Marcionism as a Christian movement emerged in the 1st century. It constituted one of the earliest major “heresies” within the early Church. It also happened to be one of the largest and most influential of the “heretical” movements well into the 2nd century. Marcionism also overlapped, both chronologically and geographically, with Valentinism.
This Christian movement was founded by Marcion of Sinope, a city on the northern coast of Anatolia, near the very center of that coastline, in the Pontus province of the eastern Roman Empire. What we know of him comes from other Christian sources who’d opposed his movement.
He was the son of a Christian bishop, these reports tell us, and had made his living in shipping. Sometime before 140 CE he journeyed to Rome and joined a Christian congregation there. He must have been extremely successful in shipping, since he made a large donation to that church; one that was returned to him once he’d made his beliefs known.
Reportedly he’d been a student, once he arrived in Rome, of Cerdo, a Gnostic or quasi-Gnostic sage of the Simonian variety. While Marcion certainly embraced some Gnostic ideas, particularly a rigidly dualistic worldview in which the God of the Hebrews was an entirely different entity from the deity about whom Jesus the Christ taught, the degree to which he was a Gnostic is a topic of its own (which I will get to shortly). As with Marcion, antagonistic Christian writers are our only sources of information about Cerdo, who appears to have had a small but noteworthy following in Rome. But what they have to say isn’t much. They suggest that Cerdo’s followers were absorbed later into Marcion’s movement, although Simonianism (with which Cerdo had been associated) continued after him.
This brings us to the consideration of whether or not Marcionism was a Gnostic sect. Marcion was, and on occasion still is, seen as a Gnostic. However, that’s almost certainly not accurate. While (as noted) he did borrow from Gnostic notions, Marcion never taught a layered initiation process, and his teachings weren’t esoteric in nature.
In fact, Marcion leaned heavily on scripture and articulated a single package of teaching. He developed a canon of his own, on which his Church was founded — and never suggested anything was to be kept secret, or that knowledge of the Divine could only be arrived at subjectively and by only a small number of people.
So, while you may hear that Marcionism is a form of Gnosticism, it makes little sense to say that. Some of the ancient Christian authors who mentioned him confused his movement with that of Cerdo and the Simonians with whom Marcion had been associated. Some later writers (and even modern ones) make the same association. However, it’s an invalid comparison. Marcionism actually had more in common with the other “literalist” Christian movements, than it did with Gnostic movements.
Marcion was influential within Christian circles in the central Roman Empire, particularly in the environs of Rome and in other major cities such as Carthage. That his generous donation to the church in Rome had been returned to him, and he’d been rejected by its leadership as a teacher of wayward doctrine, only put a minor dent in his overall reputation.
Thus, Marcion’s movement extended throughout the central Roman Empire. As the 2nd century drew to a close, Marcionism also found a footing in the eastern Empire, in places such as Damascus.
There are also indications, based on what the Christian authors tell us, that the differences between Marcionist Churches and other types of “literal” Christian churches weren’t always easy to spot. One of Marcion’s critics, Cyril of Jerusalem, felt the need to warn traveling Christians about the perils of entering a Marcionist church by accident.
Later writers attest that the Marcionite Church lasted for quite some time, being led by a succession of presiding bishops who followed Marcion. There’s evidence of Marcionist churches as late as the 4th century, and Christian critics were still commenting on Marcionism in the 4th and 5th centuries.
What separated Marcionism from other forms of Christianity — both heretical and heterodox — was its teaching that there were, fundamentally, two different deities: The Hebrews’ God, and the God of Jesus the Christ. While most Gnostic sects also taught something of a duality, almost all of them were, to a degree, monotheistic. They viewed the ruler of the physical realm, the Demiurge, as an emanation from the original Ineffable Divine, just as Christ himself was just such an emanation.
For Marcionists, by contrast, these were two separate, distinct, rival entities. It wasn’t possible for the evil God of the Hebrews to have descended or emanated from the benevolent God of whom Christ had spoken. That latter deity was one who hadn’t previously been involved with humanity. Marcion referred to this deity occasionally as “the Stranger” or “the Alien” due to that being’s aloof nature and previously-unknown existence.
Marcion’s belief in the harshness of the Hebrew God led to one of the primary differences that Marcion and his Church had with other “literalist” sects. He and his movement utterly rejected Jewish scripture as corrupt and profane, whereas most others still retained Jewish scripture and considered it either fully or partly sacred.
With regard to sacred scripture, Marcion went a step further than other Christian leaders of his time. He propounded a definite, specific list, or canon, of sacred texts. His canon included what he called “the Gospel,” or the Evangelikon, and ten of Paul’s epistles: (Philemon, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, and Laodiceans) which he’d termed the Apostolikon.
His Evangelikon was a redacted version of Luke, and Laodiceans in his Apostolikon is a now-unknown text which may have been Ephesians. Marcion also reportedly wrote a work of his own, called Antitheses or Antithesis, which hasn’t survived.
Marcion claimed to have been a follower of Paul, and this is reflected in his choice of canon, being devoted as he was to Paul’s epistles. In this regard he was little different from other Christian leaders of his time, including Valentinus (who claimed to have been a student of Theudas who was in turn a protégé of Paul, and thus privy to Paul’s secret teachings as opposed to his written epistles).
This is a curious position, given that Paul was himself a Jew, and had worked ostensibly to reach an accord with Jews within the early Christian movement. Still, Paul had condemned the Judaizers in his letter to the Galatians, who’d taught that all Christians, Jewish and Gentile, were supposed to obey the Mosaic Law. That, Paul taught, had to stop. Jewish Christians could continue to follow the Law, but Gentiles should not. Marcion appears to have preferred an elaboration on this principle, in which there was a clearer division between the two groups.
Marcion also taught that followers of Christ, who believed in the true deity who’d sent him, ought to be celibate. This may have followed from Paul’s comment on his own bachelorhood and celibacy:
But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. (1 Cor 7:8-9)
So while Paul did not condemn marriage in general, he preferred for himself never to marry, and in turn suggests celibacy was a superior spiritual state. Marcion, it seems, did not miss this.
This meant the overall survival of the Marcionist Church depended on making adult converts, which they typically did from among other “literalist” Christian congregations. Although the movement took off and expanded quickly over its first few decades, over the long term, celibacy led to diminished numbers and made it difficult for Marcionism to compete with other movements.
Marcionism’s call for celibacy also helped trigger at least one fracture within that movement: One of Marcion’s students, named Appelles, was (rather famously) not celibate and appears to have established his own branch movement within Marcionism. It reportedly veered closer to Gnosticism, over the years.
Marcionism experienced other fractures and schisms, as well; in subsequent generations, other variants emerged within the movement. In this regard the Marcionite Church was just like most other Christian movements. A constant theme of Christianity is that at no point was it ever a unified set of beliefs, and also, no movement within Christianity lasted very long without also developing variants.
This contrasts with Marcionism’s early history in the middle of the 1st century when it seems to have propagated rather widely and quickly, reaching many parts of the Roman Empire within a span of only a few years. At times, the Marcionite Church threatened to overwhelm the rest of Christendom (or rather, its “literalist” wing). This is why later 2nd century critics such as Irenaeus and Tertullian considered it a grave threat to the religion’s very existence.
Marcionism appears to have suffered a fate similar to that of the Gnostic sects overall; that is, it was excluded from efforts to create a wider and more unitary Church with a single set of specific doctrines. The Council of Nicaea did not address Marcionism; but as far as is known, it also didn’t include anyone from the Marcionist Church. Marcionism was also left out of subsequent Christological and doctrinal disputes, uninvolved in (and never addressed by) any of the other ecumenical councils of the next few centuries.
Marcionism isn’t mentioned after the 5th century. It might still have existed beyond that point, but we do not have any way to know how long that may have been. It was mentioned only by eastern authors during its last two centuries, so it might have lingered on only in those provinces. That, in turn, means that even if it endured beyond the 5th century, it would have been wiped out by the rise and conquests of Islam.
Quotation from 1 Corinthians taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation.
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