History Matters — Tertulian’s “Against Marcion” (Part 1)

Tertullian Against Marcion (Part 1)

The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books): Cross-Linked to the Bible by Tertullian (Author), Philip Schaff (Translator)

I haven’t read the complete works of Tertullian yet. So far, I’ve only read Tertullian’s “Against Marcion” in all five of its books. That’s not a small portion of Tertullian’s corpus. This volume contains twenty-three works by Tertullian, and “Against Marcion” accounts for almost 25% of the total. So, we might infer that refuting Marcion was one of Tertullian’s major life projects, which might lead to the further inference that Marcion was a major threat to Christianity.

“Against Marcion” is a tour de force. I found it to be logical, well-written, and insightful. The last two books are a chapter-by-chapter review of the Gospel of Luke (“GLuke”) and Paul’s letters. In these sections, Tertullian shows himself to be a master of eisegesis, using typology and both figurative and literal readings to answer Marcion’s claims that Christ was sent by an alien God rather than the Creator God of the Jews. These sections offer deep and surprising insights into these texts. They are worth reading for insights into the meaning of the Bible as much as for their historical content.

Tertullian was Septimius Tertullianus. He was born in approximately 155 AD and died approximately 220 AD. He was born a pagan and converted at some point in his adulthood. He was a resident of Carthage. He notes in “Again Marcion” (“AM”) that he had been Christian for only a short time. He lapsed into the heresy of Montanism at some point midway through his Christian life, but it is debated whether this meant that he stopped being — or belonging to — the Catholic Church. Marcion appears to be associated with Montanism at the time he wrote AM — he mentions the “New Prophecy” as something he identifies with — but his Montanism does not seem to affect his thoroughly orthodox approach to ecclesiology, Christology, or God’s nature. [1]

Marcion was born in Sinope, Pontus, around 100 AD. After possibly being excommunicated for heresy by his father, Marcion went to Rome in 129 AD, where he made a huge donation of 200,000 sesterces. After spending five years working out his theological program, in the summer of 144, when there was an interregnum in the succession of bishops, Marcion called for a church council to present his ideas. His ideas were rejected, his donation was returned, and he was excommunicated. Marcion then used his wealth to establish a rival church organized along the lines of the Catholic Church.[2]

Marcion’s theology was almost Gnostic. He believed that the Jewish Creator God (JCG) was a malicious divinity, albeit an actual divinity, responsible for human suffering. The JCG was a god of justice, but not of love. The Old Testament disclosed the limitations and ugliness of the JCG.

There was also a Good God (GG) who was totally unknown and alien to the world. The GG did not make the world or anything in it. Unlike the Gnostics, Marcion did not teach that human beings had a divine spark that came from a god superior to the JCG. Whatever soul that humans had was created by the JCG. The GG did not owe humanity anything since it had not created humanity or been involved with humanity. All the writings of the Old Testament were revelations about the JCG alone.

The GG revealed himself in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, when Jesus descended from the GG’s heaven as a fully formed man. Marcion’s Jesus was not born, did not have a mother, and was definitely not Jewish. For Marcion, Jesus’s first appearance was in a synagogue.[3] Like the Gnostics, Jesus had an immaterial, spiritual body, but unlike the Gnostics, Jesus did suffer with humanity in the Crucifixion, albeit not in substance.

Most of this sketch comes from the Summary of Harnack’s Marcion. Unfortunately, Tertullian does not offer a direct and clear statement of Marcion’s theology. Marcion’s theology can be inferred from Tertullian’s polemical attacks on Marcion. These attacks are our prime source of information about what Marcion taught. Marcion’s writings have not survived. A lot of what I learned from the Summary, I saw in Tertullian; however, I assumed that Tertullian was exaggerating or speaking hyperbolically. It turns out that modern scholars don’t believe that to be the case.

Marcion never wrote a systematic statement of his beliefs. He redacted the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters. These two sources — the gospel and the apostolic letters — formed the Marcionite canon. He also wrote something called the Antithesis, a series of statements taken from the Old and New Testaments that show a contradiction between them. None of these works has survived.

Tertullian seems too well-informed about Marcion’s theology to have been limited to the antithesis and Marcion’s canon. It is clear that Tertullian had copies of both, since he quotes them, but it isn’t clear to me how the idea of an “alien god” could have come from these sources alone. Cutting out passages of Luke doesn’t seem to explicitly communicate that a different god is being proposed. That kind of insight needed a separate avenue of communication, such as discussions with a Marcionite or a letter explaining Marcion’s belief.[4]

Tertullian does not mention either source, and that’s interesting. The Marcionite Church is supposed to have rivaled the Catholic Church in size, but although Tertullian condemns the heresy of Marcion, he does not mention whether there is a Marcionite congregation in Carthage. Had Marcionism gotten that far by 200 AD? Tertullian’s silence on the subject suggests it hadn’t, but the question of how Tertullian knew Marcion’s theology is puzzling. It may have simply involved information coming in by word of mouth via commerce and sailors.

A book I am currently reading gives a nice organizational overview of AM:

In the five books of Against Marcion, which appeared in at least three ever-expanding editions over the course of a number of years and which incorporated material from the earlier Against the Jews, Tertullian argued for the unity of God (book one), defended the Old Testament god as God (book two), identified Jesus as the messiah promised in the Old Testament (book three), even on the basis of Luke’s Gospel, the only gospel Marcion accepted as canonical (book four), and Paul’s letters (book five).

Dunn, Geoffrey D.. Tertullian (The Early Church Fathers) (p. 30).

I. Book One

Tertullian begins with a tirade against Marcion, beginning with his birthplace. His take-down is a classic:

The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature, and deceptive in its name. As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation , when life is passed in waggons. They have no fixed abode; their life has no germ of civilization; they indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked. Moreover, when they gratify secret lust, they hang up their quivers on their car-yokes, to warn off the curious and rash observer. Thus without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war. The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare to marriage. In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature. The day-time is never clear, the sun never cheerful; the sky is uniformly cloudy; the whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North. Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice; their mountains are covered with heaps of snow. All things are torpid, all stiff with cold. Nothing there has the glow of life, but that ferocity which has given to scenic plays their stories of the sacrifices of the Taurians, and the loves of the Colchians, and the torments of the Caucasus. Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there….

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian’s first book includes a metaphysical analysis of divinity. Tertullian argues against Marcion’s “Two God theology”[5] on the grounds that God must be one, simple, and indivisible. Tertullian’s definition of God is “the great Supreme existing in eternity, unbegotten, unmade without beginning, without end.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 3.) With that definition, God must be unique and not have an equal. Thus, all of the capacities of divinity must be found in a single being. “God is not if He is not one.” (Id.)

One is an important number. “After unity, number commences.” (Bk. 1, Ch. 5). If Marcion can posit two gods, then three or more gods can equally be posited, leading to the thirty Eons of the Gnostics.

Tertullian also attacks the novelty of Marcion’s god. According to Marcion’s theology, the GG had no involvement with the world until the 15th year of Tiberius’s reign (“Year 15”). The problem is not that the GG was unknown. Men have had “unknown” gods before; the JCG was an unknown god prior to Moses. The problem was that the GG was completely alienated from the world, which raised the question of what the GG was doing before Year 15. This late appearance is inconsistent with eternity. The newness of the GG indicates a beginning, which contradicts the definition of God.

The GG is also impotent. The JCG has miracles and creation to prove His existence. “One stray vegetable at least Marcion’s god ought to have produced on his own; so might he be preached up as a new Triptolemus.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, ch. 11.) (Triptolemus spread knowledge of agriculture around the world at the behest of Demeter.) The GG is either unwilling to create or else unable, and there is no other reason. (id.) Tertullian questions the claim that the GG is “unwilling” inasmuch as the GG has engaged in the world by coming down from heaven, preaching, suffering, and rising from the dead, all of which indicate that the GG wants to be acknowledged.[6] (Id.)

Tertullian points out that there is no evidence for the existence of the GG. (CWOT, Bk. 1, ch. 12.) The GG has not created anything that might show his existence. Tertullian points out that there is a connection between “cause” and “proof.” A proof points from a cause to a conclusion. Insofar as the GG is totally alienated from existence, there is no effect caused by the GG that would point to the GG.

In Chapter 12, Tertullian plays on an interesting point of agreement between Marcionism and Christianity. Like the Christians (and Jews), and unlike the pagans, the Marcionites agree that the JCG created the world ex nihilo, but they say that since the world is corrupt, this proves that the JCG is not the Good God, since we know a tree by its fruits. Tertullian then makes a point about the pagan view of the eternality of the world:

The majority of the philosophers hesitated to assign a beginning and an end to the said world, lest its constituent elements, great as they undoubtedly are, should fail to be regarded as divine, which are objects of worship with the Persian magi, the Egyptian hierophants, and the Indian gymnosophists. The very superstition of the crowd, inspired by the common idolatry, when ashamed of the names and fables of their ancient dead borne by their idols, has recourse to the interpretation of natural objects, and so with much ingenuity cloaks its own disgrace, figuratively reducing Jupiter to a heated substance, and Juno to an aërial one (according to the literal sense of the Greek words); Vesta, in like manner, to fire, and the Muses to waters, and the Great Mother to the earth, mowed as to its crops, ploughed up with lusty arms, and watered with baths. Thus Osiris also, whenever he is buried, and looked for to come to life again, and with joy recovered, is an emblem of the regularity wherewith the fruits of the ground return, and the elements recover life, and the year comes round; as also the lions of Mithras are philosophical sacraments of arid and scorched nature. It is, indeed, enough for me that natural elements, foremost in site and state, should have been more readily regarded as divine than as unworthy of God. I will, however, come down to humbler objects. A single floweret from the hedgerow, I say not from the meadows; a single little shellfish from any sea, I say not from the Red Sea; a single stray wing of a moorfowl, I say nothing of the peacock, — will, I presume, prove to you that the Creator was but a sorry artificer!

CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 12.

This is an intriguing passage. Moderns tend to think that we were the first to understand that religious stories can be “naturalized,” e.g., that stories of dying and rising gods were about planting and harvesting, but here we have Tertullian appealing to the same logic to rebut the pagans’ attempt to divinize nature. Because pagans divinized nature, pagan myths were intended to reveal the divine in nature. Christians did not do that. Christ died and rose because that happened, not because it was intended as a parable of the seasonality of divinized nature.

Having dealt with the pagan claim on one wing, Tertullian turns to face Marcion’s charge that the JCG is incompetent: a single flower speaks to God’s greatness.

So, interestingly, Christianity stands between Paganism and Marcionism: nature was not divine as the pagans would have it, but it was very awesome as a work of the Creator.[7]

Since the GG is not a creator, what can the Marcionites point to as evidence of the GG’s existence. The one “proof” that Marcionites make for the existence of the GG is that the GG “delivered man by his supreme and most excellent goodness.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 17.) Tertullian argues that this begs the question:

Now without doubt the first thing you have to do is to prove that he exists, after the same manner that the existence of God must ordinarily be proved — by his works; and only after that by his good deeds. For the first question is, Whether he exists? And then, What is his character? The former is to be tested by his works, the other by the beneficence of them. It does not simply follow that he exists, because he is said to have wrought deliverance for man; but only after it shall have been settled that he exists, will there be room for saying that he has affected this liberation. And even this point also must have its own evidence, because it may be quite possible both that he has existence, and yet has not wrought the alleged deliverance.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian’s point is that Marcionites cannot claim that the GG is a savior without showing that the GG exists and has the capacities they claim for the GG.

In Chapter 19, Tertullian points out that while Marcion claims that Jesus disclosed the existence of the GG in Year 15, it was not until the reign of Antoninus Pius, “about 115 years and 6–1/2 months” later, that Marcion made the claim that Jesus was an agent of the GG rather than the JCS as everyone thought up to that point. Tertullian writes:

Now, from Tiberius to Antoninus Pius, there are about 115 years and 6–1/2 months. Just such an interval do they place between Christ and Marcion. Inasmuch, then, as Marcion, as we have shown, first introduced this god to notice in the time of Antoninus, the matter becomes at once clear, if you are a shrewd observer. The dates already decide the case, that he who came to light for the first time in the reign of Antoninus, did not appear in that of Tiberius; in other words, that the God of the Antonine period was not the God of the Tiberian; and consequently, that he whom Marcion has plainly preached for the first time, was not revealed by Christ (who announced His revelation as early as the reign of Tiberius).

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

In Chapter 20, Tertullian addresses Marcion’s “separation of law and gospel.” (CWOT, Bk, 1, Ch. 20.) Like the Protestant Reformers, Marcion emphasized Paul’s rebuke of Peter for being insufficiently rigorous concerning Jewish dietary practices. Tertullian points out that Paul recognized the authority of Peter, and that the rebuke was directed to conduct, not principles.

As Catholics would do 1,500 years later, Tertullian called out Marcion’s teachings as innovative and contrary to apostolic teachings:

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation. You will, however, find no church of apostolic origin but such as reposes its Christian faith in the Creator. But if the churches shall prove to have been corrupt from the beginning, where shall the pure ones be found? Will it be among the adversaries of the Creator? Show us, then, one of your churches, tracing its descent from an apostle, and you will have gained the day.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian points to the concepts of the apostolic deposit of faith, the preservation of that faith in the apostolic churches, and apostolic succession, all of which are well-established by 200 AD.[8]

Tertullian challenges the goodness of the GG on the grounds that the GG did not intervene in the world until Year 15. If the GG were omniscient, then the GG’s goodness seems to have been on hold for a lengthy period. This implies that Goodness is not part of the essence of the GG, but merely an accident, which would disprove the GG’s divinity — God does not have accidents.

Further, goodness must be rationally good. Tertullian argues that rational goodness is an ordered goodness, and the ordering of love is first to the neighbor and then to the stranger. But the GG is an alien god, a complete stranger. By what reason does such a stranger bestow love on the stranger? Tertullian argues:

Such a deliverer, I had almost said kidnapper, would even meet with condemnation in the world. Now, no other than this is the character of Marcion’s god, swooping upon an alien world, snatching away man from his God, the son from his father, the pupil from his tutor, the servant from his master — to make him impious to his God, undutiful to his father, ungrateful to his tutor, worthless to his master. If, now, the rational benevolence makes man such, what sort of being prithee would the irrational make of him? None I should think more shameless than him who is baptized to his god in water which belongs to another, who stretches out his hands to his god towards a heaven which is another’s, who kneels to his god on ground which is another’s, offers his thanksgivings to his god over bread which belongs to another, and distributes by way of alms and charity, for the sake of his god, gifts which belong to another God. Who, then, is that so good a god of theirs, that man through him becomes evil; so propitious, too, as to incense against man that other God who is, indeed, his own proper Lord?

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (Bk 1, Ch. 23.)

In essence, according to Tertullian, Marcionites are ungrateful rebels, and the GG is a thief.

Marcion’s doctrine of non-bodily resurrection is also criticized on the grounds that the body deserves resurrection since it did nothing wrong. It was the servant of the soul. A salvation that does not include the body is imperfect. (Bk 1, Ch. 24.)

II. Conclusion of First Part

Tertullian’s metaphysics seems rudimentary. Readers of later Christian theologians will see that Tertullian lacks the concepts and language to give his arguments the precision they will acquire later. Nonetheless, the principles that define the Christian approach to divinity, the Trinity, and Christology are present.

While people acquainted with later theology will notice the rudimentary nature of Tertullian’s arguments, the general reader may be surprised at how sophisticated Tertullian’s arguments are. Moderns probably like to think they invented the idea that religious principles evolved from the forms of nature, such as planting and harvest, as expressed in the dying and rising of Osiris. This is a chronological prejudice. Tertullian was aware of that comparison and applied it to paganism. This was not malicious because pagans divinized nature in a way that Christians didn’t. This suggests that facile attempts to impose The Golden Bough on Christianity lack merit because the cultural seedbed was not there. Christians were not interested in a religion that made nature more divine; they sought a religion that elevated their understanding of a God uniquely beyond time and comprehension.

Footnotes:

[1] This is the passage I am thinking of:

Or was it on the principle which we maintain in the cause of the new prophecy, that to grace ecstasy or rapture is incident. For when a man is rapt in the Spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God, or when God speaks through him, he necessarily loses his sensation, because he is overshadowed with the power of God — a point concerning which there is a question between us and the carnally-minded. Now, it is no difficult matter to prove the rapture of Peter. For how could he have known Moses and Elias, except (by being) in the Spirit?

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (“CWOT”)

It seems that Tertullian might be describing something like Pentecostalism.

Another passage also mentions “the new prophecies,” but it may be that he’s talking about Christian prophecies, such as the Book of Revelation:

According indeed to our view, he is Antichrist; as it is taught us in both the ancient and the new prophecies, and especially by the Apostle John, who says that already many false prophets are gone out into the world, the fore-runners of Antichrist, who deny that Christ has come in the flesh, [ 1 John 4:1–3 ] and do not acknowledge Jesus (to be the Christ), meaning in God the Creator.

Tertullian. CWOT.

Given that this book was written around 200 AD, it seems that Revelation was known to Tertullian by 200 AD and accepted by him and, presumably, his community as canonical by that time.

[2] It is interesting that liberal bible scholars will point out that Catholics copied Marcion’s idea of a canon, but they don’t mention that Marcion copied Catholic institutional structure. Typically, such scholars argue that there was no pope in Rome at the time and that Catholic institutional structures developed later.

Sometimes it is important to note the silences.

[3] Since Luke 3:1 provides the reference to the 15th year of Tiberius, followed by his baptism by John, the temptation in the desert, and a long biography of Jesus’s lineage, while the first reference to Jesus preaching in a synagogue is Luke 4:16, it seems that Marcion “purified” all the “corruption” that linked Jesus with the JCG by redacting everything between Luke 3:1 and Luke 4:16.

[4] For example, Tertullian is aware that Cerdon was a mentor of Marcion. (CWOT, Bk.1, ch.2.) This information has to come from a source outside of Marcion’s canon.

[5] Tertullian seems clear that Marcion’s theology posits two “principles”, i.e., the GG and the JCG. In the 300s, Ephanius would write that the Marcionites of his time posited three powers: the GG, the JCG, and Satan.

[6] In Book 1, Chapter 11, Tertullian also attacks Marcion’s Docetism, pointing out that it was “all the more shameful” if Christ only “pretended the assumption of a bodily substance” during the crucifixion.

[7] This is yet another position where Christianity exists at a point of tension between those who would place Nature over Man and those who would reject nature as evil.

[8] Tertullian writes: “This most patent conclusion requires to be defended by us against the clamours of the opposite side. For they allege that Marcion did not so much innovate on the rule (of faith) by his separation of the law and the gospel, as restore it after it had been previously adulterated.” (Bk. 1, Ch. 21.)