John Marshall Misunderstanding The New Paul Marcions Transformation of The Sonderzeit Paul PDF

Misunderstanding the New Paul: Marcion's Transformation of
the Sonderzeit Paul

John W. Marshal
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2012,

pp. 1-29 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.2012.0001
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Misunderstanding the New Paul:
Marcion’s Transformation of
the Sonderzeit Paul
John W. Marshall
The study of Marcion’s reception of Paul has not kept pace with changes
in the historical-critical interpretation of Paul’s letters. This study seeks to
understand Marcion’s view of the future of the Jewish people by means of the
“two paths” interpretation of Paul. I argue that Marcion’s doctrine of the two
Christs both transforms and preserves something of Paul’s conception of the
special way into salvation that he offered to Gentiles. Marcion’s transforma-
tion of Paul consists in the ubiquitous second-century containment or removal
of Paul’s intense eschatology. Marcion participates in this wider movement in
second-century Christianity but stands as a rare instance of preserving distinct
salvific paths for Jews and Gentiles.
Harnack’s dictum that “in the second century only one Christian—
Marcion—took the trouble to understand Paul; but it must be added
that he misunderstood him”1 stands as a fence, defending Paul from the
“heretic” who arguably had the strongest claim upon the apostle’s legacy
in the middle of the second century.2 Harnack’s enigmatic statement also
pulls Marcion towards the nineteenth-century Lutheran form into which
This article has benefited by the generous criticism of John Gager, Marcus Ohler,
and the anonymous reviewers of JECS. Their assistance in sharpening my argument
does not imply full support of the analysis offered herein.
1. Adolf von Harnack, “Marcion,” Encyclopaedia Britannica 15 (1888), 534.
2. On the extensive prevalence of Marcionite forms of Christianity in the second
century, see Joseph B. Tyson, “Anti-Judaism in Marcion and His Opponents,” Studies
in Christian-Jewish Relations 1 (2005): 196–98, esp. 198; Stephen Wilson, Related
Strangers: Jews and Christians 70–170 CE (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006),
208; Heikki Räisänen, “Marcion,” in A Companion to Second-Century Christian
“Heretics,” ed. Antti Marjanen and Petri Luomanen (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 101, 119.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 20:1, 1–29 © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
2 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
Harnack rehabilitated him.3 Tertullian understood the need for such a

fence when he called Paul “the apostle of the heretics”4 and undertook to
claim later in his polemic that the apostle rightly belonged to Tertullian,
just as Christ belonged to Tertullian, rather than Marcion.5 Both the great
modern German scholar and the tireless North African heresiologist (and
heretic) undertook a complex process of retrieval, transformation, and
domestication. The entire history of the reception of Paul seems to be a
history of misunderstanding (mixed of course with understanding). I want
to suggest that this is almost inevitable, but also that the shape that we
understand the misunderstanding to take depends on the changing char-
acter of what it is to “understand” Paul: the account of second-century
misunderstanding requires revision because our understanding of Paul has
changed immensely since Harnack’s quip.
This proposition, that analysis of reception is conditioned by an inter-
pretation of the object being received, is the methodological problem that
drives the present inquiry. For this reason, the data considered here are
two-fold: on the one hand, the most influential reading of Paul in the sec-
ond century, namely that of Marcion of Sinope, and on the other hand,
the less influential reading of Paul known as the “two covenant” reading,
or the Sonderweg reading.6 The argument concerning these data is that
3. R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion, On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay

on the Development of Radical Paulinist Theology in the Second Century (Chico,
CA: Scholars Press, 1984), xv; Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining
Struggle (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 25–26; Räisänen,
“Marcion,” 102; Wolfram Kinzig, “Ein Ketzer und sein Konstruktor,” in Marcion und
seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirking / Marcion and His Impact on Church History,
ed. Gerhard May and Katharina Greschat with Martin Meiser, Text und Untersu-
chungennzure Geschichte der altchristliche Literatur 150 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2002), 253–74.
4. Tertullian, Marc. 3.5.5 (ed. and trans. Ernest Evans, Tertullian: Adversus Mar-
cionem [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972], 180): Haereticorum apostolus (my trans.).
Evans, Tertullian: Adversus Marcionem, 181, translates it as “the heretics’ own apos-
tle.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are Evans’s.
5. Tertullian, Marc. 5.1.8 (ed. and trans. Evans 512–13): “He is my apostle, as also
Christ is mine” (Habe nunc et apostolum de meo sicut et Christum).
6. Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver, BC: University of British Colum-
bia Press, 1987); John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985); Stanley Kent Stowers, A Rereading of Romans (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1997); John G. Gager, Reinventing Paul (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002); Terence L. Donaldson, “Jewish Christianity, Israel’s Stum-
bling and the Sonderweg Reading of Paul,” JSNT 29 (2006): 27–54. In some ways
the present article is an exploration of a footnote in Wilson, Related Strangers. Note
78 on p. 218 / 379 gestures to the parallel between certain views of Paul and Mar-
cion’s double Christology.
MARSHALL / SONDERZEIT PAUL 3
Marcion has preserved—and just as surely transformed—a key theme in

Paul of Tarsus’s thought, that the means by which Gentiles enter the ben-
efits of God’s covenants with humanity through Noah and Abraham does
not define the means by which Jews relate to their God in theory and prac-
tice. This is an echo of the Sonderzeit interpretation of Paul, which is more
commonly known as the Sonderweg, or two covenant, interpretation, but
this latter designation distorts Paul’s thought. My argument then concerns
a problem with two unknowns. Barring sufficient data, there will be more
than one coherent solution to such a problem. In the data-sparse territory
of early Christianity—in this case, the span from Paul to Marcion—we
must test such solutions against each other.
The New Pauls
The “New Perspective”

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a responsible account of the
transformation in scholarly understandings of Paul since Harnack wrote
his great opus characterizing Marcion as a Pauline reformer of Christian-
ity in the manner of Luther or Augustine. Instead, I want to gesture to
the major transformation in the past fifty years and zero in on a particu-
lar reading generated mainly in the 1980s and beyond. In 1960, Krister
Stendhal began a project that might be called de-Lutheranizing Paul.7 The
basis of Stendhal’s insight was important to the movement known as the
“New Perspective,” comprised of the works of E. P. Sanders, James Dunn,
Heikki Räisänen, and others.8 The key element of the “New Perspective”
is a reconsideration of Second Temple Judaism, one that sees it not in
7. Initially publishing in Sweden as Krister Stendahl, “Paulus och Samvetet [“Paul

and Conscience”],” Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 25 (1960): 62–77, Stendhal also published
a summarized working version as “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience
of the West,” JSSR 1 (1962): 261–65, before publishing the definitive version as “The
Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” HTR 56 (1963): 199–215.
8. See James D. G. Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul: Collected Essays, WUNT
185 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Heikki Räisänen, Paul and the Law (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1983); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison
of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977); E. P. Sanders, Paul,
the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1983). It would
be a mistake to simply lump Räisänen together with Dunn and Sanders because of
the substantial place he holds for a non-systematic character—even to the point of
incoherence—in Paul’s writing. Nevertheless, the problems he attends to and the
perspicacity of the questions he raises have been crucial for the development of the
“New Perspective.”
terms of the legalistic counterpart to Paul’s grace-governed Christianity,

but as a form of religion with its own inner coherence, characterized by
Sanders as “covenantal nomism.”9 On the one hand, this interpretive
movement cleared away a cluttered apparatus of reading Paul burdened
by the clichés of Christian anti-Semitism. On the other hand, it has left
little to account for the intensity of Paul’s argumentative endeavor. Sanders
is left with the tautology that “in short, this is what Paul finds wrong in
Judaism, it is not Christianity.”10 Similarly, Dunn is left having dispensed
with only half of Luther’s anti-Semitism: while Jews may not be legalisti-
cally oriented to works-righteousness, they are still the objects of Pauline
polemic because of ethnic pride.11 The difficulty faced by most advocates
of the “New Perspective” is in fact recognized by Sanders’s oft-caricatured
aphorism: they are caught by the fact that the “Christianity” that is the
analytic framework for their reading of Paul, with its habitual binaries
of the universal and the particular, is irreconcilable with the recognition
of the failure of traditional Christian construction of Judaism based on
universalizing readings of Paul.12 Nevertheless, the “New Perspective” has
been instrumental in moving beyond the traditional reading that grossly
mischaracterized Judaism.13
9. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 422. See also Donald A. Carson, Peter
Thomas O’Brien, and Mark A. Seifrid, ed., Justification and Variegated Nomism.
Vol. 2: The Paradoxes of Paul, WUNT 181 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).
10. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 552 (original emphasis).
11. Dunn, New Perspective, 43. See also Dunn’s major interpretation of Paul in The
Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 117–18, where
he describes Paul as indicting “his Jewish contemporaries” for an “overconfident reli-
gious identity” (cf. 137–50). This also identified as Paul’s “problem with Judaism” in
Craig E. Hill, “On the Source of Paul’s Problem with Judaism” in Redefining First-
Century Jewish and Christian Identities, ed. Fabian E. Udoh and Susannah Heschel
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 311–18.
12. David Brakke, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria,”
JECS 9 (2001): 467–68, 478, elucidates the construction of Judaism as particular in
contrast to Christianity as universal, especially by means of exegesis of Paul. For a
careful examination of the relation of the universal and the particular in antiquity—
one that does not treat them as simple opposites corresponding to Christianity and
Judaism—see Philippa Lois Townsend, “Another Race? Ethnicity, Universalism, and
the Emergence of Christianity,” Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 2009).
13. For a defense of a neo-Lutheran position, see Stephen Westerholm, Perspec-
tives Old and New on Paul: The “Lutheran” Paul and his Critics (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2004). In terms of the characterization of Judaism, Westerholm largely
accepts the work of the “New Perspective,” but his reading of Pauline thought on the
character of his enterprise retains a highly traditional framework and problematic.
The “Sonderzeit” Paul

The reading I want to take most seriously as the best grounds for re-
interpreting Marcion’s reception of Paul is what I would call here the
Sonderzeit reading. More commonly it is referred to as the “two-covenant”
reading, or as the Sonderweg reading.14 Though I’ll elaborate later on
the conditions that lead me to rename the reading, at this point it is suf-
ficient to note that term Sonderzeit emphasizes the eschatological dimen-
sion of Paul’s thinking in his letters. Moreover, the traditional names for
the reading have the effect of pulling Paul out of his “special time” into
a conceptual space that, in the case of the Sonderweg designation, reifies
“Christianity.” The Sonderweg reading thus sees the salvation of Israel
as exceptional rather than seeing God’s action for the Gentiles as excep-
tional.15 In contrast to the “two-covenant” designation, which positions
Paul’s thinking about the salvation of Gentiles and Israel at the end of the
age as two ongoing covenants that need to stand side by side as time goes
on and on and on, in the Sonderzeit reading’s emphasis on the provisionality
of Gentiles’ integration into the fold of the God of Israel, a system of two
covenants or paths is not in view. More will be said on these issues later.
The Sonderzeit reading is at least known to scholars of early Christian-
ity, but it has not received sustained engagement from the leaders of the
“New Perspective.”16 It rests on a few basic principles:
1. Paul understands himself as the apostle to the Gentiles and therefore
his letters need to be understood as addressed to Gentiles; his discussion
of Jewish Law and practice needs to be understood as a discussion of the
significance of Jewish Law and practice for Gentiles in the light of Paul’s
mission to them. Lloyd Gaston was the first scholar to give primary weight
to this insight.17
2. Paul’s eschatological conviction—that he operated at the end of the age,

that he would live to the return of Jesus, that such a return was barely
held in check so that he could develop his mission to Gentiles—conditions
everything he writes. Gager describes this conviction as “intense,” “all-
consuming,” and that without which Paul is “incomprehensible.”18
3. Paul did not envision a third race, a new religion, a tertium quid, but a
means of bringing the Gentiles into salvation at the end of time.
14. The Sonderzeit reading is also often known by the names of its formative con-
tributors: Gaston, Gager, and Stowers; see n. 5 above.
15. Gager, Reinventing Paul, 146.
16. Dunn, New Perspective, is the simplest witness to this claim.
17. Gaston, Paul and the Torah, 23.
18. Gager, Reinventing Paul, 61–62.
Moreover, Paul’s rhetorical habits make interpreting Romans on the top-

ics that these three principles address particularly difficult. Paul’s rhetori-
cal strategy in Romans seems to have been a failure in the sense that his
later readers give no evidence of grasping the complex interplay of voices
with which Paul constructs his argument. It’s as if Paul delights in leading
his readers at high speed towards a logical precipice, stepping aside and
interjecting μὴ γένοιτο with the expectation that they will not sail over the
precipice but merely experience a pedagogically productive whiplash. In
practice, it seems that they usually sailed over the precipice. Stanley Stow-
ers’s meticulous reading of Paul’s rhetoric is the key work of scholarship
on this point.19
The three principles are largely undone when Christianity is used as
an analytic category. In short, using a category of “Christianity” is fun-
damentally erroneous when interpreting Paul. It exercises transformative
influence on his writings in the same way the pseudepigraphical Pastoral
epistles do, by circumventing each of the three principles just mentioned.
By reading Paul’s writings as instances of “Christianity,” the new, but later,
religion is already retrojected onto the letters, the force of Paul’s eschato-
logical conviction is blunted, and the specificity of his address to Gentiles
is effaced. These effects of the term “Christianity” are largely distorting
in the way it takes over and transforms, christianizes, or simply eradicates
Paul’s conviction at Rom 11.26 that “all Israel” would be saved.20
The most perceptive, insightful, and engaged criticism of the Sonderzeit
reading has come from Terence Donaldson. In his article, “Jewish Chris-
tianity, Israel’s Stumbling and the Sonderweg Reading of Paul,” Donald-
son chronicles the development of what he calls the Sonderweg reading
with judicious attention to the major proponents. As Donaldson notes,
Gaston’s insight on the addressees of Paul’s writing (the first principle in
the block quotation above) “has the effect of removing great swatches of
Pauline material from any discussion of whether Paul criticized Jews for
not believing in Christ.”21 To a substantial extent, Donaldson has taken
real account of Gaston’s work. Nevertheless, Donaldson focuses on two
sections of Romans where he suggests Paul “criticizes Jews explicitly and
directly: 2.17–29 . . . and chs. 9–11.”22 Debating Donaldson’s reading of
19. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans.

20. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, 23–26, elaborates the problematic action of
the category of Christianity.
21. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 31.
22. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 31. See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the
Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 93.
these passages is a worthwhile endeavor, but misplaced in the context of

an exploration of Marcion’s reception of Paul. I mention them here for two
reasons. First, I would note that, while Donaldson does take real account
of Gaston’s insight, his analysis of these passages does not wrestle in any
substantial way with Stowers’s reading of Romans 2 and 3. Second, and
most importantly, Donaldson declares simply that the first person plurals
in Romans 3 are Paul’s speech on behalf of Jews. One need not ask Gas-
ton, Gager, or Stowers whether or in what sense this is the case; grammar-
ians rooted in a very traditional reading of Paul also admitted, “I and we
chase each other throughout these documents without rhyme or reason,”
and “every theory for regularizing Paul’s use of these pronouns breaks
down entirely.”23 The difficulties of interpreting Paul are not solved by an
appeal to the pronouns.
Just as important is the challenge of Romans 9–11. Gaston, Gager, and
Stowers concur that the key is the combination of Paul’s clear articulation
and an equally clear absence in his articulation. Positively, Paul declares
simply that “all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11.26). This is, in Paul’s words,
a mystery (τὸ μυστήριον). The absence that Gaston, Gager, and Stowers
take as crucial is that Paul does not avail himself of the loyalty to/belief
in/faith of Christ to clarify this mystery. The terms under which all Israel
is saved are not articulated by Paul in Romans 9–11 in any way that
supersedes God’s covenant with Abraham and the thought and practice
of Judaism so ably articulated by Sanders. Christians, and scholars dwell-
ing in a Christian intellectual habitus, may not be able to resist suggesting
a Christian resolution to the Pauline mystery, but they are leading rather
than following Paul in such a suggestion. It is not clear that the Apostle
would follow. Donaldson holds Paul to a systematically consistent critique
of Jews who do not “believe in” Jesus and finds “Jewish Christianity” to
be precisely the problem, but this holds Paul to a greater level of system-
atization than characterizes his eschatologically anomalous endeavor.24
Sanders’s formulation for a different configuration of the problem may be
apposite here: Paul reasoned from solution to plight.25 Paul’s letters dem-
onstrate the uncontrolled heat that sometimes characterized his rhetoric
and there is no doubt that Donaldson is right that some inconsistency
23. James Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek. Vol. 1: Prolegomena,

3rd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908), 86.
24. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 38, attacks Stowers for creating a Paul that would
be anomalous within Second Temple Judaism and yet admits that “Paul is anomalous
no matter how we interpret him” (39).
25. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 443.
is the result. That even his own rhetorical momentum led Paul to criti-
cize Jews for failing to express loyalty to/belief in/reception of the faith
of Christ seems more revealing of his disposition than are logical eddies
in his rhetoric revealing of his theology. In what Paul saw as the time of
exception, when time itself had contracted and was yet being prolonged
in a mystery, the consistency of a soteriology and an identity that had to
last indefinitely was not a good that Paul sought.
More important in this context than any dispute over Romans 2–5
and Romans 9–11 is the question of which principles of the Sonderzeit
interpretation of Paul are really being engaged by its critics—especially
by Donaldson, the best of them. First, Donaldson takes Gaston’s insight
into the addressees seriously. The sparse body of evidence that Donald-
son is left with pushes him to see Paul as systematic in a way that allows
a direction of thought to be foreclosed by a faint countergesture. There
can be no doubt that Paul made statements of a blanket character against
those who disagreed with him, or merely those whose level of agreement
was unsatisfactory to him. These broad negative statements are not usu-
ally oriented to Jews who did not see the significance of Jesus for Gentiles
in exactly the same way Paul did. As Gager has shown without engage-
ment in the question of a Sonderzeit reading, Paul was a man of violent
temper and intemperate words all his life.26 With Donaldson’s casting
of Paul as a systematic writer, the rhetorical dimensions of Paul’s writ-
ing apart from logic get the short shrift. More systemically, Donaldson
assumes the givenness of Christianity, not only in the terminology by
which he thinks through Paul,27 but more significantly in the unexamined
(or underexamined) naturalness with which “belief in Christ” is used as a
cipher for Christianity; it is that which makes a Christian.28 Here another
strand of Lloyd Gaston’s work needs to be taken more seriously. The
same eagerness to deploy belief as a distinguishing and essential charac-
teristic is true for “Jewish Christianity.” Of course, Donaldson is not to
be faulted for not having read literature published after his own writing,
but the concept of Jewish Christianity has been the subject of sustained
reflection and trenchant criticism in recent years.29 Overwhelmingly it is
26. John G. Gager and E. Leigh Gibson, “Violent Acts and Violent Language in the
Apostle Paul,” in Violence in the New Testament, ed. Shelley Matthews and E. Leigh
Gibson (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 13–21.
27. See Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 30, 51.
28. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 30.
29. Matt A. Jackson-McCabe, ed., Jewish Christianity Reconsidered: Rethinking
Ancient Groups and Texts (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007); Oskar Skarsaune
and Reidar Hvalvik, Jewish Believers in Jesus: The Early Centuries (Peabody, MA:
a construct that is a tool in traditional Christian supersession narratives,

describing a transitional phenomenon that becomes obsolete after it suc-
ceeds in delivering whatever elements of Jewish heritage a particular Chris-
tian narrative values.30 Donaldson is forthright in recognizing the risks of
these categories—“I recognize that by using the term ‘Christian’ here and
in the title I am leaving myself open to the charge of begging the question
at the outset,”31—but though he promises that the article as a whole is
his “response to the charge,” the article concludes that the phenomenon
of “Jewish Christianity” is what makes the Sonderzeit reading untenable.
That is, Donaldson offers a conclusion about Paul on the basis of “Jewish
Christianity,” not a reflection on the utility of the category.32 The given-
ness of Christianity in general and Jewish Christianity in particular are
necessary conditions of the “New Perspective” and they are conditions
that the Sonderzeit reading disputes.
At this point it is helpful to return to the phenomenon to which the
term Sonderzeit is meant to gesture: eschatology. The intensity of Paul’s
eschatological conviction is easily demonstrable and should constitute a
foundational principle of Pauline interpretation.33 It plays a very little role
in the “New Perspective” and a very little role in Donaldson’s argument
against Gaston, Gager, and Stowers. Demonstrating the negative is labo-
rious, but suffice it to say that eschatology is one of the prime stumbling
blocks to any interpretation of Paul that strives to balance the dual goals
of faithfulness to his thought and relevance to a contemporary Christian
context. This has been difficult in the last nineteen hundred years, and
eschatology proved a difficult topic in Paul’s own lifetime. One of the
h
allmarks of all second-century interpretations of Paul is the t ransformation
endrickson, 2007); Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument

H
for Dismantling a Dubious Category (To Which is Appended a Correction of My
Border Lines),” JQR 99 (2009): 7–36.
30. See William Arnal, “The Q Document,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered,
ed. Jackson-McCabe, 119–54, and John W. Marshall, “John’s Jewish (Christian?)
Apocalypse,” in Jewish Christianity Reconsidered, ed. Jackson-McCabe, 233–56.
31. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 29. This is in relation to the discussion of “Jewish
Christianity.”
32. Nor does Donaldson make any use of the extensive pre-2006 literature on the
subject. See John W. Marshall, “The Objects of Ignatius’ Wrath and Jewish Angelic
Mediators,” JEH 56 (2005): 21 n. 58; James Carleton-Paget, “Jewish Christianity,”
in The Cambridge History of Judaism, III: The Roman Period, ed. William David
Davies et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 731–75, 1168–72.
33. 1 Cor 10.11, 15.51–52; 1 Thess 1.9–10, 4.14–17; Rom 15.23.
of his eschatology, most commonly into a personal asceticism.34 To speak

in terms of Donaldson’s article, perhaps Krister Stendahl is correct that
to imagine two covenants, a Sonderweg, is overly concrete,35 but to speak
only of a Sonderplatz underplays the temporal urgency of Paul’s thinking.
Instead, it is most helpful to think of Paul as thinking and acting in a time
that he conceived of as utterly exceptional—the end of the age, when time
contracted—a Sonderzeit. In Paul’s understanding, this exceptional time
folded in on itself as God’s plans for the inclusion of salvation of Gentiles
and for the salvation of Jews jostled in a resonance effect as Paul describes
in the mystery of Romans.36
I have dwelled on the Sonderzeit interpretation of Paul and on Donald-
son’s criticism of it for two reasons: first because it is not (yet?) a widely
persuasive interpretation of Paul and I want to argue for its plausibility
before I argue that we should understand Marcion as receiving such a Paul,
but more importantly because it highlights as problems in the traditional
interpretation of Paul some key factors that plagued second-century inter-
preters of Paul, including Marcion. These factors are that Paul thought dif-
ferently about Jews and Gentiles,37 that Paul was frequently misunderstood
in his own lifetime, and that Paul wrote with an eschatological conscious-
34. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation
in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 98–102.
35. Donaldson, “Sonderweg,” 29, quoting Krister Stendahl, Final Account: Paul’s
Letter to the Romans (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), x, a “misplaced
concreteness.”
36. Agamben’s peculiarly philosophical commentary on Romans seeks, on the one
hand, to distinguish messianic time from eschatological time, but on the other hand
Agamben lavishes real attention on the special quality of time within which Paul
understood himself to be working; Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Com-
mentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Cultural Memory in the
Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Contemporary philosophical
readings of Paul by Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans.
Ray Brassier, Cultural Memory in the Present [Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003]) and Jacob Taubes (The Political Theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann
and Jan Assmann; trans. Dana Hollander; Cultural Memory in the Present [Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004]), while taking a highly christianized strategy of
reading and paying uneven attention to eschatology, still stress helpfully the role of
the exceptional in understanding Paul. See also the interaction of philosophers and
scholars of early Christianity in John Caputo, ed., St. Paul Among the Philosophers
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).
37. Paula Fredriksen, “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gos-
pel,” NTS 56 (2010): 232–52, esp. 242–43, elucidates the intersection of cult and
ethnicity in the Roman context of the Pauline enterprise. Townsend, “Another Race,”
35, helpfully formulates the issue thus: “What later interpreters have usually seen as
purely a theological problem, Paul saw also as an ethnic problem.”
ness that his interpreters over time were unable to maintain. In this “two
variable” construction of the problem of Marcion’s reception of Paul, the
Sonderzeit reading is the value I am assigning to (and arguing for in rela-
tion to) Paul.
Marcion’s Transformations OF
and Continuities with the New Paul
Marcion’s significance within second-century Christianity is immense. The

volume of heresiological literature from Asia, Europe, and Africa stands as
a witness to the patristic evaluation of his relevance.38 By roughly 155 c.e.,
Justin complains that Marcion’s teaching has spread to “many in every race
of men” and Justin can explain the success of Marcion only through the aid
of demons.39 Tertullian’s observation that Marcionites make churches as
wasps make hives suggests the intense spread of the movement.40 Similarly,
investigations of the development of the New Testament canon invariably
acknowledge the significance of Marcion’s Apostolikon (together with his
Euangelion) in the eventual formation of the New Testament canon that
was finally articulated in the fourth century—a time when Marcionites were
still present on the land. All of this is to say that by nearly any measure
Marcion’s reading of Paul was among the most influential in the second
century. Its influence continued through Mani’s reception of Marcion in
the third and fourth centuries.
Dating Marcion
Marcion’s dates are a quite uncertain. While Irenaeus declares that Mar-
cion learned his doctrine from Cerdo at Rome in time of Hyginus,41 Hoff-
mann suggests that this is a fabrication subject to the political commit-
ments of Irenaeus, namely that the heretic should be opposed in Rome by
Polycarp.42 More plausible is Justin’s characterization around 150 c.e. that
Marcion “is even at this day alive.”43 Hoffmann argues that Marcion’s
teaching was well underway in Asia Minor around 130 c.e., and that Poly-
carp’s letter to the Philippians opposes Marcionite teaching. Hoffmann
attempts to draw the evidence for Marcion’s teaching back to the letters
38. In addition to extant polemics by Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Epiphanius, one needs
also mention lost literatures such as Justin’s Syntagma and the polemic of Rhodon, etc.
39. Justin, 1 Apol. 26 (trans. ANF 1:171).
40. Tertullian, Marc. 4.5
41. Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27.1.
42. Hoffmann, Marcion, 41–45.
43. Justin, 1 Apol. 26 (trans. ANF 1:171).
of Ignatius.44 This is a difficult argument to make for a number of reasons

and Hoffmann has not persuaded many. Moreover, the recent work by
T. D. Barnes to re-date the Ignatian epistles, and by implication the letter
of Polycarp, needs to stand as a significant caution to Hoffmann’s earlier
work.45 Barnes argues that Ignatius was not active and writing until the
140s c.e. Nevertheless, this leaves Hoffman’s main insight intact—that
Irenaeus’s testimony is unreliable and that the most reliable testimony is
the earliest and the only one to have direct contact with Marcion, namely
that of Justin. By the mid-second century, Marcion had taught for many
years and to Justin’s amazement was teaching still. He had made it to
Rome after a long period of activity in Asian Minor.46
This, however, places Marcion within the tumultuous period of Pauline
reception characterized by Acts, the Pastoral Epistles, and the Acts of Paul
(and Thecla). Each of these efforts to read (and write) Paul for a new day
struggles intensely with two problems: the lack of eschatological fulfill-
ment, and the problem that Judaism posed for Christian identity. Mar-
cion’s reception of Paul reads sensibly as a serious attempt to deal with
these problems.47
Philo-Jewish Accusation
Marcion was accused by his critics of making common cause with Jews.
In the history of Christianity, the accusation that a person is too Jewish
has been damning indictment. From Ignatius of Antioch’s condemnation
of those who “talk of Jesus Christ and practice Judaism,” through the
twentieth century in which to be a Judenchristen was to be less than fully
Christian,48 the accusation of association with Judaism that did not prop-

45. Timothy D. Barnes, “The Date of Ignatius,” Expository Times 120 (2008):
119–30.
46. See Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts, 28–29, and Adolf von Harnack, Marcion:
The Gospel of the Alien God (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1990), 1–25. Räisänen,
“Marcion,” 103, indicates that he understands Marcion to be born in perhaps 85 c.e.
47. Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in
the Second Century (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996), 262–70, ably places Marcion
within the larger narrative of Christianity’s formation of its identity in relation to
Judaism. See also Wolfgang A. Beinart, “Marcion und die Antijudaismus,” in Mar-
cion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirking, ed. May, Greschat, and Meiser, 199,
on the transformation by Marcion of practical advice from Paul into matters funda-
mental to Christian identity.
48. Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third
Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 30, 69; Susan-
nah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 44, 77, 85, 133–35.
erly subordinate Judaism to Christianity was a peculiarly Christian form

of slander. Marcion was the object of such slander.
Tertullian, immediately after admitting that the heretics (and pre-
eminently Marcion, given the literary location of Tertullian’s comment)
lay claim to Paul, accuses Marcion of an unholy and mistaken alliance
with Judaism:
So then, since heretical madness was claiming that that Christ had come
who had never been previously mentioned, it followed that it had to
contend that that Christ was not yet come who had from all time been
foretold: and so it was compelled to form an alliance with Jewish error,
and from it to build up an argument for itself, on the pretext that the Jews,
assured that he who has come was an alien.49
The accusation is that Marcion has learned his interpretation of the mes-
sianic materials in the Jewish Scriptures from Jews who assert that the
messianic figures described therein are not Jesus of Nazareth. This is the
“alliance with Jewish error.” Tertullian’s position is that Jews erroneously
read their own Scriptures. The accusations of Jewish error, in combina-
tion with any conformity between Judaism and Christian interpretation
of Scripture, forms a double-edged anti-Jewish sword: whenever Jews are
considered by Christians to be correct—such as believing that the creator
God is the ultimate God—Christianity is validated and Judaism is appro-
priated. Whenever Jews disagree with the Christian interpretation that a
given author understands as normative, Jews are superseded, abandoned
by God, and fulfillers of prophecies of their own destruction. Tertullian
goes on to describe Jesus as “a Jew, yet a perverter and overthrower of
Judaism.”50 Marcion, according to Tertullian, has failed to realize that
Judaism is overthrown by Jesus himself. If this is indeed a failure, the
Sonderzeit reading of Paul is plagued by the same “failure.”
In his agreement with Jews that the prophets of the creator God did not
prophesy Jesus of Nazareth as Christ, and in his disagreement on this issue
with many—and surely at first with most—devotees of Jesus, Marcion was
caught among a few conflicting commitments: that Jesus was his Christ,
that Jewish Scriptures rightly prophesied a Christ, and that Jewish Scrip-
tures did not prophesy his Christ. For Marcion, it was the words of his
Christ that freed him from this dilemma; he famously treated as founda-
tional the aphorism found on the lips of Jesus in Luke 6.43–44: “For no
good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for
49. Tertullian, Marc. 3.6. (ed. and trans. Evans 182–83).

50. Tertullian, Marc. 3.6 (ed. and trans. Evans 182–83).
each tree is known by its own fruit.”51 For all his reputed aversion to alle-
gory,52 Marcion nearly made an exception here that ruled out the same
exception for future readers guided by his understanding. For Marcion
the trees are the Gods of the old dispensation and the new. This is not a
Jewish position with which Marcion was affiliated, but the Jewish side
of a binary constructed in the course of Christian polemic. It does lead,
however, to the major point of theological difference between Marcion’s
movement and the “proto-orthodox” movement.
Two Gods, Two Christs, Two Paths

Marcion held that the creator God was not the God who anointed Jesus
as his Christ. Instead, there was another God who was not the creator, but
who was higher, purer, unalloyed by the contradictions that the mytholo-
gized accounts of the Hebrew Scriptures place before a reader without a
sympathetic cast of mind. Justin’s first notice of Marcion passes this on
as its only theological complaint:
Then there is a certain Marcion of Pontus, who is still teaching his converts
that there is another God greater than the Fashioner. By the help of the
demons he has made many in every race of men to blaspheme and to deny
God the Maker of the universe, professing that there is another who is
greater and has done greater things than he. As we said, all who derive
[their opinions] from these men are called Christians.53
Justin’s later mention of Marcion in the First Apology reiterates his criti-
cism of ditheism, emphasizes the ubiquity of Marcionism and that it can
only be explained through demonic assistance, and adds to it the accusation
51. Tertullian, Marc. 1.2, 2.24 (ed. and trans. Evans 6–7, 150–51).
52. Harry Gamble, “Marcion and the ‘Canon,’” in The Cambridge History of
Christianity: Origins to Constantine, ed. Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M.
Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 200; Judith Lieu, “As Much
My Apostle as Christ is Mine: The Dispute over Paul between Tertullian and Mar-
cion,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 57; W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of Christianity
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 215. Andreas Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten
Christentum: Das Bild des Apostels und die Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie
in der frühchristlichen Literatur bis Marcion, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 58
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1979), 389.
53. Justin, 1 Apol. 1.26. (trans. ANF 1:171). In most translations of Justin, Ter-
tullian, and other heresiological writers, a variable capitalization of the word “God”
attempts to stay on the same side of a theological argument as the writers being
translated. I have elected to consistently capitalize “God” in order to avoid taking a
side in such arguments.
that, in addition to proposing two Gods, Marcion proposed two Christs.54

Tertullian and Irenaeus agree that the commitment to a division between
the creator God and the high God is at the root of Marcion’s offense.55
The corollary of Marcion’s arrangement of the high God and the creator
God is his doctrine of two Christs. While Justin—the only contemporary
witness to Marcion—mentions it,56 Tertullian extends it in his polemic
against Marcion. According to Tertullian, Marcion fails to realize that
the primary proof that the Hebrew Scriptures prophesy Christ is not the
prophecies of Christ—which Marcion neatly sidesteps by suggesting that
they are the prophecies of the creator’s Christ rather than of the Christ
of the highest God—but the primary proof is the plight of Judaism in
the Roman world in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and
the rebellions of 115–118 c.e. and 132–135 c.e. Tertullian interprets the
travails of Judaism in the first and second centuries as validations, even as
proof, of his interpretation of what he considers messianic prophecies of
Jesus as Christ: “But where by that time will there be a daughter of Sion
to be made desolate? Even today she is not. Where the cities to be burned
with fire? They are already in ruinous heaps. Where the dispersion of that
nation? It is already in exile.”57 Here Tertullian works in the same mode as
54. Justin, 1 Apol. 58.1 (trans. ANF 1:182): “And, as we said before, the devils
put forward Marcion of Pontus, who is even now teaching men to deny that God is
the maker of all things in heaven and on earth, and that the Christ predicted by the
prophets is His Son, and preaches another God besides the Creator of all, and like-
wise another son. And this man many have believed, as if he alone knew the truth,
and laugh at us.”
55. Tertullian, Marc. 1.13 (ed. and trans. Evans 32–33): “When we depose from
this rank a God of whom no previous evidence has been given by any creation of
his own as worthy of a God as the Creator’s is, the Marcionites shamelessly turn
up their nose and set about the demolition of the Creator’s works. ‘A great work,
indeed,’ they say, ‘and worthy of a God, is this world.’ Is then the Creator in no sense
a God? Clearly he is a God.” Irenaeus, Haer. 4.33.2 (trans. ANF 1:507): “the doctrine
of Marcion, how he holds that there are two Gods”; and Haer. 1.27.6 (trans. ANF
1:352): “Jesus being derived from that father who is above the God that made the
world . . . abolishing the prophets and the law, and all the works of that God who
made the world, whom also he calls Cosmocrator.”
56. Justin, 1 Apol. 58 (trans. ANF 1:182); see n. 54 above.
57. Tertullian, Marc. 3.23 (ed. and trans. Evans 244–45). For the deployment
of the plight of second-century Jews as an indicator of the reliability of prophecy,
see also Tertullian, Marc. 3.23 (ed. and trans. Evans 242–45): “Next, seeing you
agree with the Jews in denying that their Christ has come, take note also of the end
which it was prophesied they would bring upon themselves after Christ’s coming,”
and, “Quite meaningless this, if they suffered these things not for his sake who had
Justin in the Dialogue with Trypho, reading the pattern of supersession—

what I would specify as an “appropriative supersession”—onto history.
Marcion seems not to share this disposition.
Marcion’s conviction that there is another Christ specific to the creator
God of the Bible and to the Jewish people is clear in the heresiological
polemic against him. This conviction is an indication that Marcion did
not simply dismiss the authoritative writings of Jews, but that he accorded
them authority within a certain sphere and under a certain interpretive
principle: the Jewish Scriptures were a source of a certain authority in
Marcion’s thinking.58 But Marcion’s thought on the value and role of the
creator God’s Christ is less clear. Tertullian’s account of it in Book 4 of
his anti-Marcionite tract is the most extensive witness:
Marcion lays it down that there is one Christ who in the time of Tiberius
was revealed by a God formerly unknown, for the salvation of all the
nations; and another Christ who is destined by God the Creator to come
at some time still future for the reestablishment of the Jewish kingdom.
Between these he sets up a great and absolute opposition, such as that
between justice and kindness, between law and gospel, between Judaism
and Christianity.59
It is worthwhile to examine this account in detail. Beyond the two Christs

doctrine itself, there is the opposition that Tertullian characterizes as “great
and absolute.” Oddly, the examples are not as clear as the adjectives. Jus-
tice and kindness may be distinguished of course, and placed in a hier-
archy, but kindness is the opposite of cruelty, and justice the opposite of
injustice.60 Tertullian is clearly pushing the argument into a greater level
of binary differentiation than the data facilitates. The force of Tertullian’s
openly stated that they would suffer them for his sake, but because of the Christ of
some other God. Yes, you say, it was the Christ of the other God who was brought
to the cross, by the Creator’s powers and principalities which were hostile to him.”
58. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts, 33. See also Edwin Cyril Blackman, Marcion
and His Influence (London: S.P.C.K., 1948), and Räisänen, “Marcion,” 108.
59. Tertullian, Marc. 4.6 (ed. and trans. Evans, 274–75): Constituit Marcion
alium esse Christum qui Tiberianis temporibus a deo quondam ignoto revelatus sit
in salutem omnium gentium, alium qui a deo creatore in restitutionem Iudaici status
sit destinatus quandoque venturus. Inter hos magnam et omnem differentiam scindit,
quantam inter iustum et bonum, quantam inter legem et evangelium, quantam inter
Iudaismum et Christianismum.
60. On the ambiguities inherent in any attempt to construct a strong opposition
between goodness and justice, see E. Muehlenburg, “Marcion’s Jealous God,” in Dis-
ciplina Nostra: Essays in Memory of Robert F. Evans, ed. Donald F. Winslow, Patristic
Monograph Series 6 (Cambridge: Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1979), 95–100.
argument here is subtle. The three pairs characterized here as “great and
absolute opposition” function actually as units, supersession and rejec-
tion. In the previous books, Tertullian argued that justice and goodness
cannot be separated, that law and gospel proceed from the unified source
of justice and goodness, but in a sequence in which gospel supersedes law
and law is in fact only a temporary measure for an inadequate people,
and that the result of the supersession of gospel over law is the founda-
tion of Christianity and the rejection and replacement of Judaism. Accord-
ing to Tertullian, Marcion, because he distinguished a good God from a
just God, ends up on the wrong side of the ledger, lumped with Judaism
rather than Christianity. Modern scholarly accounts of Marcion as the
most extreme anti-Semite may suffer from a similar trajectory of exaggera-
tion.61 Tertullian and modern scholars’ distortions are even more evident
when one considers the potential valence of “Judaism and Christianity” in
Tertullian’s context (early third century) in contrast to Marcion’s context
(c. 120–155 c.e.), and the non-existence of the contrast in Paul’s.
How then do we understand the contrast of law and gospel that Ter-
tullian attributes to Marcion? The problem for Tertullian is not that they
are in some senses “opposed,” but that Marcion does not place them in a
sequence of temporal succession, namely invalidation and supersession.
Instead, Marcion associates them with different orders of salvation. Tertul-
lian sees law as dismantled and having passed away with Christ; Marcion
does not: he sees them as distinguished rather by ethnic constituency.62
Here Marcion has grasped that element of Paul’s enterprise that Philippa
Townsend describes as an ethnic rather than a theological problem.63 Not
that Marcion’s retention of that dimension of the problem corresponds to
Paul’s—without the same configuration of eschatological expectation, it
cannot. And two generations later, the same expectation is scarcely possible.
61. E.g., Miriam Taylor’s positioning of Marcion as the extreme of anti-Judaism

that forms one pole by which the church can be judged to have taken the via media
between anti-Semitism and Judaism (Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A
Critique of the Scholarly Consensus [Leiden: Brill, 1995], 170). See Heikki Räisänen,
Marcion, Muhammad and the Mahatma: Exegetical Perspectives on the Encounter
of Cultures and Faiths (London: SCM, 1997), 64, for other examples of Marcion as
the pinnacle of anti-Semitism.
62. Tertullian, Marc. 5.2; cf. Marc. 1.19, 4.1, 4.6. This way of seeing the role of
Gods as hierarchical and ethnically or geographically local is, of course, completely
normal in the ancient world. See Paula Fredricksen, “What Parting of the Ways?,”
in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early
Middle Ages, ed. Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2003), 39.
63. Townsend, “Another Race,” 35.
The closest parallel to the intensity of Paul’s eschatological expectation is

perhaps the New Prophecy, but that phenomenon entailed a substantially
elaborated theory of divine dispensations.
Returning to the characterization of the Christ of the creator God,
Tertullian suggests that Marcion understands him as “destined by God
the Creator to come at some time still future for the reestablishment of
the Jewish kingdom.”64 This is crucial to understanding several facets of
Marcion’s reception of Paul’s eschatological thought and his participa-
tion in the wider endeavor of second-century Christians to make sense
of the eschatological intensity of their forebears in the previous century.
In many ways Marcion undertakes a strategy of ethnic displacement for
Paul’s problematic eschatology that differs from the dual parousia super-
sessionist narratives that characterize “orthodox” receptions of Paul in the
second and third centuries. In his dual Christology, Marcion maintained
an element of Paul’s thought that other Christians found it impossible to
retain: Paul’s resolute focus on Gentiles and his rigorous distinction between
Jews and Judaizing Gentiles. Writing in the early 1980s, Hoffman, who
shows no awareness of or affiliation with the Paul of Gaston, Gager, and
Stowers, sees clearly that Marcion distinguishes fully between Judaizing
and Judaism: “It is important in the face of the evidence to distinguish
between Marcion’s attitude toward the Jews and toward the judaizers.”65
Two Goals?
In suggesting above that Tertullian may have exaggerated the ditheistic
character of Marcion’s theology, I have opened the topic of monothe-
ism, dualism, and polytheism and the destiny Marcion might imagine for
those with whom the creator’s Christ keeps faith. These terms function
sometimes as ideals, sometimes as descriptions of structures of thought,
and sometimes as accusations. Dualism haunts ideals of monotheism. In
fact, monotheistic theologies seem especially prone to dualistic individual
eschatologies, e.g., the heaven and hell of traditional Christian theology
and belief. Given Marcion’s understanding of two Gods, was he bound to
a construction of the afterlife with only the two destinations of heaven or

65. Hoffmann, Marcion, 232, and also 233: “At no point does Marcion’s opposi-
tion to the ‘judaizing’ of Paul’s gospel become opposition to the Jews.” Cf. Stephen
Wilson, “Marcion and the Jews,” in Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity: Volume 2,
Separation and Polemic, ed. Stephen Wilson, ECSJ 2 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1986), 45–46, and Karl Rengstorf and Siegfried von Kortzfleisch,
Kirche und Synagoge. Handbuch zur Geschichte von Christen und Juden. Darstellung
mit Quellen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1968), 1:82 n. 139.
hell? And if so, were the two Gods leading their peoples to opposite, so to
speak, places: a high God leading Christians to heaven and a lower God
leading Jews and pagans to hell, though in the case of the Jews by means
of a detour of glorious reign and prophetic fulfillment? If the latter is the
case, any talk of two paths is meaningless since they lead to dualistically
differentiated destinations.
For several reasons, I think that talk of two paths is not meaningless,
and in light of the tensions in Marcion’s thought, such questions are
indeed worth addressing. The answer to the charge that Marcion’s creator
God and his Judaic Christ66 lead only to damnation lies in the character
of ancient polytheism and monotheism, in the variegated images of the
afterlife in Tertullian and Marcion, in Marcion’s characterization of the
creator God, and in the role of the devil and his relation to the creator
God in Marcion’s thought.
The practical character of ancient theisms—“poly-” and/or “mono-”—
rarely includes a rigorously philosophical monotheism. Paul clearly states
that “there are many Gods” (modern translations add scare quotes and
use a lower case “g”); this stands as a counterbalance to his phrase, “there
may be so-called Gods in heaven or on earth,” and the two statements form
a preamble to his “yet for us there is one God.”67 Paul may not intend to
proclaim a singular and philosophical monotheism, but rather a practical
monotheism for the in-group: one God “for us.” Tertullian, on the other
hand, perhaps a hundred and forty years after Paul and seventy-five after
Marcion, undertakes to define Marcion’s creator God out of godness,
attempting to demonstrate that the concept of “God” implies a unity and
an ultimate quality that, by definition, prevents there from being more
than one “God.” It is clear that Marcion has pushed Tertullian to a tighter
definition of monotheism than was operative in the social world of the
second century. It would be a mistake to imagine that Tertullian could
push back in time and move Marcion to a more consistent monotheism.
Paula Fredriksen emphasizes the gulf between philosophical monotheism
and the continuum of monotheism and polytheism in the ancient world:
in her words “all ancient monotheists were (by modern measure) poly-
theists.”68 The binary conception of two goals depends on the unfounded
notion that a single God decrees binary fates for humans.
Neither Marcion nor the “orthodox” “monotheists” believed consis-
tently in simple binary solutions in consideration of an afterlife. Scholars
66. Tertullian, Marc. 3.21.

67. RSV translation of 1 Cor 8.5–6, capitalization and emphasis modified.
68. Fredricksen, “What Parting of the Ways?,” 46; cf. 39, 45.
investigating Marcion’s attitude to Jews note that his Christ does not admit
Abraham and other luminaries of Judaism to the kingdom of heaven.
This is true, but it is evident that Marcion looked at Luke 16 and clearly
distinguished the comforts of “Abraham’s bosom” from the torments of
Hades. According to Tertullian, Marcion describes the creator’s Christ as
promising “the Jews their former estate, after the restitution of their coun-
try, and, when life has run its course, refreshment with those beneath the
earth, in Abraham’s bosom.”69 This is clearly a destiny that is neither tor-
ment nor paradise, yet it is a destiny of refreshment and comfort. Tertul-
lian returns to the thorny topic of Abraham’s bosom in Against Marcion 4
and reiterates that Marcion claims “that both of the Creator’s rewards in
regions below,70 whether of torment or of comfort, are intended for those
who have obeyed the law and the prophets, while he defines as heavenly
the bosom and the haven of his particular Christ and God.”71 Tertullian’s
answer is as follows: “So I affirm that that region, Abraham’s bosom,
though not in heaven, yet not so deep as the nether regions [inferis], will
in the meanwhile afford refreshment to the souls of the righteous, until
the consummation of all things makes complete the general resurrection
with its fullness of reward.”72 Again, we can contrast a pattern in Tertul-
lian’s thought to one in Marcion’s. Tertullian suggests a temporal sequence
after which Abraham’s bosom will pass away, in a manner similar to the
way in which Tertullian sees God’s covenant with Israel as having passed.
It would be a mistake to push Tertullian’s temporal supersessionism onto
Marcion’s thinking of the Creator’s covenant or of Abraham’s bosom.73
Marcion’s characterization of his high God as good in comparison to
the creator God as just is an important element of his thought. While Löhr
has argued that the distinction proceeds from the heresiological tradition
rather than Marcion,74 there are problems with Löhr’s argument: Marc.
5.13, a text that Löhr neglects to treat, is explicit in attributing the dis-

70. Evans’s translation of inferus as “hell,” while understandable, perhaps over-
draws exactly the binary specificity against which I am arguing.
71. Tertullian, Marc. 4.34 (ed. and trans. Evans 455, slightly modified).
72. Tertullian, Marc. 4.34 (ed. and trans. Evans 455. slightly modified).
73. Within an “orthodox” heaven, Irenaeus, Haer. 5.36, sees distinctions of reward
as well, namely mansions of different status based on the various levels productivity—
thirty, sixty, or a hundred-fold—in the Matthew’s version of the Parable of the Sower.
Adela Yarbro Collins pointed this out to me.
74. Winrich Löhr, “Did Marcion Distinguish between a Just God and a Good
God?,” in Marcion und seine kirchengeschichtliche Wirking, ed. May, Greschat, and
Meiser, 131–46.
tinction [distinctionem] to the Marcion himself.75 While Irenaeus credits

the distinction most explicitly to Cerdo,76 whom he positions as Mar-
cion’s predecessor in a succession of heretics, Tertullian does not follow
Irenaeus closely on this matter. Instead, Tertullian’s witness attributes the
distinction directly to Marcion and comes from that portion of his tract
at which several scholars speculate he had direct access to some of Mar-
cion’s own writings.77 Tertullian argues mightily that justice and goodness
should not be separated as the provenance of separate Gods, no matter
how contrary their actions may look. In Marcion, Tertullian finds sepa-
ration, not a positioning of the two qualities as opposites. The people of
Marcion’s just creator God are not destined to the opposite fate of the
people of Marcion’s good alien God.
The opposite of good of course is evil—and Marcion is famously critical
of a creator God who proclaims that he creates both good and evil, but
Marcion does not simply conflate the creator God with the devil. Though
Marcion frequently applied negative references to the creator (we should
allow that this disposition towards the creator God may be intensified in
the course of heresiological refutation), he also held the creator respon-
sible for the creation of the devil and thus distinct from the devil.78 The
untidiness of Marcion’s thought on this needs to be acknowledged and
indeed his disciple, Lucian, is described by several sources as attempting to
resolve this problem in Marcion’s aftermath by positing the devil as a third
75. Tertullian, Marc. 5.13 (ed. and trans. Evans 590–93): “There is no doubt he
ascribes both gospel and salvation to a God not kind but just—if I am permitted to
make the distinction the heretic makes—a God who carries men over from the faith
of the law to the faith of the gospel” (sine dubio et evangelium et salutem iusto deo
deputat, non bono, ut ita dixerim secundum haeretici distinctionem, transferenti ex
fide legis in fidem evangelii).
76. Löhr, “Did Marcion Distinguish,” 137, on Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27.1.
77. Lieu, Image and Reality, 265; Evans, Tertullian: Adversus Marcionem, xx; Eric
Francis Osborn, Tertullian: First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 119; Timothy D. Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary
Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 128; Gerhard May, “Marcion in Contempo-
rary Views: Results and Open Questions,” Second Century 6 (1987): 141; Gamble,
“Marcion and the ‘Canon,’” 200; Lindemann, Paulus im ältesten Christentum, 383.
78. Marcion refers clearly to a corresponding evil power that is not identical with
the creator God (Tertullian, Marc. 2.5: creator allows devil; 2.10: creator creates devil;
5.18: discourse on the spiritual hosts of wickedness in Eph 6.12). Tertullian tries to
goad those who would follow Marcion into equating devil and creator God system-
atically. Moreover, the Jewish Scriptures really have no room for an interpretation of
the God of Israel that does not have good elements and Marcion’s very tight leash on
allegorical exegesis effectively removes any hermeneutical strategy for an interpreta-
tion of the creator God as thoroughly evil.
foundational power in the structure of the universe.79 More practically,

Marcion did not demonize Jews as followers of the creator God or blame
Jews for the death of Jesus: both portrayals of Jews are products and/or
possessions of the groups that understood Marcion as heretical.80 Mar-
cion’s creator God was sharply distinguished from the high God but not
identical with the devil, evidently. It is not then a necessary conclusion that
the fate to which the Christ of the creator God leads those for whom he
is messiah is a hell in a binary afterlife. Abraham’s bosom is indeed com-
fort. In his association of a particular God with a particular people, and
in his multifaceted thinking about the fate of humans after death, Marcion
stood squarely within the norms of antiquity and the process of “ethnic
reasoning” that was part of Christian self-definition.81
Marcion and Other Transformations of Paul
Marcion did not receive Paul directly, but within a tradition of reception
that had already transformed him. Marcion’s conviction that Judaizing
interpolations had corrupted the text of Paul reflects a consciousness of
being within a tradition of reception. His acceptance of pseudepigraphi-
cal letters as authentic was a less conscious stand within a tradition of
reception. Moreover, Marcion faced a transformed Paul in much the same
way that scholars do today in the form of texts heavily redacted through
pruning and recombination. It is not clear, for example, whether or how
far Marcion differentiated what stand in the New Testament canon as
1 and 2 Thessalonians, nor in what form Marcion received the materials
that we have as 2 Corinthians. More simply still, Marcion worked in a
context in which controversy about what Paul wrote and what Paul meant
were endemic to those who treated Paul as an authority.
79. See Epiphanius, Pan. 43.1.4, on Lucian, a disciple of Marcion. Apelles went
the opposite way positing a single foundational power. See Epiphanius, Pan. 44.1.4,
and Räisänen, “Marcion,” 119–20.
80. See John 8.44, in the case of associating Jews with the devil, and the bulk of
gospel as well as the corpus of Adversus Iudaeos literature for blaming the death
of Jesus on the Jews. Noteworthy is the fact that Marcion does not blame the Jews
for the crucifixion of Jesus (most clearly, Marc. 5.6, but also 3.19, 3.23, 4.42); cf.
Räisänen, “Marcion,” 116.
81. Denise Buell, “Rethinking the Relevance of Race for Early Christian Self-
Definition,” HTR 94 (2001): 449–76; also, “Race and Universalism in Early Christi-
anity,” JECS 10 (2002): 429–68, and Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early
Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Townsend, “Another Race.”
Marcion and Ephesians

For several reasons, Ephesians—or, as Tertullian suggests Marcion knew
it, Laodiceans—is a crucial pivot in any account of Marcion’s reception
of Paul in light of a Sonderzeit understanding of Paul. Far more than any
other canonical appropriation of Paul, Ephesians emphasizes the value of
Judaism as that to which Gentiles have gained access, the inheritance into
which Gentiles have been brought through the action of Christ. More than
Paul himself, and certainly more than the opponents of Marcion, Ephe-
sians emphasizes repeatedly the exaltation of Christ and his own to “the
heavenly places” (ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις) and the fore-ordination of God’s
purpose “before the foundation of the world” (πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου).
And unlike Paul, Ephesians has a very attenuated eschatology. All of these
qualities make this text very attractive to Marcion.82
Tertullian’s comment on Marcion’s use of Ephesians opens a host of
questions. He writes, “I forbear to treat here of another epistle to which
we give the title To the Ephesians, but the heretics, To the Laodiceans.”
While commentators strive to find allusions to Ephesians in sources like
Ignatius or Polycarp,83 Tertullian describes the earliest reception of the
letter, long before Irenaeus’s explicit naming of it in relation to Paul.
Marcion’s reading of Ephesians is the earliest explicit reception of that
letter. Given Tertullian’s extensive argument against Marcion’s text and
reading of Romans, as well as Galatians, the lack of treatment of Ephe-
sians is noteworthy. It seems that this is not ground on which Tertullian
is willing to undertake an argument. Muddiman’s suggestion that Tertul-
lian exhibited “a certain fatigue”84 by this point in his treatise and so did
not offer a rich treatment of Marcion’s use of Ephesians assists Tertullian
in dodging a difficult rhetorical challenge: Ephesians is very amenable to
Marcionite interpretation.
82. Tyson’s account (Marcion and Luke-Acts, 36–38) of “Marcion and Paul” is
overwhelmingly oriented to Galatians. Without denying the importance of Galatians
to Marcion, I would highlight a tendency to describe Marcion’s thought in relation
to the “real Paul” of modern scholarship rather than to the Paul received by Marcion
as authentic. Tyson’s scriptural index stands as a witness to this tendency.
83. Ernest Best, Ephesians, ICC (London: Continuum, 2004), 15–17, makes a
strong case for a few allusions or overlaps. His cautious and accurate formulation
that “the earliest known attributions of the letter come from Irenaeus (1.8.5, 5.2.3,
5.8.1, 5.14.3, 5.24.4) and Marcion as testified by Tertullian” (14), glosses over the
point that Marcion’s attribution of the letter to Paul preceded any extant “orthodox”
attribution by probably two generations.
84. John Muddiman, A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, Black’s New
Testament Commentaries (New York: Continuum, 2001).
Hoffmann makes the case that Marcion was the author of a letter in
Paul’s name addressed to the Laodiceans and that the canonical edition
of Ephesians is a lightly redacted version of Marcion’s letter, edited to
associate it with doctrine perceived as more authentically Pauline and less
congenial to Marcion.85 While there are several reasons to be skeptical of
Hoffman’s narrative of the origins of Ephesians, it makes as solid a case of
particular authorship and particular location of composition as any. As far
as I can tell, commentators on Ephesians have not considered Hoffman’s
argument. Without following Hoffmann all the way to treating Marcion
as the author—and thus avoiding the myriad difficulties of adjudicat-
ing what differences would stand between an original composition and
the canonical version—it is worth noting that the Marcionite context is
the earliest we know for the epistle. Given the dates of Marcion’s major
activity—ca. 125–155 c.e.—it seems more likely that he received an epistle
that he treated as Pauline and undertook a redaction of it that proceeded
from his conviction of the Judaizing corruption of Paul’s letters.
Like the authentic letters of Paul, Ephesians is—at least on the sur-
face—oriented to a Gentile audience. This shows up most clearly in the
description of the audience as called “uncircumcision by those who are
called circumcision,” formerly “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel”
(Eph 2.11–12), but also in the language of inheritance and adoption scat-
tered throughout the letter. The scheme of relation between Jews and Gen-
tiles is unification in a new dispensation rather than the violent superses-
sion of other receptions of Paul such as Luke-Acts, the Pastorals, or the
Epistle of Barnabas.86 This is a very different transformation of the Pauline
eschatological state of exception.
How would, or could, Marcion deal with this movement in Ephesians
given his double Christology? Actual data on this question is sparse. Most
accounts of Marcion’s Laodiceans are oriented to text-critical minutiae,
but, on the assumption that Eph 2.11–22 was relatively intact in Mar-
cion’s Laodiceans, his embrace of the text may show him participating in
a larger, early second-century trend in which devotees of Christ thought
of him in ever more exalted terms and explored a variety of narratives to
describe the relation to Judaism. Though the action of the double Chris-
tology is not evident in the data on Marcion’s Laodiceans, the alternate
text at Eph 3.9 in which Marcion’s version stands without the ἐν, suggest-

86. James Carleton-Paget, “Paul and the Epistle of Barnabas,” NT 38 (1996):
359–81.
ing that the mystery of salvation was hidden “from (or with respect to)
the God who created all things” rather than “in the God who created all
things.”87 The ditheism of Marcion’s text of Eph 3.9 points to the system
in which the double Christology coheres.
The Ephesian/Laodicean pseudepigraph should stand as a witness to a
reception of Paul and an exploration of devotion to Jesus that transforms
Paul’s witness and authority for the longue durée, beyond the eschatologi-
cal moment. Marcion may well have transformed the text of the letter
toward the Paul he was confident of as the apostle of the alien God; it is
also the case that the letter we have in Ephesians was transforming Paul
in a direction that was congenial to Marcion’s structure of thought. Per-
haps the canonical Ephesians was redacted away from a form that was so
congenial to Marcionite usage. The most textually prominent instance of
this is of course the textually unstable geographical location of the letter
in Ephesus.88 Hoffman makes the case that the Ephesus location draws
the letter into an “orthodox” orbit, while the Laodicean location situates
it in a region more sympathetic to Marcion.89
For Marcion, Ephesians addressed the problem of a landscape of human
belief that was more complicated than his two-Christ system. One might
imagine that, for Marcion, Ephesians described the unification that could
take place between Jews and Gentiles living in loyalty to Jesus as the
anointed one of the alien God, but that the Christ of the creator God was
still to come for Jews who were not living as if the dividing wall had been
broken (Eph 2.14). The work of Ephesians stands as an alternate resolu-
tion to the dilemma of the Sonderzeit Paul. It seeks a unity of the Jews
and Gentiles that was of little utility in the Pauline eschatological crisis,
but became more and more an element of the social landscape of forma-
tive Christianity in the wider Roman world.90
87. Ulrich Schmid, Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische
Einordnung der marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe, Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen
Textforschung 25 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 112–13.
88. Commentaries on Eph 1.1, as well as the text-critical apparatus of the NA27,
make this clear and usually acknowledge Marcion’s alternate account of the destina-
tion of the epistle.
90. Alternatively, Eph 2.15, often read as supersessionist, might just as easily be read
(regarding Paul or Marcion) as applying only to the letter’s “Gentiles”—that is, the
wall that has kept them out (the requirement that they observe the law) has now been
taken down for Gentiles (John G. Gager, personal communication, September 2009).
Traditional Transformations of Paul

As I have attempted to emphasize, Marcion stands within a larger sec-
ond-century tradition of receiving and transforming Paul in particular, as
well as the materials of devotion to Jesus. Both Marcion and others were
engaged in a process of attributing authority to Paul that universalized
messages originally composed in and for local situations. Tertullian lays
this out as a principle in his dispute over the destination of Ephesians/
Laodiceans: “when the apostle wrote to some, he wrote to all.”91 To ascribe
Ephesians to Paul is to head down this route. But Marcion’s double Chris-
tology retains a specificity that other forms of Christianity did not. The
decisive challenge in the reception of Paul was one that Marcion and other
Christians could not avoid, namely, taming the intense eschatology of the
earliest devotees of Jesus. Some strategies for transforming eschatology
removed the corporate and catastrophic character of earlier conceptions
and replaced them with personal ascetic practice: the beatitude on Paul’s
lips in the Acts of Paul—“blessed are the bodies of the virgins” with a
promise of merit laid up against the day of God’s son—stands as a clear
example, and the rigorous ascetic practice of Marcion and his followers
may stand in this tradition. More commonly, the problem of eschatology
moved hand in hand with the challenge of the formation of communal
identity in relation to Judaism, leading to arguments over prophecy and
Scripture. The “orthodox” solution was to emphasize a double parou-
sia and to assert the misunderstanding by Jews of their own Scriptures.
Marcion, on the other hand, while participating in the notion of a double
parousia, doubled the Christ as well and thereby held onto something
that others could not, that Jews did understand their Scriptures, and that
their place in God’s, or a God’s, plan was special without being obsolete.
Perhaps Donaldson’s Sonderplatz proposal is more apposite to Marcion’s
thinking about Judaism than to Paul’s.
Conclusion
In case there is a lingering suspicion that I am arguing that Marcion cor-

rectly understood Paul, let me be clear: he did not. In his construal of the
textual tradition, his conviction of corrupting interpolation, and his sub-
91. Tertullian, Marc. 5.17. A similar, and ahistorical, principle of interpretation

appears in Victorinus’s comment (Commentary to Revelation 1.7) on the multiple
“epistles” of Rev 2–3, remarking that while each is specifically addressed, he consid-
ers that each is in some sense universally intended.
sequent endeavors to correct that certainly distorted Paul and especially

the letter to the Romans, Marcion transformed the Apostle drastically.
Marcion’s rejection of the Hebrew Bible, his positing of an alien higher
God in opposition to the creator, his positing of two separate Christs, his
attenuation (if not removal) of Pauline eschatology: all of these are serious
distortions of Paul, but so were all other readings of Paul in the second
and third centuries. The appropriate question is not, Who in the second
century understood Paul?, but rather, What axes of transformation and
continuity characterize each reception of Paul? Such an adjudication of
transformation and continuity assumes an understanding of Paul. In this
circle of interpretation and positing of “accurate” and “inaccurate” read-
ings, there is a provisionality to any conclusion that is not debilitating if
conclusions are held to be local to particular discourses—historical-critical
in the present case and normatively theological in the orthodox account.
Admittedly these ideal discourses are often mixed in their instantiation.
Heikki Räisänen attempts to hold together two views of Paul in relation
to Judaism but it seems that Räisänen’s universalizing reading of Chris-
tianity makes it impossible for him to do so. On the one hand Räisänen
writes that, for Marcion, “the Old Testament was a trustworthy account
of the past and even of the future of the Jews; they had reason to expect a
messiah (who was not identical with Marcion’s Christ) promised to them
by Scripture.”92 Räisänen later suggests that “Marcion completely rejected
the Old Testament. He replaced it with writings he considered the genuine
founding documents of Christianity.”93 What could hold these statements
together is the recognition that Marcion rejected the “Old Testament” for
Gentile Christians. This recognition is implicit in the earlier quotation, but
the failure to make it explicit reenacts on Marcion a parallel implemen-
tation of rejection and replacement theology that traditional and “New
Perspective” readings of Paul enact on Paul, forcing the Apostle into a
de-ethnicized universalism that proceeds from the reader rather than the
author and his context.
Marcion, like all his contemporaries, wrote in conditions that were not
operative in Paul’s lifetime. I have emphasized the difference between Pau-
line eschatological conviction and that of his second-century interpreters,
but other conditions intervene, most notably, the presence of “Christian-
ity” as a potential third category among Jews and Gentiles.94 Ephesians,
92. Räisänen, “Marcion,” 108.

93. Räisänen, “Marcion,” 113.
94. Lieu, Image and Reality, 266–67.
while not mentioning the “Christians” or “Christianity,” begins to deal

with the problem of a third category in its rhetoric of union. In some
ways, Ephesians forms for Marcion a strategy to address this emergent
possibility. The counterbalance within Marcion’s thought, one that keeps
a kind of faith with Paul’s vision of the ultimate salvation of all Israel,
is the d octrine of the two Christs. Marcion created at least a provisional
coherence by planting a foot in each of these camps—the new entity in
Ephesians and the Jew-Gentile binary in his Christology. Moreover, Ephe-
sians’ exalted Christology drew close enough to the hiddenness of Mar-
cion’s alien God to be amenable to his redaction and co-optation. Alterna-
tively, the text that Marcion understood as Paul’s letter to the Laodiceans
was, as he found it, even more congenial to Marcion’s thought than the
text we have as Ephesians, and came to the longer tradition through a
process of anti-Marcionite redaction. Given the new conditions Marcion
faced, Ephesians and his double Christology enabled him to present Paul
coherently for a new day.
The Judaism that Ephesians lyrically described as available to union
with Gentiles is one point in the continuum of second-century Christian
discourse on Jews and Judaism, and slurs against Judaizing are another,
often (though not in Marcion’s case)95 slipping unstably between Judaizing
Gentiles and Jews. Judaism and Judaizing are labels thrown at each other
by second-century Christians in order to delegitimize each other. Marcion
threw it at the orthodox and the orthodox threw it back. The relationship
of Christians to Judaism varied along several axes: conceptual, cultural,
social, and more. Conceptually, the options that were crucial in the recep-
tion of Paul are the appropriative supersession of Acts, the negative con-
demnation of Judaism in the Pastorals, and the disjunctive supersession of
Marcion. It is important to see that each of these is an attempt to create
coherent readings of Paul in the absence of the exceptional circumstance
that governed Paul’s relation to Judaism, namely, his conviction that he
was living in the last days, living until Jesus returned to tie up the ages
gathering people and bringing glory to God.
Nevertheless, Marcion may have preserved something of Paul’s thought
that eluded other channels of reception: the conviction that salvific options
might take different shapes across the line dividing Israel from the nations,
that Paul was talking about Christ in relation to Gentiles. This is the coher-
ent solution on the basis of the two variables that have been emphasized in
this article: a Sonderzeit understanding of Paul, on the one hand, and an
95. Hoffmann, Marcion, 33.

understanding of Marcion showing the influence of that Paul in his double

Christology, on the other. Moreover, in the reading of Marcion that I have
explored here, we gain an understanding of how Marcion’s reception of
Paul stood within larger currents of early second-century reception of Paul.
In understanding Marcion’s transformation as a dissociative supersession
rather than the more traditional appropriative supersession, we see how
Marcion’s interpretation of Paul retained some of the largest structures
of Paul’s thought, in spite of heresiological complaints about the gnawing
of the Pontic mouse.
John W. Marshall is Associate Professor of the Study of Religion

at the University of Toronto

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Misunderstanding the New Paul: Marcion's Transformation of

the Sonderzeit Paul

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 20, Number 1, Spring 2012,

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Harnack rehabilitated him.3 Tertullian understood the need for such a

3. R. Joseph Hoffmann, Marcion, On the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay

Marcion has preserved—and just as surely transformed—a key theme in

The New Pauls

The “New Perspective”

7. Initially publishing in Sweden as Krister Stendahl, “Paulus och Samvetet [“Paul

terms of the legalistic counterpart to Paul’s grace-­governed ­Christianity,

The “Sonderzeit” Paul

2. Paul’s eschatological conviction—that he operated at the end of the age,

Moreover, Paul’s rhetorical habits make interpreting Romans on the top-

19. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans.

these passages is a worthwhile endeavor, but misplaced in the context of

23. James Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek. Vol. 1: Prolegomena,

a construct that is a tool in traditional Christian supersession narratives,

­ endrickson, 2007); Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument

of his eschatology, most commonly into a personal asceticism.34 To speak

Marcion’s significance within second-century Christianity is immense. The

of ­Ignatius.44 This is a difficult argument to make for a number of reasons

44. Hoffmann, Marcion, 56–63.

erly subordinate Judaism to Christianity was a peculiarly Christian form

49. Tertullian, Marc. 3.6. (ed. and trans. Evans 182–83).

Two Gods, Two Christs, Two Paths

that, in addition to proposing two Gods, Marcion proposed two Christs.54

Justin in the Dialogue with Trypho, reading the pattern of supersession—

It is worthwhile to examine this account in detail. Beyond the two Christs

61. E.g., Miriam Taylor’s positioning of Marcion as the extreme of anti-Judaism

The closest parallel to the intensity of Paul’s eschatological expectation is

64. Tertullian, Marc. 4.6 (ed. and trans. Evans 274–75).

66. Tertullian, Marc. 3.21.

69. Tertullian, Marc. 3.24 (ed. and trans. Evans 246–47).

tinction [distinctionem] to the Marcion himself.75 While Irenaeus credits

foundational power in the structure of the universe.79 More ­practically,

Marcion and Other Transformations of Paul

Marcion and Ephesians

85. Hoffmann, Marcion, 268–80.

Traditional Transformations of Paul

In case there is a lingering suspicion that I am arguing that Marcion cor-

91. Tertullian, Marc. 5.17. A similar, and ahistorical, principle of interpretation

sequent endeavors to correct that certainly distorted Paul and especially

92. Räisänen, “Marcion,” 108.

while not mentioning the “Christians” or “Christianity,” begins to deal

95. Hoffmann, Marcion, 33.

understanding of Marcion showing the influence of that Paul in his double

John W. Marshall is Associate Professor of the Study of Religion

Potrebbero piacerti anche

terms of the legalistic counterpart to Paul’s grace-governed Christianity,

endrickson, 2007); Daniel Boyarin, “Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument

of Ignatius.44 This is a difficult argument to make for a number of reasons

foundational power in the structure of the universe.79 More practically,