History Matters — A Study Guide to Harnack — Marcion: The Gospel of an Alien Guide by Gabriel Andersen

A Study Guide to Harnack — Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God by Gabriel Andersen

In 1921, Adolf von Harnack published a book entitled “Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott” or, in English, “The Gospel of the alien God.” Harnack is a major figure in historical-critical biblical scholarship. His ideas and insights still inform the thinking of 21st-century university historical-critical biblical scholars. In turn, Marcion was a major figure for Harnack. His first academic recognition came in 1871, when he wrote an essay on Marcion. After a lifetime of adding to that essay, fifty years later, Harnack released a text that praised Marcion as a fulcrum of Christian history.

We are now one hundred years removed from Harnack, nearly as long a period as Marcion was from the life of Christ. Today, we can look at Harnack’s text on two levels. On the one hand, it reveals the ideas that permeated the time of Marcion, i.e., Rome in the mid-second century. On the other hand, the book also reveals the ideas that permeated Harnack’s world, the Protestant/Academic world of Germany on the eve of the Nazi regime. This latter perspective may be more important for us than the former because Harnack’s book premiered and made respectable ideas that would become political issues under the Nazis, such as the idea of eliminating the Old Testament from the Christian canon.

The Study Guide is a summary of Marcion’s work on the “Gospel of an Alien God.” The study guide provides an overview of Harnack’s work on Marcion, followed by a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the text. The chapters are short, but the summaries seem to get a grip on the key points that Harnack intends in his book, while also offering excerpts from Harnack’s work. In fine, the study guide should orient the reader to Harnack’s text.

I. The Alien

The study guide introduces Harnack’s view of Marcion’s ideas. The title’s reference to an “alien god” was meant to capture Marcion’s key notion that the god of Christ was not the god of the Jews. The god of the Jews was the creator of the world and spoken about in the Jewish scriptures, which Marcion labeled the “Old Testament.” Christ’s God was the Good God (GG), who was nothing but love and never exercised judgment or punished. The Jewish God (JG) was the Creator of the world and was a god of justice, who punished and caused evil.[1] The GG did not create the world, including the souls of human beings, and was most definitely not spoken about in the Old Testament. The GG was first disclosed to the world in the 15th year of Tiberius when Christ descended to a synagogue in Capernaum as revealed by the one true gospel that Marcion included in his canon.

Marcion’s god (GG) is totally alien to humanity. GG did not create man or put man in the box of a fallen nature. GG owes nothing to man. GG simply interlopes into the world and, as an act of the purest grace, sends his Christ to Earth to die and therefore provide a basis for offering salvation to humanity. Why and how this works is not clear. It may be that the Passion and death of GG’s Christ is a kind of payment to the JG to buy the right to redeem humans.[2]

The Study Guide explains that Marcion came from Sinope in the Pontic region of northern Asia Minor on the Black Sea. His father was a Catholic priest in Sinope. Marcion left Sinope after allegedly seducing a virgin, which may be a metaphor for attempting to teach heresy. He came to Rome around 139 AD and made a donation of 200,000 sesterces to the Catholic Church of Rome. In July 144, AD, at a time when there was an interregnum in the office of the bishops of Rome,[3] he demanded that the Church of Rome accept his “two gods” theology. The Roman Church rejected the demand and returned his donation. Marcion then embarked on his career as a heresiarch.

II. Dealing with Complexity

Harnack’s explanation for Marcion’s “two gods” theology (also known as “two principles”) was that from its inception Christianity was Complexio Oppositorum, a religion that embraced a variety of contradictory extreme positions:

Harnack catalogues these polarities with characteristic comprehensiveness: Christianity preached a previously unknown God and simultaneously the Lord of heaven and earth; it proclaimed a new Savior recently crucified and asserted that he had participated in creation since the patriarchs; it emphasized pure spirit and yet produced “a harsh and obscure literalism as well as sacraments that addressed religious sensuousness”; it announced the resurrection of the flesh and simultaneously treated the flesh as “the worst of enemies”; it sensitized the conscience through the wrathful God of judgment and proclaimed the same God as the source of all mercy and love (pp. 5–6). This complexio oppositorum was not a corruption of Jesus’ original message; it was the unavoidable consequence of transmitting the Old Testament and the entire religious capital of late Judaism alongside the new proclamation. “This ‘catholicism’ was not in the spirit of the founder” (p. 6), Harnack observes — Jesus had always “had in view only practical religion itself at its decisive main points” — but the material transmitted with his message demanded systematic ordering once it reached Greek soil, where “a religion became a philosophy of religion” (p. 7).

Andersen, Gabriel. A Study Guide to Harnack — Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (pp. 8–9).

Harnack argued that this complexity, even contradictions, required an institutional matrix[4] to preserve the varied ideological commitments that existed in its foundation:

This complexity required an institutional bearer. No individual, “however profound and capable of development might be his spirit,” could internalize the entire antithetical complex; he could “always choose only parts.” The church thus emerged as “intrinsically indispensable” — the entity strong enough to maintain the whole and defend it against both abridgments and expansions. “The visible catholic church is therefore no ‘accidental phenomenon’” (p. 8), but the necessary guarantor of Christianity’s syncretistic universality. Against this stood those Harnack calls “heretics” — those “who sought to make themselves at home in the religion by means of excision, accentuation, and coherent organization of the material” (p. 8).

Andersen, (p. 9).

III. The Canon

Marcion is famous for offering the “first Christian canon.” Like many things, I think we need to be cautious about making any didactic statement like this. We simply don’t have enough information to confidently state that anything is a fact. Marcion seems to have offered the first collection of books that distinguished divine revelation from (or about) his god (the GG) from divine revelation about the other god (the JG). While presented as an innovation that Catholics[5] readily adopted, the Marcionite canon was necessitated by Marcion’s bright line distinction between GG and JG. In contrast, even after Marcion, the Christian canon was always more porous. There were books, such as the Shepherd of Hermes, that were considered edifying although not canonical in the sense of a book read in church. Similarly, the deuterocanonical books were always recognized as both canonical and, yet, somehow in another canon.

Marcion’s canon consisted of a version of the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline letters. No copy of Marcion’s Gospel has survived. It has been recreated by references and quotes in Tertullian and Epiphanius. Luke was adopted because Marcion viewed Paul as the only reliable disciple of Jesus. This may have been because Paul condemned Judaizing, and he was also outside the institutional disciples, who corrupted Jesus’ message.[6] In addition, Marcion taught that Paul received the Gospel bearing Luke’s name directly from Jesus (and, hence, the ascription of the gospel to Luke is incorrect). He also taught that Mark and Matthew were “forgeries.”

There is a debate about the form in which Marcion received Luke. Harnack seems to accept the idea that Marcion emended Luke by “purifying” it through “philological means.” In other words, he cut out the parts that did not conform to his theology. Nonetheless, Harnack insists that Marcion was “provisionally honest” — he acknowledged what he had done, and his motive was to purify the text.[7]

He did the same thing to the Pauline epistles that were allowed into his canon.

Harnack’s assessment of Marcion’s “emendations” is as follows:

Harnack identifies four categories of correction: (1) exchanges of similar-sounding words, (2) changes of active/passive voice, (3) rearrangements of sentence order, and (4) direct alteration of ideas and sentences. Behind these operations stood twelve “self-contained motives”: (1) Creator-God may not appear as Father of Jesus Christ; (2) the Old Testament cannot have prophesied anything fulfilled in Christ; (3) the good God must have been hidden until his appearing; (4) the good God is not the director of the world; (5) the good God may not appear as judge — he is exclusively merciful; (6) redemption relates exclusively to eternal life; (7) Christ is understood modalistically; (8) Christ had no earthly nature — no flesh, no physical body, not born; (9) Christ abolished the law; (10) he demanded total separation from the world; (11) he raised up only one genuine apostle (Paul); (12) he will not appear again as judge but will announce the great separation (pp. 46–47).

Andersen (p. 26).

IV. The Antithesis

Marcion also wrote a text called the Antithesis, which played the game of putting seemingly contradictor quotes from the Old Testament and excerpts of his “emended” “New Testament.” The gist of the Antithesis is well-known to readers who note that the God of the Old Testament seems so different than the God of the New Testament.

Marcion adhered to a “nuanced Docetism.” Christ was not born. He did not have a childhood. He appeared “suddenly and unexpectedly in the fifteenth year of Tiberius by descending into a Galilean synagogue at Capernaum. Christ did not have a material body, and yet, he actually suffered in and with the human form into which he had entered. (p. 82.)

Marcion was also a Modalist. The Son was the Father in a different mode.

V. The Marcion Church

The Study Guide describes the Marcionite Church, which allegedly was larger than the Catholic Church in the late second century. According to Harnack, Marcion’s four contributions[8] were:

Harnack summarizes Marcion’s organizational achievement in four points: (1) he created the Christian Holy Scripture — eleven writings comprising Gospel and ten Pauline epistles; (2) he produced the Antitheses as critical companion; (3) he insisted on biblical theology rather than philosophical dogmatics; (4) he bound believers through the alien God, aversion to the Creator, the new Scripture, and strict conduct of life. The result was “a unified church which spanned the empire. The church of the bishops required several generations to get that far” (p. 97).

Andersen (pp. 49–50).

A fatal flaw in Marcion’s system may have been its requirement that adherents renounce marriage and children. The motivation included an enmity to the JG:

The dual motivation for this rigorous asceticism was distinctive: liberation from sinful flesh, certainly, but also deliberate spite against the Creator — “one should offend this evil god, irritate him, spite him, and thereby show him that one no longer is in his service” (p. 96). Fasting was the strictest in Christendom: meat and wine were forbidden (fish was allowed), and fasting on the Sabbath was practiced specifically “to spite the lawgiver” (p. 96).

Andersen (p. 49).

VI. Marcion’s Legacy

Harnack summarized Marcion’s legacy as follows:

Harnack catalogues seven affirmations that, taken individually, would each “have been enough to secure for him a unique and eminent place in church history” (p. 138): (1) literal Scripture, ban on allegorism; (2) the gospel standing on its own without external authorities; (3) Christianity understood through the Paul vs. Judaizers struggle; (4) the need for a canonical New Testament in two parts; (5) church unity based on principles of faith and life rather than philosophical dogmatics; (6) rejection of all syncretism, fanaticism, mysticism, and pneumatic enthusiasms; (7) the Old Testament as the book of a “less-worthy Jewish God.”

Andersen (pp. 65–66).

And:

Harnack catalogues seven affirmations that, taken individually, would each “have been enough to secure for him a unique and eminent place in church history” (p. 138): (1) literal Scripture, ban on allegorism; (2) the gospel standing on its own without external authorities; (3) Christianity understood through the Paul vs. Judaizers struggle; (4) the need for a canonical New Testament in two parts; (5) church unity based on principles of faith and life rather than philosophical dogmatics; (6) rejection of all syncretism, fanaticism, mysticism, and pneumatic enthusiasms; (7) the Old Testament as the book of a “less-worthy Jewish God.”

Andersen (pp. 65–66).

VII. Marcion and Weimar Germany

We can now move to the reception of Marcion after the second century, namely the era before the 1933 Nazi “seizure of power” (machtergreifung). Harnack’s catalog of Marcion’s “affirmations” is noticeably Lutheran. For example, Marcion’s development of a canon had definite implications for a “sola scriptura” approach to authority:

Harnack’s culminating thesis is that Marcion was not merely a textual critic but “a creator of a church, who with gifted vision recognized the necessity of giving to his church… a new littera scripta as the basic document of its faith” (p. 52). “He reworked the Gospel of Luke and the epistles of Paul in order to combine them and to put this corpus in place of the Old Testament. The idea of combining them in the sense of a unified canon as well as the idea of displacing the Old Testament with a new collection is his work” (p. 51).

Andersen (pp. 27–28).

Likewise, Marcion’s key inspiration involved putting “law” and “grace” in opposition to each other:

“The point of departure for Marcion’s criticism of the tradition cannot be mistaken. It was provided in the Pauline contrast of law and gospel” (p. 22). Marcion had “immersed himself in the basic ideas of Galatians and Romans” and found in them the definitive illumination of the Christian religion. The discovery was threefold: “that Christ represented and proclaimed an entirely new God; further, that religion is simply nothing other than devout belief in this redeemer-God who transforms man; and finally, that the totality of world events down to the present time is the evil and contradictory drama of a deity who possesses no higher value than does the obtuse and loathesome world itself” (p. 22).

Andersen (pp. 17–18).

Thus, Harnack idealized Marcion as a great thinker who anticipated Martin Luther by separating Law and Grace. Harnack compared Luther and Marcion:

But Marcion went further: “the Christian religion is simply nothing but faith (in the sense of fides historica and fiducia) in God’s revelation in Christ” (p. 138). The comparison with Luther is explicit: “Luther’s concept of faith actually is the one that stands nearest to the Marcionite concept, as Neander has already seen” (p. 138).

Andersen (p. 66).

For Harnack, the comparison of Marcion with Luther often had Luther coming out on the losing side:

Only one figure in the entire subsequent tradition approaches Marcion’s achievement: “Only Luther with his justification-faith manages to rival Marcion here; but since he holds fast to the identity of the Creator-God and the Redeemer-God, he is able to combine with this faith the whole wealth of salvation history” (p. 63). The critical difference is that Luther’s maintenance of the one God permitted him to affirm the full range of biblical material while still insisting on the primacy of grace; Marcion’s separation of the two Gods required the elimination of everything that did not serve the exclusive principle of redemption.

Andersen (p. 34).

Likewise:

Luther “once again gave a central position to the Pauline-Marcionite recognition of the distinction between law and gospel” (p. 134). His thesis that “the law is unable to show us the true God” approached Marcion; the law was “the Jews’ ‘Sachsenspiegel’” — a carnal code Christians no longer needed (p. 134). Agricola “assessed the law as a failed attempt on God’s part to lead mankind by means of threats” — but Luther recoiled from the full implication, believing “the law was indispensable for the awakening of the conscience” (p. 135). Harnack muses: “What an unburdening of Christianity… if Luther had taken this step!” (p. 135). The Calvinist and Anabaptist churches went in the opposite direction, placing the Old Testament on “fully equal footing” with the New — producing in some groups “an Islamic zeal” and in others “a new kind of Judaism” (p. 135). “If Marcion had reappeared in the time of the Huguenots and Cromwell, he would once again have encountered the warlike God of Israel whom he abhorred, right in the very middle of Christendom” (p. 135).

Andersen (pp. 64–65).

Harnack proposed that the time was right — in 1921 — to enact Marcion’s project of eliminating the Jewish Old Testament from the Christian canon:

The thesis that is to be argued in the following may be stated thus: the rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church rightly avoided; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a fate from which the Reformation was not yet able to escape; but still to preserve it in Protestantism as a canonical document since the nineteenth century is the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling.

Harnack, Adolf, Marcion: The Gospel of an Alien God (The Labyrinth Press)t ranslated by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierm (1924)

In Holy Reich, Richard Steigman-Gall points out how Harnack belief that Luther had not gone far enough influenced the Nazis:

Harnack sadly acknowledged that Luther did not expunge the Old Testament from Protestantism –“What an unburdening of Christianity and its doctrine it would have been if Luther had taken this step!”–but nonetheless, his emphasis on gospel over law meant that “Luther’s concept of faith actually is the one that stands nearest to the Marcionite concept.”136 Nowhere in his book Marcion did Harnack engage in a political antisemitism aimed directly against contemporary Jewry. In fact, like many other liberal theologians, he would later take exception to the “rabble-rousing”of the Nazis. However, the work influenced the growing pro-Nazi thrust of Kulturprotestantismus after 1918; more importantly, it predated and overlapped completely with Nazi attitudes toward the Old Testament.137 So long as departures such as Harnack’s existed within the parameters of legitimate Protestant theology, the Nazi rejection of the Old Testament cannot be used to demonstrate an antithesis to Christianity.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (p. 41). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.[9]

The idea of redacting the Old Testament was in the air before Harnack published his book on Marcion. Steigman-Gall notes:

Other sources of Hitler’s religious views in this period confirm a Christian element. As early as 1919 Hitler sketched out his basic worldview in an unpublished manuscript. The first section was on the Bible, under which heading Hitler noted: “Monumental History of Mankind–Idealism–Materialism: Nothing without a cause — history makes men . . . the children of God and men.”64 He concluded from these ruminations the first result: “Purification of the Bible — that which is consistent with our spirit. Second result: critical examination of the remainder.”65 This “purification” is almost certainly an allusion to the Old Testament, which both Eckart and Dinter claimed had to be removed from the Christian canon owing to its origins in Judaism. Although such a position brings into question the theological soundness of Hitler’s religious views, the idea of expunging the Old Testament from Christianity was not simply a nazification of Christianity. No one less than Adolf von Harnack, one of the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, had conceived such an idea when the Nazi movement was still to be born (see subsequent discussion).

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (p. 27). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Harnack was a friend of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the author of “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” which inspired Nazi ideology. (Steigman-Gall, supra, p. 40.) Chamberlain used Harnack’s polemics against Judaism for his Foundations. (Id.)[10] In turn, Chamberlain was the source for the Nazi’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg to write his “The Myth of the Twentieth Century.”

The connections between liberal Protestantism and Nazi ideology is incestuous and convoluted:

As Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, Chamberlain served as a living link between the Wagner legacy and the Nazis, living just long enough to see the movement become a political force and endorsing it as Germany’s only hope. That Chamberlain was also associated with liberal Protestant theologians like Harnack is more than coincidence. Perhaps most revealing, however, is that in the Third Reich it was not only Nazis who revered Chamberlain. Members of the Confessing Church, a group often cast as the “true” anti-Nazi wing of Protestantism, believed he was their intellectual property as much as Rosenberg’s or the DC’s. In a 1936 article in the Confessing Church journal Junge Kirche, Chamberlain was described as “outstanding among the confessors of Jesus Christ at the turn of the century.”91

Steigmann-Gall (pp. 100–101).

In short, liberal German Protestant bible scholars, like Harnack, prepared the ground for the Nazi rise to power. After the “machtgreifung,” in November 1933, the German Christians ( Deutsche Christians (DC)) attempted to enact Harnack’s proposal to remove the Old Testament from the Christian canon:

The following November came the national DC conference in the Berlin Sports Palace. The rift in German Protestantism was widened even more when one of the Berlin DC leaders, Reinhold Krause, formally called for the removal of the Old Testament.47 The outrage that ensued led Martin Niemöller to found the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund, or PNB), the direct institutional forerunner of the BK, as a counterpoint to the DC and their scriptural position. Such outrage was not confined to PNB members, however; even within the ranks of the DC there was indignation. Many left the DC, and the Bavarian section went so far as to voluntarily disbanded itself in protest.

Steigmann-Gall (p. 164).

Although this proposal was defeated, the DC was able to enact a variety of antisemitic rules.

You can hear biblical scholars on YouTube today sighing about how things would have been “in some respects better” if Marcion had prevailed. (See Video at 1 minute.) These scholars don’t mention the ban on reproduction or the virulent antisemitism.

We had a glimpse of “better.”

It was not pretty.

Footnotes:

[1] Marcion’s understanding of the Jewish God is ambivalent. The JG is called the god of justice and is not identified as evil, but he is called malicious: “Harnack enumerates seven attributes of the Creator’s malice: creating weak and mortal man, dispensing disproportionate punishments, cruelty and warlike rage, punishing children for fathers’ sins, hardening hearts, jealousy regarding the tree of life, and partiality toward his worshippers even when wicked (p. 67). Yet Marcion’s contempt was directed not only at the Creator but at his creation: “flesh stuffed with dung,” the “lewd transaction” of procreation, the “factory of filth” (Tertullian, pp. 70–71).Andersen (p. 39).

[2] Marcionite theology can be distinguished from Gnostic theology in that, for Gnostics, the “divine spark” belonged to the gods, higher than the demiurge. “The creation of man was “a grievous tragedy” — God imparted his own imperfect substance through the soul but mixed it with evil matter through the flesh. Crucially, the good God “has no part at all in man, not even in his spirit or his soul” (p. 72) — distinguishing Marcion sharply from the Gnostics, who maintained a divine spark in humanity” Andersen, (p. 39)..

[3] The accuracy of these dates is suspicious. The dating of births, deaths, and publications during this period is usually inferred and approximate. The dating of the four gospels is heavily debated and runs from 60 AD to 160 AD.

[4] There is an interesting sociological insight here. Christian heresies usually involve a move toward simplification. Embracing the “and” required by many Christian doctrines is psychologically difficult, e.g., Is Christ human or divine? Catholic Answer: He is human AND divine. Likewise, is God a god of love and forgiveness, or a god that can drown most of humanity? Catholic Answer: Both.

[5] I am not going to refer to the Christians of the Great Church as “proto-orthodox” or “orthodox Christians” because such Christians called themselves “Catholic.” Terms like “proto-orthodox” are intended to suggest a discontinuity between those Christians and Christians of today. There was no discontinuity; Catholic Christians didn’t disappear for centuries, only to be revived centuries later, like the Marcionite Church of today. People who want to talk about “proto-orthodox” should be prepared to show when the transition from “proto-orthodox” to “orthodox” clearly happened.

[6] Marcion can be numbered among the many who claim such a corruption, also known as a “great apostasy,” e.g., Mohammad and John Smith. Even Protestants assert something similar but perhaps occurring later during the “Dark Ages.”

[7] Harnack also posits an unknown text that contained Marcion’s edits, i.e., the W-text or I-text.

[8] Also:

Marcion supplied what was missing through four innovations. First: the production of a littera scripta — a written text establishing a new covenant. “He, and no one else, did it!” (p. 129). Second: the combination of Gospel and Pauline epistles into a two-part canon. “He, and no one else conceived of this!” (p. 129). Third: ending the chaotic syncretism of prophetic, allegorical, and philosophical approaches by means of “a clear and unequivocal biblical theology” in the Antitheses (p. 129). Fourth: the creation of actual church unity through organized missionary activity that spread “throughout the whole human race” (Justin).

Andersen, (pp. 59–60).

[9] By “Christianity” in the phrase “antithesis to Christianity,” Steigman-Gall meant Lutheranism.

[10] Steigman- Gall writes:

This development is illustrated in the liberal Protestant reception of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and in particular Chamberlain’s relationship with the theologian von Harnack. According to his biographer, Chamberlain both influenced and was influenced by liberal Protestantism.127 Harnack’s polemics against Judaism were used by Chamberlain in his own Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), a Christian–racialist tract widely regarded as one of the most important antecedents of Nazi ideology. According to a review in Christliche Welt, “this book . . . carries in it an apologetic strength for which our ‘Christian world’ will have much to thank.” The highly charged attacks on Catholicism and scientific materialism in Foundations also ensured a warm reception among liberal Protestants. While confessional Lutherans firmly rejected Chamberlain’s critique of organized religion,128 liberal Protestants found their own views echoed in Chamberlain’s call for a nationalist Kulturreligion.

Steigmann-Gall (p. 39).