Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. By Judith M. Lieu.

Abstract

Having read this book, doing research on Marcion is like chasing a phantom, yet a race with unbelievable sweat and input disproportionate to the effort. In this, present-day scholarship on Marcion can be compared to the heyday of the first half of the nineteenth century. In the last five years only, over half a dozen monographs have appeared, amongst which are Sebastian Moll, The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Tübingen, 2010), followed by his Die christliche Eroberung des Alten Testaments (Berlin, 2010) (missing in the bibliography); Jason BeDuhn, The First New Testament: Marcion’s Scriptural Canon (Salem, OR, 2013); Ulrike Röhl, Der Paulusschüler Markion (Marburg, 2014) (missing in the bibliography); Matthias Klinghardt’s two-volume reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel Das älteste Evangelium (Göttingen, 2015); and now the volume under review here. Such output is also reminiscent of the decades in which Marcion was active, namely around the mid-second century. Although most of their own texts are lost, we still know of many authors who have written to, on, and against Marcion within the first 50 years after his death in the 160s. The list reads almost like a Who’s Who of early Christian writers (Justin, Rhodo, Dionysius of Corinth, Theophilus of Antioch, Philippus of Gortyna, Anonymus Presbyter, Irenaeus of Lyon, Modestus, Miltiades, Proclus, Melito of Sardis, Bardesanes, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Canon Muratori). The list underpins the race for the riddle. Because following the most recent research, the breadth and length of research on Marcion runs contrary not only to what we know about this teacher, but also to what he has contributed to church history. According to Lieu’s monograph of over 500 pages ‘Marcion survives within the tradition as, and only as, a heretic; if he had not been so constructed his name would have long been forgotten’ (p. 433), and on more than double the number of pages Klinghardt makes his case that Marcion has written and left us next to nothing, as he neither wrote, nor tempered, nor adapted an earlier Gospel which he simply used and found (presumably like him simply using Paul’s Letters), and, consequently, Marcion had not published anything else (except a letter, mentioned by Tertullian). We are left with a conundrum, an enormous Wirkungsgeschichte but no actor, a no-man, no-author. For almost two thousand years, after people had made him a heretic, they were chasing this phantom, perhaps, like a forerunner and then antithesis to the wandering Jew Joseph or Ahasver.