MARCION and THE MARCIONITE CHURCHES. Among the Christian organisations of the middle period of the second century the most important, next to Catholicism, was the Marcionite community. It admitted all believers without dis tinction of age, sex, rank or culture. It was no mere school for the learned, disclosed no mysteries for the privileged, but sought to lay the foundation of the Christian community on the pure and authentic gospel of Christ. The pure gospel, however, Marcion found to be everywhere more or less corrupted and mutilated in the Christian circles of his time. His undertaking thus resolved itself into a reformation of Christendom. This reformation was to deliver Christendom from false Jewish doctrines by restoring the Pauline conception of the gospel—Paul being, according to Marcion, the only apostle who had rightly understood the new message of salvation as delivered by Christ. In Marcion's own view, therefore, the founding of his church—to which he was first driven by opposition—amounts to a reformation of Christen dom through a return to the gospel of Christ and to Paul; nothing was to be accepted beyond that. This of itself shows that it is a mistake to reckon Marcion among the Gnostics. For he ascribed salvation, not to "knowledge" but to "faith"; he appealed openly to the whole Christian world; and he nowhere consciously added foreign elements to the revelation given through Christ. It is true that in many features his Christian system resembles the so-called Gnostic systems; but the first duty of the historian is to point out what Marcion plainly aimed at ; only in the second place have we to inquire how far the result corresponded with those purposes.
Marcion was a wealthy shipowner, belonging to Sinope in Pontus. He appears to have been a convert from Paganism to Christianity. About A.D. 14o he arrived in Rome as a Christian, and made himself known to the local church. Even then, however, the leading features of his peculiar system must have been already thought out. At Rome he tried to gain acceptance for them in the college of presbyters and in the church ; but he now encountered such determined opposition from the majority of the congrega tion that he found it necessary to withdraw from the great church and establish in Rome a community of his own. This was about the year 144. The new society increased in the two following decades; and very soon numerous sister-churches were flourishing in the east and west of the empire. Marcion took up his residence
permanently in Rome, but still undertook journeys for the propa gation of his opinions; and he seems never to have abandoned his design of gaining over the whole Church to his gospel.
The distinctive teaching of Marcion originated in a comparison of the Old Testament with the gospel of Christ and the theology of the apostle Paul. Its motive was not metaphysical, but religious and historical. In the gospel he found a God revealed who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men. This God he could not discover in the Old Testament; on the contrary, he saw there the revelation of a just, stern, jealous, wrathful and variable God, who requires from his servants blind obedience, fear and outward righteousness. Overpowered by the majesty and novelty of the Christian message of salvation, too conscientious to rest satisfied with the ordinary attempts at the solution of dif ficulties, while prevented by the limitations of his time from reaching an historical insight into the relation of Christianity to the Old Testament and to Judaism, he believed that he expressed Paul's view by the hypothesis of two Gods : the just God of the law (the God of the Jews, who is also the Creator of the world), and the good God, the Father of Jesus Christ. Paradoxes in the history of religion and revelation which Paul draws out, and which Marcion's contemporaries passed by as utterly incomprehensible, are here made the foundation of a dualistic conception of history and of religion. It may be said that in the 2nd century only one Christian—Marcion—took the trouble to understand Paul; but it must be added that he misunderstood him. The profound reflections of the apostle on the radical antithesis of law and gospel, works and faith, were not appreciated in the 2nd century. Marcion alone perceived their decisive religious importance, and with them confronted the legalizing, and in this sense judaizing, tendencies of his Christian contemporaries. But the Pauline ideas lost their truth under his treatment ; for, when it is denied that the God of redemption is at the same time the almighty Lord of heaven and earth, the gospel is turned upside down.