Reforming Christianity III - Rehabilitating Marcion

In my last post I went to great pains to point out that there was almost certainly a tension between Peter and Paul and at least two different strains of early Christianity.

This isn’t exactly an original idea and, in fact, within the scholarly world, this thesis has been debated for about two hundred years. All I did was come out firmly on one side of the debate after examining the evidence and squaring it with what I know about the habits and tactics employed by the Chosen people. A quick Google search is enough to prove that serious historians have also delved into this area of inquiry and shared their own conclusions as well. The idea that Paul was, indeed, what could be termed a “gnostic”, or rather that the gnostics weren’t lying when they claimed Paul had some connection to them and their teachings isn’t really all that crazy if you just look at it objectively. The Faithful, however, try to mislead and confuse people looking for answers by claiming that this is a fringe or made-up fantasy story by one lone blogger (like myself) or another. Please, avail yourself of the search function that every internet browser provides and punch in the search terms “Paul + Gnostic” to find out for yourself just how “fringe” and “unsubstantiated” the ideas I presented in part II really were.

The way I see it, it was important to point out that there is more than enough reason to believe that there is a “Paul + Gnostic” connection and I brought it up so that I could then justify the claims of the heretics who came a generation or more after Paul’s death and who battled for the future of the Church with the Petrine faction.

Allow me to lend some more credence to their claims with this post, but first allow me to point out that I don’t really even care about the hagiography of the heretics myself. A good idea is a good idea and it doesn’t really matter to me who came up with it and when or why. But most people argue from authority and don’t care that they’re committing a logical fallacy while doing so. Being unable to evaluate ideas on their own merits, they get sucked into debates on who has more authority or not before even considering the actual arguments being presented. Well, seeing as that aspect of human nature isn’t about to change, I have to work with the grain and not against it, and try to explain why these heretics did indeed have legitimate claim to the legacy of Paul, the founder of the Christian faith.

Marcion of Sinope was the chief heretic of his age, and, probably the greatest heretic in all of Church history. The Nicene Council was almost certainly convened in his honor, to figure out a way to present a unified theological front against his wildly popular and vehemently anti-Judaic system of Christianity.

Allow me to provide a quick rundown on who Marcion was. We only have the documents that his opponents passed down attacking his metaphysics and his character to work with, but, because his haters were so thorough and quoted him so extensively, we actually end up with quite a bit of material. From what we can tell, he was involved in the shipping business of the Empire and was excommunicated by Rome in 144 AD. Most of the background information on this man can be found on his Wiki page and so I won’t rehash it here.

Instead, I’ll offer some logical speculations that make sense to me. For example, we know that his father was a Bishop in Pontus (Greek-settled lands of Turkey) and that Marcion was not a newcomer to Christianity then, by simple logic of his family being high-ups in it. We also know from Paul’s letters that at the time of their writing, Peter and James were in Jerusalem or Antioch, not Rome. Paul also talks about already established Churches all over the Eastern part of the Roman Empire - they are the people to whom his letters are addressed. Yet, somehow, Rome is considered the first Church and the greatest among them by Catholics. Rome’s claim to primacy is dubious seeing as we know for a near certain fact that Peter did not even make it to Rome and that Rome was clearly not the first Church. My claim isn’t exactly fringe seeing as the Orthodox Church doesn’t even recognize the Catholic argument that according to Matthew, Christ chooses Peter to be his “rock” i.e., the leader of the Christian faith, let alone the primacy of the Church in Rome or the legitimacy of the institution of the Papacy as a whole.

If anything, the congregations in Pontus were clearly the first Churches. That means Marcion’s father would have been either a first or second generation priest of one of these original Pauline churches and Marcion the second or third generation himself.

But the Marcion - Paul connection goes deeper than that. For example, we know for a historical fact that it was Marcion who discovered the letters of Paul and who popularized them by circulating them among Christians. We also know that he gave the Church in Rome their first copy of the letters - the Vatican confirmed it.

So there’s a very blatant Paul connection right there, no?

Here I’m saying something rather obvious, so that means I ought to repeat it several more times so that the slow-witted Churchians can understand it.

• Marcion comes from a Christian family of higher-ups in the Eastern Church

• He hails from the area of Paul’s most active proselytizing work

• He claims to have a direct connection to Paul and his teachings and to be its continuation, and is separated by one/two generations

• He reveals the Pauline Epistles to the world and popularizes them, going so far as to make it the central part of his Bible

• His work is the original text for the later latin translation of the epistles - a fact confirmed by the Vatican recently itself

• Even his critics, like Tertullian, concede that Paul himself is the “father of all heresies” which seems to imply that Paul’s writings inspired heretics like Marcion, which is exactly what Marcion himself is saying!

And yet, there can be no connection between Paul and the heretic Marcion - none whatsoever. I’ve tried pressing Churchians on this topic, but to no avail. They will never address your claims about Yahweh and the Old Testament head-on and they will never engage honestly on the topic of Marcion with you. These are two glaring weaknesses, two chinks in the dogmatic armor, and they know it. Push hard enough on these two points and their whole religion comes undone. Can’t blame them for not wanting to engage in good faith knowing this.

All of this had to be said before I even got into the central arguments of Marcionism. Again, I wouldn’t care if this was some just some crank who clambered out of some cave in Siberia - I’d consider the arguments he presented on their own merits. But, seeing as that this isn’t just some crank from a cave in Siberia, but a man with considerable weight to his name and pedigree, it’s worth pointing out that he’s not some nobody, and his movement wasn’t “fringe” at his time or in the centuries following his death. Not only did Marcion create the first Bible - based on ten Pauline Epistles (the later Pastoral letters were fakes tacked on by the Church) but the oldest inscription of Jesus' name in the world was found on a Marcionite shrine, dated 318 A.D. That date puts the existence of a still living and breathing Marcionite movement right before the Nicene Council. Like I mentioned before, much of what the Nicene Council wrote and settled upon appears to be a direct response to the Marcionite movement in much the same way that the Torah was a direct response to Manetho’s account of the Hebrews and their crimes against the Egyptian people.

Marcion, unlike other gnostics, did not talk much about secret teachings. He laid out his worldview openly and clearly, as far as we can tell. He believed that Christianity was meant to be a direct rejection and repudiation of the tradition of the Old Testament, and also, we can conjecture at least, the cosmological gods of the pagan world. The ancients had a complicated relationship with the pagan gods where these entities were feared as much as they were revered and there was a consistent trend that pops up in Greek thought calling for the need to move past these gods, or at least to acknowledge their malign influence. In that sense, many ancient thinkers conceptualized the gods in the same negative way as Paul conceptualized his “archons”.

That is the key to Marcionite thought - the concept of rebellion against higher powers that don’t seem to have our best interest in mind.

Unlike atheism, which denies higher realities all-together and promotes a crass materialism that is actually quite similar to the kind of spirituality espoused in the Torah, Marcionism does not deny the existence of such entities. Nor does Orthodoxy, for that matter, or even old-school Catholicism from I can gather.

As an aside, both Capitalism and Communism have their roots in Judaism. Harrison Koehli gets into this during his recent interview with Russel Gmirkin (Judaism as the first real belief system and Marxism-Leninism as its latest great success) and I plan to revisit the topic in a later post.

Marcionism, because of its explicit anti-Judaic message, has a lot to offer in the current situation we face now. Churchianity, on the other hand, is the result of an aborted repudiation of Judaism that started out promisingly with the early Christians, but, by the time of the Nicene Council the faith had returned like a dog to its own vomit when it re-embraced the “Curse of Moses”. As a result, the Church has always intervened on the behalf of Jews to save them from the ire of the peasants that they have exploited and oppressed. The logic, provided by yet another Semitic rat, Augustine, is that Jews are our older brothers in the faith and have to encouraged to convert, not resisted openly. But even this once explicitly stated objective of the faith has been dropped in recent years as the Judaizing trend within Churchianity has accelerated. Protestants, who were once called Old Testamentarians, believe that the Jews immediately go to heaven on account of their blood, while the Pope has recently started saying that the Jews have their own special way of getting into heaven outside of the Christian faith after a controversial visit to Israel:

This visit is to come a little over a month after the publication of a document by the Commission of the Holy See for Religious Relations with the Jews, entitled “The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable: A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra Aetate” (December 10, 2015); this document states that “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews”. Indeed, “the covenant that God made with his people Israel perdures and is never invalidated,” which leads the Church “to view evangelization to Jews in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views.” The text leads one to think, as the newspaper Le Monde said in its title on December 10, 2015, that “the Catholic Church will no longer seek to convert the Jews.”

There is also the one-world religion project that is underway now, part of the greater Ecumenical effort, which seeks to subordinate the entire world under the Noahide Laws. But this topic requires its own post. Later, later.

One of the most problematic ideas that Churchianity has left us with is the idea of blind obedience to higher authority. Usually, this translates to blind obedience to corrupt and self-serving Church authority, but, ultimately, it translates to blind obedience of Yahweh and special treatment for his Chosen people, the Jews.

As the situation stands now, all Churchian institutions have been compromised and have been so for the better part of a century. It will be exceedingly hard to combat organized Jewish power when the peasants have been convinced that their savior was a rabbi without a foreskin and that God loves everyone equally, but that the Jews are the first among equals. Frankly, philosemitism has led us directly to the current crisis situation that we are in and until we change the religious, cultural and political programming that our people are subjected to, we will never be able to stand up to our oppressors. Within the greater right-wing coalition, there have always been talks about what to do about the spiritual crisis facing the European peoples. It seems quite clear that we need a spiritual system that is uncompromising and unapologetic on the topic of Jewish power. And I can think of no better metaphysical system than the one presented by Marcion and other gnostics of the pre-Nicene period.

As to how we should approach spirituality going forward, I have an entire set of essays examining Belief v Knowing, Worship v Self-Empowerment, Soul v No-Soul v Oversoul and a few more planned that get into alternative structures for approaching religiosity. In a nutshell, I believe that spiritual practice, like any other practice whether it be cooking, training, crafting or so one, has to make individuals and the groups to which they belong stronger. Spirituality ought to empower our people and give them both the tools and the courage to confront their oppressors. No system deserves blind allegiance and all systems have to answer the question, “does it make me and mine stronger?” to avoid being jettisoned or radically reformed going forward.

I plan to write more on these topics eventually, but I see this essay as a bookmark for the time being even though there is more that can be said about origin stories, spiritual practice, cosmology and so on. I feel like I’ve said quite a bit and I hope to see these ideas discussed before I forge even further ahead. I’ve seen many of the ideas that we’ve already discussed picked up on other blogs, which is heartening and gives me hope that the same will occur with what I have written most recently. That being said, I don’t know whether or not this has occurred because people have read my blog or the collective psyche has started intuitively moving in this direction on its own. Regardless, I pray that we don’t have to wait another decade before thinking minds are ready to engage with the ideas that I have presented here.

I don’t know about you, but time seems to be running low to me.