Abraham's Curse by Bruce Chilton

Author:Bruce Chilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385525602
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2008-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

In embracing his picture of God paying ransom to Satan, Origen introduced into Christian theology a conception that originated, not with the teaching of Catholics, but with a Gnostic thinker. In second-century Rome, Marcion, a bishop from Sinope in Asia Minor, established a radical new form of Christianity, portraying the god of the Israelite Scriptures as false, a demiurge compared to the true God, the Father of Jesus. Predictably, this led him to eliminate the Old Testament from use in his communities, and to cut out what he considered Jewish materials from the New Testament. That textual surgery is what scholars usually discuss when they consider Marcion. They also argue about whether or not to call Marcion a Gnostic. But although his system of thought is not as complex as in many of the writings of Nag Hammadi, his approach to the whole issue of God by means of the false demiurge makes it apparent the term “Gnostic” can be used with caution to characterize him. In fact, however, Marcion’s most enduring contribution is not to the ancient debate about the true content of Scriptures or to Gnosticism, but to the Christian understanding—both Catholic and Gnostic—of how Jesus’ death freed humanity from sin.

According to Marcion, who was not inclined to attribute even provisional value to the sacrificial system of ancient Israel, the crucifixion liberated people from the demiurge who had created the physical world and produced the Hebrew Bible. According to his theory, the ancient equivalent of René Girard’s, the demiurge was compelled to acknowledge that he had arranged to kill an innocent man, and in compensation he had to free all those who believe in Christ. Jesus becomes the ransom that buys believers out of their slavery to the demiurge and frees them for the true God. If you put Satan in place of the demiurge, this is Origen’s conception. Before the “ransom” theory was a Catholic doctrine, it had been a Gnostic teaching for a century.

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