Marcionites vs. orthodoxy

I should really be writing a paper on Tertullian�s response to that heretic Marcion and his followers, but my brain is on fuzz mode. I have completed the required readings though�.

Weird, Marcionites made quite the splash back in the second century. So much of a splash, that even after Marcion was excommunicated by the Church and all his writings were branded heretical, the churches that he founded in Asia Minor continued to grow and thrive well into the fifth century. In fact, for a while there in the second and third centuries, Marcionite Christianity was the main form of Christianity in the Asia Minor region.

For those of you who haven�t a clue what I am on about I shall give a quick synopsis of what I learned over the past few mornings.

Marcionite Christianity rejected that Christianity and Judaism had anything in common. There are 2 gods, the one of the Old Testament, who created the material world and all the matter therein as told in the story of Genesis, and gave Moses the Laws to follow. This Jewish God was seen as vengeful and just to a fault. The new Christian God was not of the material real at all, he sent Jesus (who was completely divine and only appeared to be human) to pay the debt of humanity�s sins to the Jewish god and provide humanity with a new god to follow that promoted mercy, love and tolerance.

Well, you can imagine that this line of thinking cause more than a few alarms to sound in the theological community of the time (and it still does today). If Jesus was never really human, then he never really died for humanity�s sins; therefore he never really paid the debt owed to God (the Jewish God and the Christian God is the one true God in this scenario). If this is so, then Jesus sure didn�t resurrect three days after his non-material death and the whole core of Christianity as we know it unravels faster than you can say �heretic�.

No resurrection? You might as well say that the last two thousand years was a big lie and Christianity was a long practical joke played on the Western world (of course there are many who might think the lies and practical joke stand true even without Marcion�s deviations on what we now know to be orthodox Christianity). See, if Jesus didn�t resurrect, then how are mere mortals supposed to pull off a resurrection at the last judgement to prove their righteousness to the glorified Jesus and gain passage into the Kingdom of God? Hell, what if Jesus (never being mortal, never resurrecting, and not being from the God that created the world) doesn�t bother to show up to the apocalypse? He has nothing invested in it, no real ties to this world, even the God that sent him has zero to do with this pathetic material realm. Why should either of them care? Why take the time and energy to wage a holy war (in the true sense, not the modern day political sense) that has nothing to do with them?

Marcion obviously either did not think his theory through properly, or thought that this new merciful god was a lot nicer than anyone would expect from an other worldly deity with no connection to our measly existence. Either way, he was a real threat to the proto-orthodox Christians of the second century, and I need to write a paper on him.

�

�

Black and white - Colour

Rant and/or Rave at will