much evil in a civilisation-our own-which is corrupted at its roots, in its very inspiration, by this atrocious lie? The curse of Israel weighs upon Christendom. The atrocities, the extermination of heretics and of unbelievers – all this was Israel. Capitalism was Israel –  (and is so still, up to a certain point…)

 But, there were some OT texts she did approve of -

    The beauty of the world was expressed in  - Isaiah, Job, Song of Solomon, Daniel, Tobias, parts of Ezekiel, Psalms, Book of Wisdom, beginning of Genesis.

We cannot agree with her judgement concerning the Book of Isaiah, which thunders with dreadful curses towards the Earth, moaning about everyone and everything: there can be no more racist tract in existence.

Again -

    Thus it (‘the beauty of the world’) inspired, in the Old Testament, the Book of job,.. most of the Psalms, the Song of songs, the sapiential books .. and what is called the ‘second Isaiah,’ and some of the minor prophets, and the books of Daniel and Tobias. Almost all the rest of the Old Testament is a tissue of horrors.  (to J.W., 1942, Letters p160)

     English-language books about Weil seek to deplore, apologise and cover-up this aspect of her work, for obvious reasons, whereas in fact it is the most important part. It would be good if someone could examine her French writings for a fuller exegesis instead of just the above scrappy notes.

      We’ve quoted how Simone Weil had ‘vainly sought for a Catholic priest’ who would express disapproval of the genocidal mass-murder as described by the  Saul/David story. 

      Instead, she only got to hear the wittering of theologians.