#marcionism

It's plenty of other things too.

When we are arguing that Antizionism is Antisemitism, I at least used to fall into the trap of thinking Antizionism is the only thing associated with Antisemitism that Leftists fail to see as being inseparable from Antisemitism at least via Guilt by Association. But I've come to realize it's really not.

First there is being Anti Circumcision.

It's incredibly normal to see Leftists and even Libertarians argue for making Infant Circumcision illegal with no religious exemptions because "it's a procedure the Baby can't consent to" and I'm like "so is having the Ambilocal Cord cut".

The Medical arguments against Circumcision are all nonsense, actual studies keep showing Circumcision to be medically beneficial, that includes some benefits only useful when it's done soon after birth like how it reduces the risk of UTI.

The first time I ever read an Anti-Circumcision article it made an absurd claim then when Jews perform Circumcisions the Rabbis lick the blog off the babies circumcizer member. I instantly recognized the invocation of Blood Libel.

Just look at the scandal involving that Silent Hill Fandom Wiki Editor to see how quickly fixating on a dislike of Circumcision leads to Conspiratorial madness.

As a Gentile and a Paulian Christian, I don't believe Paul ever intended for his followers to stop Circumcising newborns. All of the allegedly Anti-Circumcision stuff in the New Testament is solely about the issue of imposing it on adult converts. In fact as a Credo-Baptist I see there being a direct link between the origins of Infant-Baptism and the abandonment of Circumcision, when you're doing Infant Circumcision what Infant Baptism is supposed to do becomes redundant. Plus most of the argument for there being a Biblical Basis for Infant Baptism is tied to the false doctrine that Baptism replaces Circumcision. The only time Paul talks about Baptism and Circumcision near each other is when talking about how for both the physical ritual is a symbol something spiritual, it is absolutely not saying one replaces the other.

The other issue I want to talk about is Marcionism.

People who literally believe in the fullness of Marcionite of Gnostic Theology are a niche minority. But they do exist, I sometimes watch a YouTube video made by one, and in one the Gnostic said "you know YHWH is a bad due because he loves Blood, the bloody bloody blood" once again people can't stop themselves from evoking Blood Libel.

However mild Marcionism is way more common then you think. Whenever an Atheist specifically uses the name YHWH for the God they view as Evil. Whenever Christians God acted differently in the "Old Testament".

The gist of the Marcionite way of thinking about The Bible is pretty mainstream actually.

Supersessionism, sometimes called “replacement theology,” is the doctrine that claims that Christianity and/or the Catholic Church has superseded or replaced the Jewish people as God's covenant people. It asserts that the “old” covenant that God had with Israel has been replaced by the “new” covenant in Jesus, and that Jews are no longer God's chosen people and are rejected by God. Only conversion to Christianity via Baptism can fully restore them to God's love and acceptance. 

The French Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor Jules Isaac sketched out this Christian theological anti-Judaism that had been an integral part of Christian teaching since it began in the second century, reached its full maturation in the early Middle Ages, and continued until its complete rejection by the Second Vatican Council in its document Nostra Aetate (“In Our Age,” 1965). In Isaac's book, The Teaching of Contempt (1962), he details this teaching of contempt in ten main themes, explaining how it: 

​Promulgates an erroneous, univocal, and stereotypical view of the religious and ethical world of the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament). 

Denies the indebtedness of Christianity to the religious genius of Judaism. 

Denigrates first-century Palestinian Judaism. 

Teaches that the dispersion of the Jews from the land of Israel was a divine punishment for their rejection of Jesus. 

​Fails to educate Christian people about the polemical (and intra-Jewish) character of certain texts of the Christian Scriptures (the New Testament), including the pejorative invoking of “the Jews” and caricatures of the Pharisees. 

Characterizes Jesus in ways that reject his Jewishness and his fidelity to his Jewish tradition. 

​Conveys the erroneous impression of universal antipathy toward Jesus by Jews of his time, when in actuality only a small number of Jews—mainly the Temple priesthood—opposed Jesus. 

Employs a singular, messianic interpretation of the religious motives of the Jews of Jesus's time (that is, that only a messianic expectation was prominent in the religious imaginations of the people and that only one particular understanding of messianism prevailed in Jewish belief). 

Stereotypes Jewish leadership, and exonerates the Roman officials in the death of Jesus. 

Charges the Jews with deicide, a charge “murderous…,” as Isaac wrote, “in its generation of hatred and crime but also…radically false.”

History of the Development of Supersessionism 

All the controversial passages in the Christian Scriptures regarding Jews, which were an in-house family argument within the Jewish community, were misunderstood in Christian understanding by the early second century, when the majority of Jesus's followers were then converted Gentiles with little or no knowledge of Jewish religion, culture, and history. ...

In this context, Marcion, a non-Jew, born in Pontus on the Black Sea, who came from a high social class and was well-educated, arrived in Rome about the year 140 CE. He was accepted into the Christian community there and began teaching. His dominant theme was that of the discontinuity between the Law, that is, the Torah, and the Gospel story concerning Jesus.

He taught that the Old Testament was not fulfilled by, but abolished by, Jesus. The God of the Jews, according to Marcion, was a god without mercy who was vengeful, who severely punished, and who was in no way related to the God of Jesus, whose father was a God of love, forgiveness, and salvation. 

Odds are good that if you think you understand early Christianity, you don’t understand early Christianity. This lecture lays out what early Christianity was actually like, and how it was far, far more complicated and diverse than most of us were led to believe.

‘Marcion, an early church theologian active in the first part of the second century, taught that the God of the Old Testament, typified by wrath, was distinct from the loving God of the New. ...As a professor of biblical studies, I know that his legacy continues.

This year in particular, I have found some blog posts of this semester’s students surprising and unsettling, even upsetting.  I am co-teaching a course called “Scripture”... In the posts for one of the first classes, several students commented on the OT’s angry God — their language — highlighting a small selection of texts that they had read, such as the conquest of the land of Israel by Joshua. But none of these students balanced this presentation with other texts that they also knew, such as the book of Jonah, whose very theme is God’s compassion for all. 

At the beginning of the next class, I called out this problem, and even showed the entire class a website, which, using principles as selective as Marcion, highlights the loving God of the OT and the fierce and vengeful God of the New. ...It starts with this contrast: 

God [in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament] is compassionate and slow to anger: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6) vs. Jesus says he has come to sow violence: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.’ (Mt 10: 34-39). 

It continues with a series of similar contrasts, and should be shown by all teachers of the Bible in one of the first classes. This post by Notre Dame’s Gary Anderson is also very helpful.  ...’

- Marc Zvi Brettler

______

Further reading:

This quote by Amy-Jill Levine about the God of love and anger is pertinent to this conversation:  . “[A common error Christian preachers make when they talk about the Judaism of Jesus’ day is] that Jews believe in a God of wrath and Christianity invented the God of love. When I get that from my students I’m inclined to tell them, ‘Fine, the Lord is my shepherd, his mercy endures forever, but you’re condemned to the outer darkness with wailing and gnashing of teeth.’ . God is a God of love throughout both testaments… but God is not a ‘don’t worry, be happy’ sort of deity. We have certain responsibilities. When we do not show the love of neighbor that Leviticus commands us and that Jesus reiterates, God has good old righteous anger.” .

An old post of mine that goes into Marcionism at length

This scholarly article on Marcionism in Christian preaching & how to combat it

Post about supersessionism and how to uproot it in your own beliefs (supersessionism = the idea that Christians have “superseded” Jews as “God’s People” & that Christianity makes Judaism irrelevant / replaces Judaism)

Response to a person asking whether Christianity is inherently antisemitic, with links to resources for recognizing and uprooting antisemitism in your beliefs & faith communities 

Title: What Did Marcion Believe? Channel: ReligionForBreakfast (Dr. Andrew Henry) Length: 7:37

Introduces Marcion as one of the most famous and hated heretics of his time; everything we know about him comes from criticisms written against him.

Is the Old Testament Inspired?: The Case Against Marcion

By Award-Winning Author Eli Kittim

——-

Is the Old Testament Uninspired Because it Doesn’t Mention Jesus?

Marcion of Sinope (ca. 85 – 160 CE) preached that Jesus’ teachings, especially those on love, were completely at odds with the Old Testament (OT) revelations regarding the God of the Jews, whom he saw as legalistic and punitive, with no connection at all to the essential message of the New Testament (NT). One key Marcionite objection to the authority of the Jewish Bible is that the name of Jesus is never once mentioned there. However, the exclusivity of Jesus in the NT does not preclude the inspiration of the Hebrew Bible. The notion that the father cannot be known apart from Jesus has absolutely nothing to do with the question of the OT’s canonicity. For example, Acts 4.12 says:

Salvation is found in no one else, for there is

no other name under heaven given to

mankind by which we must be saved.

The fact that the name of Jesus is not found in the OT has no bearing on whether this collection of ancient Hebrew writings is inspired or not. After all, the name of Jesus (Ιησοῦς) is found in the Septuagint’s Book of Joshua, an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible: https://www.academic-bible.com/en/online-bibles/septuagint-lxx/read-the-bible-text/bibel/text/lesen/?tx_buhbibelmodul_bibletext%5Bscripture%5D=Joshua+4

At any rate, these are two fundamentally different questions. The former has to do with Christology (i.e. the study of Christ), whereas the latter has to do with Biblical theology (i.e. the study of the Bible)!

The former has to to do with “Theology proper,” that is to say, with the exclusivity of Jesus as the unique preexistent Word of God (the Logos) through whom “All things came into being” (John 1.1-4), or as the “only begotten Son” (1 John 4.9) who prior to his incarnation “was in the form of God” (Phil. 2.6). Marcionites will therefore argue that Christ is the *only one* who is capable of revealing the Father, given that “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1.15) “through whom he [the Father] also created the worlds” (Heb. 1.1-2). For example, John 14.6 reads:

Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth

and the life. No one comes to the Father

except through me.’

But this declaration is not a proof-text demonstrating that the OT is not authoritative simply because it doesn’t mention Jesus’ divinity. That has to do with progressive revelation, the idea that revelation is given a little at a time.

Holding to a high Christology has little to do with whether or not the Hebrew Bible is inspired. That’s an entirely different issue involving Biblical theology, Pneumatology, and the like. So, the fact that Jesus is not mentioned by name in the Hebrew Bible is not a sufficient reason to dismiss this collection of Books as uninspired.

——-

Is the OT Uncanonical?

If the OT is not authoritative, as some Marcionites have argued, then why would the NT writers quote extensively from an “uninspired” book? And what would be the purpose of the standard *Biblical canon* if the NT authors extensively quoted from so-called “uninspired” books? In other words, if the OT is not authoritative, it would *contradict* the “canon of scripture” principle in which only Biblically-inspired books are accepted into the canon. Not to mention that the OT is widely viewed as authoritative by the NT precisely because it is included as a source of prophetic predictions in many different places, notably in Matthew 24, and especially in the Book of Revelation!

As a matter of fact, the NT authors insist that the OT is inspired! For example, at the time of the composition of the second letter to Timothy, there was no NT Scripture as yet. So, when the Biblical writers referred to Scripture, with the exception of two instances——namely, 2 Pet. 3.16, wherein Paul’s letters are referred to as “Scripture,” and 1 Tim. 5.18, in which Luke’s gospel is referred to as “Scripture”——they always meant the Hebrew Bible. The proof that they considered the Hebrew Bible to be *inspired* is in Second Timothy 3.16, which reads:

All scripture is inspired [πᾶσα γραφὴ

Θεόπνευστος] by God and is useful for

teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for

training in righteousness.

——-

Does Intertextuality Prove that the OT is Inspired?

All the books of the NT are constantly borrowing and quoting extensively from the OT, a “Book” without which the NT would be lacking a foundation. If we were to remove all those OT quotations, the NT would be insupportable, not to mention incomprehensible!

So, whoever thinks that the OT is uncanonical and uninspired is clearly not familiar with the heavy literary dependence of the NT on the OT (i.e. a process known as “intertextuality”). If you were to open up a critical edition of the NT, you’d be astounded by how much of the OT is actually quoted in the NT. Prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, and Daniel abound all over the place. The Book of Revelation, in particular, is mostly based on a reorganization of OT prophetic material from Zechariah, Joel, Amos, Daniel, and many others. A brief look at a *Chain-Reference-Bible* would quickly illustrate this fact: https://archive.org/details/ThompsonChainReferenceBible/page/n47/mode/2up

So, the proposal to remove this material——-suggested by Marcion of Sinope and, to a lesser extent, by some modern day preachers and closet Marcionites, such as Andy Stanley——is rather absurd as the NT would be without any foundation or justification concerning messianic, eschatological, or prophetic terminology. For example, various questions would inevitably arise: Where did the NT get the idea of the day of the Lord? Or the idea of the resurrection of the dead? Or that of the great tribulation? Or the concept of the Antichrist? Or the notion of the Messiah? All these concepts are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Bible!

If the OT is not authoritative, then the verbal agreements between the OT and the NT would equally disqualify those same statements as inauthentic NT references. For example, Paul quotes Isaiah verbatim. Many of the Jesus sayings are from the OT. If, say, a Marcionite were to claim that the OT is not inspired, then he would have to concede that some of Paul’s and Jesus’ sayings are equally uninspired, since they are derived from the OT. In other words, unbeknownst to the Marcionites, in rejecting the OT, they would also be rejecting the NT as well!

For example, most of the Matthew-24 prophetic material is based on the OT: from the abomination of desolation (Mt. 24.15; cf. Dan. 9.27) to the time when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light” (Mt.24.29; cf. Joel 3:15). If these OT prophecies were not inspired or authoritative, then they would certainly not have been used in the NT prophetic literature!

The explicit approval of OT passages as authoritative by the NT writers, and especially by Paul and Jesus——as well as the explicit message that “All scripture is inspired by God” (2 Tim. 3.16), which obviously includes the OT, given that It has been heavily employed in the NT——argues for the inspiration of the OT!

——-

As for Marcionism, it really involves a syncretism of Christianity and Gnosticism, with all the extra-biblical distortions that this fusion entails, such as the assumed existence of two deities (a lesser and a higher one), and the evil inherent in the material world. These are two diametrically opposed belief-systems between the monotheism of the NT and the polytheism of the Gnostics!

——-

Conclusion

Thus, Marcion, who was an anti-Semite, not only rejected Yahweh as a lesser, evil god, but he went on to dismiss the entire OT as if it were completely uninspired. He felt that it lacked the extravagant love story of the NT, which was ultimately derived from the Supreme God and father of Jesus Christ. He thought that these two testaments pertained to two fundamentally different gods. And so he urged Christians to steer clear of the OT because he considered it to be the product of an inferior deity. However, this is not the view of the NT authors, nor is it part of mainstream NT theology, soteriology, ecclesiology, or eschatology.

What is more, Marcion obviously did not critically assess both testaments to fully explore the extent to which *intertextuality* was involved within these manuscripts (i.e. the literary dependence of one testament on the other) and how inextricably linked they really were! Therefore, a rejection of the entire OT is simultaneously a rejection of many portions of the NT, including many of Jesus’ sayings. Such a separation would render the NT completely useless both theologically and Christologically, if not also eschatologically. Marcion’s claims would therefore undermine Christianity’s overall integrity, and this is probably why Marcion was denounced as a heretic and was excommunicated by the church of Rome ca. 144 CE.

To be fair, Marcion had the right idea, but the wrong approach. It’s true that there’s a radical shift in the NT from an active obedience to the 10-commandments to a passive acceptance of God’s Grace; from an external circumcision of the flesh to an internal circumcision of the heart (and the consequent indwelling of the Holy Spirit). Contrary to the Aleph and Tav in the Hebrew Scriptures, we are suddenly introduced to the NT revelation of God in Jesus Christ as the Alpha and Omega (using the first and last letters of the Greek rather than the Hebrew alphabet). After all, the NT is written exclusively in Greek, by Greeks, and written predominantly to Greek communities within the Roman empire. Paul himself maintains that we are “justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law” (e.g. Gal. 2.16). So, there is very little here that is Jewish!

But although the NT is a uniquely Greek “Book,” in which the name of Yahweh is never once mentioned, nevertheless the Hebrew Bible is still its foundation, without which the former would lose not only its historical lineage and theological context but also its reliability, validity, and, ultimately, its credibility!

So, if you haven't seen my recent blog post and this is something that interests you; go check it out, its a couple posts down on my blog from this one. 

This morning I came across a new word on Wikipedia (my source for this post), and it resonated a bit with me, although I still am unsure of exactly what it means. Let’s find out. 

This is the point where reading the previous blog post will get you a bit caught up with my current theistic beliefs and just where I’m at in general on this topic. 

Define Marcionism : 

Marcionism was an Early Christian dualist belief system that originated in the teachings of Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144.[1]

“In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent by the Monad to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge.”

For context “Marcion was the son of a bishop of Sinope in Pontus.”

This is where I really find myself relating to this system. 

“Marcion believed that Jesus was the savior sent by God, and Paul the Apostle was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible and the God of Israel.”

“Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament.”

“Marcionism, similar to Gnosticism, depicted the God of the Old Testament as a tyrant or demiurge (see also God as the Devil).”

Marcionists reject the Old Testament, specifically the God depicted in the Old Testament. 

My situation seems to be rejecting that the Bible is actually written/inspired by the Christian God. It’s just genuinely so inconsistent and I cannot get behind that. The Christian God is supposedly Love, yet the Bible depicts otherwise. There are just too many things that don’t sit right with me, the teachings in the Bible don’t align with the God that I was taught about or the God that I feel within my mind. 

So which do you let go of? I really don’t know. That’s why I found this Marcionism point of view interesting. Rejecting the Old Testament, and embracing the God and/or the Spirit who is depicted in the New Testament, all-forgiving and all-loving. 

My arising issue though is still this: The Bible was written by men, human men. Even the New Testament. I just can’t see how it is free of flaws and human desires. It’s also a dualist belief system. 

Which makes me question this, does an opposing spiritual force exist? Does Satan, the Devil, exist? I have no idea, I don’t think I believe in Hell so I also don’t know if this ‘evil being’ exists. I think that this adds a layer to my beliefs and ideas but I don’t think it encompasses it thoroughly.  

With Love & Light