The Forgotten Creed by Stephen J. Patterson

Author:Stephen J. Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

No Longer Jew

Exactly how or when the Jesus movement ceased to be a part of Judaism and became a new religion attractive mostly to non-Jews is still something of a mystery. It did not happen in a single moment, but gradually, over time.69 But if you ask about the role played by Paul and his letters, the story probably begins with Marcion.

Marcion of Sinope was a prominent Christian leader, active in the first half of the second century.70 Today he is remembered as an early heretic, but that would be twenty/twenty hindsight. In the late first and early second centuries there were, as yet, no heretics. Early Christianity was a soup of ideas swirling through communities in the midst of much labored social formation. Marcion was simply a very powerful and influential early Christian teacher and organizer.

Marcion was a Greek, who had little interest in being part of a Jewish community. After the great Jewish rebellion in 66 to 70 ce, the Roman East saw a series of Jewish uprisings, culminating in the Bar Kokhba rebellion, which broke out in 132, when Marcion was in his forties and about to move to Rome. In 135 the emperor Hadrian crushed Simon bar Kokhba and his followers and sacked Jerusalem a second time. This time, though, the Romans leveled the temple mount and constructed a new Roman city on the remains, calling it Aelia Capitolina. Jews were banned from the new city—the beginning of a long diaspora that would last until the founding of the modern state of Israel. Practicing the Jewish religion became an act of sedition. In that environment, non-Jews, like Marcion, wanted nothing to do with Jews. But Marcion was born into a Christian family in Asia Minor. He could not avoid the question of his own roots. Was Christianity a form of Judaism, or something new entirely? Marcion was one of the first—perhaps the first—to claim that Christianity was a completely new religion. He found justification for this view in Paul and in the Jewish scriptures, what we think of today as the Old Testament.

While other Christians saw in the Old Testament myriad veiled references to Jesus Christ, Marcion read it literally. He thought the Old Testament was talking about what it is talking about: the creation, a covenant with God, the Law, prophets railing against injustice, and so forth. He concluded that the God of the Law and the prophets was not a God wholly good, but good only in the way human beings are good—sometimes good. He is a God whose presence in the world brings both happiness and suffering. He is a just God, but not the God of pure love. He is the creator of the world we know and can see, not unlike the creator, or Demiurgos, posited by Plato in the Timeaus. Genesis, he argued, speaks of this God, the creator God. But Marcion believed that there is another God, the “unknown God,” who stands outside of creation, unsullied and un-implicated by it.

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