Bauer and von Soden essentially agree in the judgment that I have overestimated M.’s significance for the development of Christianity into Catholicism, and in particular for the emergence of the New Testament.1 In such a question it is [p. 21] difficult to convince others, especially since old prejudices continue to work. One can — I do not fail to see this — demonstrate parallels and preliminary stages, whether in the Great Church or among Gnostics, for every single point in the church-constructive and dogma-historical field that is characteristic of M.’s creation. But M.’s originality lies not only in his exclusive combination of them; one must also ask whether the “preliminary stages” would have led, without his intervention, to the further developments that actually took place. The answer to this difficult question depends on integrated historical impressions of which one can hardly give an account to others. For me, the assertion that Marcion was the first “Catholic” Christian, although as a reformer he wanted to tear Christendom out of the development toward Catholicism, is no paradox, if by “Catholic” one thinks of the founding of the Church upon the New Testament and upon a circumscribed faith, and of the earthly execution of her plan.2 I have won this insight quite gradually from largely buried sources, but I am of course defenceless against the obvious objection that in my long-standing and zealous preoccupation with the subject I have lost my way.
It seems to me relatively easiest to bring about a unanimous verdict after all with regard to M.’s significance for the creation of the New Testament. There is no dispute that (1) since Paul the historical scheme of two covenants of God was current in Christendom; that (2) Marcion found the fourfold [p. 22] canon of Gospels already in existence;3 that (3) in M.’s time Pauline letters circulated alongside the Gospels and stood in high esteem;4 and that (4) in the services of worship, sections from the Gospels were already read alongside the Old Testament, and letters (especially Pauline ones) and apocalypses were probably not excluded from liturgical reading. But out of these four presuppositions very different things could have developed. I have treated this in detail in my investigation Über die Entstehung des Neuen Testaments (Beiträge z. Einl. i. d. N. T., part 6, 1914), pp. 4–10. The arguments there have so far not attracted the attention of the critics. What actually came into being — a second, two-part canonical collection of books, of equal rank with the Old Testament (or superior to it) — is the last thing one would expect if one takes one’s stand in the first half of the second century, because it means the greatest conceivable innovation over against the hitherto exclusive validity of the Old Testament as canonical littera scripta, and because it carries out the equating of the authority of Paul5 with that of Christ. Now of course one can also derive the Catholic New Testament from those presuppositions, [p. 23] but only with intermediate stages that first have to be constructed and that one does not need if one introduces M.’s creation here. Therefore one is obliged to do so. I must deny myself the carrying out of anything further here until my above-cited exposition of the various possibilities of development has been checked, and until it has been proved that the introduction of an independent document for the new covenant is either an insignificant innovation or not Marcion’s work. Nor can I find that my critics have refuted my appeal to the negative testimony of Justin in his Dialogue with Trypho; above all, von Soden’s sentence astonishes me: “Justin’s Dialogue surely does attest the writings of the New Testament in a dignity for him not inferior to that of the Old Testament.” I find in the Dialogue neither Pauline letters nor Christian writings at all as parts of a New Testament.6
Notes
- [p. 20] From one quarter it is also objected that I now underestimate the significance of Gnosticism alongside Marcionitism (otherwise in the Dogmengeschichte). I have in fact somewhat altered my judgment at this point. About the intellectual significance of Gnosticism I think no differently than before; but the factual significance of this phenomenon, in so far as it provoked a struggle and reactions, was not so enormous, once one separates Gnosticism sharply from Marcionitism. A mere reference to four facts shows this: 1. Compared with the army of ecclesiastical opponents of Marcion, from Justin to Esnik, the number of the combatants who wrote against the individual Gnostic sects is vanishingly small. 2. Irenaeus intends in his main work above all to oppose the Valentinians, but slides involuntarily into opposing Marcion. 3. Celsus, once one sees through his presentation, unquestionably attests that the Marcionite church was the real and only rival of the great Church in his time. 4. Justin presents to his heathen addressees Simon Magus, Menander and Marcion as the founders of pseudo-Christianity, and designates all remaining heretics as “οἱ ἀπὸ τούτων ὁρμώμενοι” [“those who take their start from these”]. ↩
- [p. 21] I need not expressly recall the sharply anti-Catholic elements in M.’s Christianity that stand over against this. ↩
- [p. 22] It is not thereby asserted that the tension between the first three Gospels and the Gospel of John had everywhere already been removed. But I cannot agree with Bauer when he sees in M.’s rejection of this Gospel a proof that the Gospel did not enjoy the same standing in the circles in which he lived and on which he wished in the first instance to work as the other Gospels did. From the sources we are able to judge only that apostolic Gospels (that is, Matthew and John; he did after all also know the Apocalypse and rejected it) were known to him and that he rejected them. But that John must have been more welcome to him than Luke I must still (against Eichhorn and Bauer) dispute. This judgment is of course dependent on one’s estimate of the spirit of the fourth Gospel, which in my judgment has in its general features blossomed up out of Judaism and must therefore have been repugnant to M. ↩
- [p. 22] Both in the Great Church and among individual Gnostics (see above all the letter of Ptolemaeus to Flora). ↩
- [p. 22] For Paul was at first in the canon “the apostle”, to whom the others were then added. ↩
- [p. 23] Von Soden writes further: “The thought of apostolic authority that carries the New Testament canon is in any case pre-Marcionite, not created by M. but only restricted by him.” This sentence is certainly correct if apostolic authority in general is in question; but it is at the very least unprovable, and most probably incorrect, when the written canon comes into consideration. For the written canon, the governing thought of apostolic authority is first demonstrable as a Catholic and antithetical thought in the Great Church. Before that, only the authority of the “Kyrios” stood alongside the Old Testament, whether in his sayings or in the Gospels. (In addition there were inspired, and therefore holy, writings of the most various kinds, number and dignity, of which only a part was apostolic: compare further the testimony of Clement of Alexandria.) It is, however, a great difference whether one appealed at an early date to words of Paul for edification and instruction, or whether with regard to apostolic letters one formed the principle: “We accept Paul and Peter as letter-writers (receive them as such) just as we accept the Lord in the Gospels.” Between the two lies the canonical identification “word of Paul = word of Christ”, which M. was the first to carry out. I will not confidently contradict the assertion that this equation would have come about gradually in the Great Church even without M.’s precedent; but why should one eliminate M. here, when what is demonstrable in him is what was accomplished in the Church only a generation later — the exclusive validity of the apostolic within inspired literature? Soden’s conception of the early emergence of the New Testament comes very close to Zahn’s; but against the latter’s hypothesis there are the gravest objections. ↩