Let’s continue my peer review of MB’s online, open-access book, focusing only on its relevance for Marcion’s Gospel (which I will occasionally call “Gospel” or “G” for short). MB proposes that G is prior to canonical Luke and that it has two primary sources: Qn (the “new” Q) and early Mark (Mk1). (I’ll immediately lay down my cards here and say that I agree with MB on the priority of Marcion’s Gospel over Luke, but I’m not convinced that Q(n) or Mark were its sources.)
MB views the Gospels as “essentially visualized audio scripts or transcripts” (61). This is a fascinating metaphor, . . .
To read the rest of this post, please become a member.
Subscribe to get access
Read more of this content when you subscribe today.
In my blog posts this week, I’ll be offering my peer review of Mark Bilby’s (MB’s) online, open-access book called “The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem based on Marcion’s Early Luke.” Page references in parentheses refer to version 4.03, uploaded on Feb 18, 2024.[1] I provide this as a service to people who have asked my opinion about MB’s work.
As seen from its title, this very ambitious book offers a reconstruction of the hypothetical sayings source Q and a new solution to the Synoptic problem. Given my interests, I will only address matters related to Marcion’s Gospel. I am not competent to review MB’s data science methods, as I am not trained in any type of statistical modeling or computer science. (I hope a competent statistician or computational analyst will address these features, since much of what MB says depends on numerical accuracy.) I review this work as a historian in the Humanities trained in religious studies and Classics at the same institution as MB was educated (the University of Virginia).
Unreadability
MB and I agree, I think, that peer-review is necessary; but we disagree on how it should be done. MB notes that “this work was presented in two-peer reviewed sessions” at the 2021 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (2). But it is unclear how these sessions are peer-reviewed (at SBL, papers are approved for presentation, but this is different from peer review). The current version of MB’s work is dated to 2024. The work has received an endorsement from Philip Tite (now of UVA), and I would like to add my own endorsement, insofar as I think people should engage with MB’s work. Nevertheless, I think MB should encourage people to engage his book by increasing its readability.
Following an open-science approach, MB seeks peer-review after publication. But after reading his work, I’m all the more convinced that it’s better to have peer-review before publication. I think there are many advantages of a pre-publication peer review, but let me focus on one very practical matter relevant here: proper editing.
Why is this important? MB’s book is very difficult to read. Visual fatigue sets in almost immediately. The book is loaded with tables and lists of code that overwhelm and numb the reader. There is little mercy when it comes to margins. Some of the font is 10-point (apparently 6- or 8-point in the footnotes). (I printed out portions of this book, and I could barely read them.) The chapters are very episodic; there is no narrative arc, and no consistent narrative voice. I think it’s beautiful that MB includes some of his own fictional writing and poetry at the end of the book (“Easter eggs”), but it does not jibe well with his scientific prose. Even in its most recently-revised form, the book is 1,072 pages long!
No respectable publisher would allow MB to publish his work in this form. It simply taxes the reader—even the scholarly reader—far too much. If MB is confused or disappointed about why his book is not being read and cited, the solution, I think, is really simple: he needs a qualified editor or colleague to provide feedback on his writing. He needs to make the effort to make his book more user-friendly. This is simply a matter of respect for the reader, who does not have infinite time, and who is already overwhelmed with more traditional, pre-peer-reviewed publications on Marcion.
I know MB wants to be understood. He urges scholars to “shed light on the earliest Joshua [=Jesus] texts and traditions, not obscure them in scholarly jargon that does more to veil ignorance, feign intelligence, deflect scrutiny, and mask insecurity than to open up these materials for the whole world to see fully and clearly. We need to make our discourse accessible to the whole world” (1059). I agree. But MB’s book—despite being open-access—is (ironically) not really accessible to the average reader.
To be continued . . .
For those of you who are interested, please consider taking my six-session webinar “Re-dating the Gospels–Without Apologetics” (mdavidlitwa.com/webinar).
[1] Bilby, M. G. The First Gospel, the Gospel of the Poor: A New Reconstruction of Q and Resolution of the Synoptic Problem Based on Marcion’s Early Luke. 4.03, Zenodo, 2020–2024, doi:10.5281/zenodo.10676806.
I was never a Q guy. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I don’t trust a text which has no physical evidence that it ever existed. I was always more interested in the Gospel of Thomas—a sayings collection for which we do have manuscript evidence. When I taught the New Testament at Virginia Tech, I taught Q, but that was only because it was the standard textbook way of teaching Synoptic Gospel source criticism. I believed then (and still do) that Matthew and Luke were fluid and interdependent texts of the early second century. Now that I’m studying Marcion’s Gospel, I’m often asked how it relates to Q. In my view, Marcion’s Gospel does not automatically eliminate Q, but it does make Q unnecessary.
To read the rest of this post, please become a member.
Epiphanius of Salamis (about 375 CE) imagines a synod in which Marcion stood before the elders of the church and posed a question about Jesus’ sayings: “What is the meaning of, ‘They do not pour new wine into old skins’ or [sew] ‘a patch of an unfulled cloth on an old garment . . .’?” The “elders” had their own explanation of the sayings (informed, it seems, by Epiphanius’ imagination), but when Marcion insisted on other explanations, they refused to admit him into their assembly, and Marcion cried that he would rend the Roman church.[1]
So goes the play. But these sorts of church synods featuring exegetical wrangling, ambitions for ecclesial office, and schisms caused by jealousy were more characteristic of Epiphanius’ own day than they were of the second century. Some of these same prooftexts (G 5:36-37; 6:43) do appear on the lips of Marcionite debaters in later sources.[2] Perhaps Epiphanius or his source projected these debates back onto Marcion’s time.
What I imagine happening is rather less flashy.
To read the rest of this post, please become a member.
Heresiologists accused Marcion of mutilating his own scriptures to suit his theology. In fact, the word for mutilation used in the Latin translation of Irenaeus is circumciso—as if Marcion was a Jewish mohel circumcising the Gospel of Luke in its infancy.
But when this heresiological hypothesis is tested, it is found wanting. Take the example of Ulrich Schmid, the meticulous editor of Marcion’s Pauline collection (the Apostolikon). (Marcion und sein Apostolos: Rekonstruktion und historische Einordnung der Marcionitischen Paulusbriefausgabe [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995]). Schmid searches up and down Marcion’s Apostolikon to find a consistent principle of emendation, and can find nothing. The only thesis he is willing to float is that Marcion omitted longer chunks of text with positive references to Israel, Abraham, and judgment according to works (Schmid, Marcion 254, 282).
But judgment according to works is missing only in Romans 2:3-11. Schmid acknowledges that Marcion accepts judgment according to works and Christ’s judgment seat in Romans 14:10 and 2 Cor 5:10 (Marcion 250). So there is no consistent editorial pattern. This is a major problem, because as Schmid says, we can’t prove that a particular change comes from Marcion if the change is not consistently made elsewhere in Marcion’s text (255). We can’t say, in this case, that Marcion erases “judgment according to works” if he only does so in one out of four cases.
Truth be told, divine judgment is a motif in both Marcion’s Gospel and Apostolikon. The Pontian transmitted Romans 2:2 (“God’s judgment is true”); Galatians 5:10 (“He who troubles you will bear his judgment”), Romans 2:16 (“In the day when God will judge the secrets through Jesus Christ”); and 2 Thessalonians 2:12 (“so that all who do not believe the truth may be judged”). We also find passages in the Evangelion which portray God or Christ as a judge, such as 12:46 and 13:28.
The same inconsistency appears in the case of Abraham. Tertullian accuses Marcion of erasing references to Abraham in Galatians 3. He is not specific as to whether all the references to Abraham are missing. It would be a huge misstep to infer that Marcion omitted references to Abraham in Romans 4—which Tertullian does not say. In Jason BeDuhn’s reconstruction of the Apostolikon, he prints the reference to Abraham in Romans 4:2. (Bilby, M.G. and BeDuhn, J.D., 2023. BeDuhn’s Greek Reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 9(1), p.25.DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.126).
Abraham also appears in Marcion’s text of Galatians 4:22 as the father of two sons through two wives. The wives are allegorized as two covenants: the slave-wife is the covenant of Sinai and the true wife is the true mother, the “holy church” (4:26). Christians are children of the true mother (4:31) which means, implicitly, that they are children of father Abraham as well. Thus Schmid’s idea that Marcion omitted references to Abraham as a model of faith and carrier of blessing fails. Why would Marcion have a problem with Abraham modeling faith? Abraham appears in one of Jesus’ parables (16:22); and a woman receives healing as a “daughter of Abraham” (13:16). These are positive references to Abraham in Marcion’s Gospel. Clearly Marcion did not systematically remove Abraham as a positive example and source of blessing.
The final example concerns positive references to Israel. Here Schmid focuses on Romans 9-11. Tertullian says that a chunk of text was omitted in Romans 9, but he does not say which chunk or how big it is. He skips immediately to what seems to be in Marcion’s favor: Israelite ignorance of God. Thus we know that Marcion’s text had Romans 10:2-4. Then Tertullian skips to 11:33-35 (a doxology to God). Does this mean that Marcion’s text was missing Romans 10:5–11:32? No. Tertullian never says that. He just skips over the text as if it weren’t important; and evidently it wasn’t important—to Tertullian. For Schmid or anyone else to assume that Marcion omitted these verses goes beyond the evidence.
Did Marcion omit all positive references to Israel? No. Ephesians 2:12 says that believers were once alienated from the body politic of Israel, and that they were foreigners to the covenants and the promise—but no longer. Anything negative about Israel here? No. One might read in something negative about “the children of Israel” mentioned in 2 Corinthians 3:7 since they cannot focus on Moses’ face due to its brilliance. But is that really their fault? The cause seems to be, rather, the fact that Moses veils himself in 3:13. So I would not call these references to Israelites negative.
Accordingly, all three large omissions that Schmid attributes to Marcion—positive references to Israel, references to Abraham as carrier of blessing/model of faith, and judgment according to works—don’t hold water. There is no consistent editorial tendency to omit such passages. Schmid himself admits that the influence of Marcion’s theology on his text is much less than previously assumed, but the exceptions he mentions are in fact not exceptions. He also confesses that the smaller differences we see in Marcion’s text are in accordance with what we know of normal textual variation in early manuscripts of the New Testament (Schmid, Marcion 282).
The academic thesis that Marcion is a theological editor is a myth, as Jason BeDuhn has pointed out (“The Myth of Marcion as Redactor: The Evidence of ‘Marcion’s’ Gospel against an Assumed Marcionite Redaction,” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 29:1 (2012): 21-48). For my summary of this article and many other resources, see my patreon (patreon.com/mdavidlitwa) and my course on Marcion (https://bc-6561.freshlearn.com/introducing-Marcion). Subscribers to this blog get 20% off my course (see previous blog post).
Marcion is the whipping boy of the heresiologists and he arguably wins the prize for the worst postmortem PR campaign ever. As if this ancient criticism were not enough, Marcion has been subject to modern value judgments too. It was once popular to quote the dictum of Franz Overbeck that, “No one has understood Paul; and the only person who did understand him—Marcion—misunderstood him.” This is certainly a back-handed compliment if there ever was one! In the context of the Lutheran reading of Marcion, Marcion came close to understanding Paul because Marcion’s Paul resembled Luther’s; nevertheless, Marcion failed to hold together the dialectical tensions of the Lutheran reading. But the obvious question here is this: Why is the Lutheran (or any other later) tradition held up as a criterion for judging the thought of Marcion, a man of the second century?
One would have thought that in recent times comments like Overbeck’s would have lost their cachet. Yet one still find comments to the effect that Marcion misunderstood Paul (meaning: he misunderstood his own scriptures).[1] This over-generalizing judgment—apart from being a potential reinscription of ancient polemic—is out of place in scholarly studies of Marcion. Upon what criteria, after all, could one possibly judge that an interpreter—nearly two millennia closer to Paul than we are, with his own presuppositions governed by a different historical context—misunderstood Paul? More humility is required here, along with a method that remains sympathetic to ancient readers of all types. This is especially true given that Marcionite interpreters have been mocked, pilloried, and in some cases buried by an opposing (self-proclaimed “orthodox”) tradition.
There is no need to bury a man already dead. It is useful to imagine, however, a world—a narrative, biblical world—through the eyes of Marcion. It may be true that one can only understand the past through one’s own interpretive horizon. At the same time, the disciplined historical imagination has the ability to reenvision the past through the lens of its subjects. The goal is not to promote the viewpoint of these subjects (as if it could be applied today without further ado), but to walk a mile in their shoes in order to obtain a new picture of the world—or in this case, of church history.
Anyone interested in the New Testament and early Christian history should know who Marcion was in order to be able to cut through the constant misinformation campaigns about him. For instance, knowing Marcion is key for understanding the Synoptic problem, the construction of the New Testament, the spread of early Christianity, its earliest rites, its ethics, the development of its scripture, the tools of its interpretation, the development of theology, the interaction of theology and philosophy, the so-called “parting of the ways” with Judaism, the church’s (primeval) fall, and its relations with so-called gnostics.
To those of you who become a member of my blog at *any level*, I’m offering 20% off my Marcion course. If you’ve stuck with me this far, you deserve value education on Marcion. Click the link (https://bc-6561.freshlearn.com/introducing-Marcion), and on the checkout page, apply this coupon code:
To obtain the code, please become a member!
Read more of this content when you become a member today.
[1] Todd D. Still, “Shadow and Light: Marcion’s (Mis)Construal of the Apostle Paul,” in Paul and the Second Century, ed. Michael F. Bird and Joseph R. Dodson (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 91-107 at 107.
Years ago at a session of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, I listened to a book review on Judith Lieu’s Marcion: The Making of a Heretic (2015) by Michael Bird. In his inimitable Australian accent, Bird dubbed Lieu’s book “the new Harnack.” “The new Harnack?” I thought. “We don’t need a new Harnack. We need a book on Marcion that replaces Harnack’s paradigm, that makes us no longer need to read Harnack except to understand the history of reception.”
The new book I’m writing on Marcion aims to do just that. My goal is to replace Harnack, whose comprehensive monograph on Marcion (2nd ed. 1924), has now reigned a hundred years. Every study that has come after Harnack—even those criticizing parts of Harnack’s paradigm—have followed him in other ways. I aim to shift the paradigm.
But here’s the secret: Harnack’s paradigm has already collapsed, people just don’t know it. Imagine an iron-clad warship, a destroyer. Once it sailed the high seas with speed. But over the course of its century-long voyage, it has been hit by half a dozen torpedoes. The torpedoes all came at different times and produced what only seemed like small damage to the hull. Now the ship is under water—but the sailors don’t know it, and everyone on shore assumes that it will come to port. Such is Harnack’s paradigm. Its pillars have all been knocked out in shorter studies, but everyone still talks as if Harnack’s model for understanding Marcion is the one to know.
My book sets out to demolish the old Harnackian paradigm, a paradigm that can be summarized with six “Ds”: Marcion the ditheist, the docetist, the detester of Jews, the denier of the world, the deleter of scripture, and the demiurgist. A ditheist is a believer in two gods (a kind of polytheist); a docetist denies that Christ was human or had true flesh; a detester of Jews attacks not just Judaism but Jews themselves; a world-denier lives ascetically out of hatred for matter and its creator; a deleter of scripture cuts out passages that don’t suit one’s ideology; and a demiurgist removes creative powers from God, bestowing them on a lower being (sometimes called “god”).
The six Ds are demolished by one rule—a rule as simple as it is underemployed in scholarship on Marcion—that we define his beliefs by the touchstone of his scriptures. Of course we listen to Marcion’s enemies, whom I will call the heresiologists, but they don’t have the final say, and when they contradict Marcion’s scriptures, the scriptures prevail. The goal here is to stop representing heresiological rhetoric and speculation as the truth of history. To be sure, Marcion’s scriptures must be reconstructed, but reliable reconstructions are available, and I will say why they are reliable. We may not always have Marcion’s interpretation of his scriptures, but if we have his scriptures, then we have what is in effect a primary source that trumps every heresiological dogma.
For those interested, I have a course on Marcion already available. It has nine video lectures plus 2 bonus videos, my original sources in translation, and my published work on Marcion so far. Please check it out and tell me what you think: https://bc-6561.freshlearn.com/introducing-Marcion
Hello all! Thank you for being here. On this website, I want to serve you. This short (5-question) survey will let me know what you need and what you’re looking for. Thanks so much for your help!
I’m on record as saying that ancient people never argued that Jesus didn’t exist. And I stand by this point. External critics like Celsus did argue that the Christian story about Jesus was a myth, or mythic, but they never went the next step of denying the existence of a flesh-and-blood Galilean. It just did not occur to them. Thus ancient “mythicism” will always be different from its modern anti-Christian variety. But it is still important.
What I recently discovered is that external critics of Christianity were not the only ancient mythicists. There were Christian mythicists as well: Christians who said that the Jesus of other Christians was mythical. One such Christian was Marcion of Pontus. Of course we have to piece together Marcion’s views from the heresiologists. But in this case we have a surprisingly clear statement from Tertullian, Against Marcion 4.4.4
Marcion per Antithesis suas arguit ut interpolatum a protectoribus Iudaismi ad concorporationem legis et prophetarum, quo etiam Christum inde confingerent
Marcion in his Antitheses argues that [his Gospel] was falsified by the defenders of Judaism to become one body with the Law and Prophets, and from this [falsification] they fictionally invent even Christ.
I continue to be floored by this remark. If I’m reading it correctly, then in his Antitheses, Marcion accused his early catholic opponents of inventing a fictional Christ. They invented a fictional Christ by falsifying or interpolating Marcion’s own Gospel with a series of stories and sayings that fused it to the storyline and narrative world of the Hebrew Bible (the Law and Prophets). Mythic stories would include Christ’s virgin birth in a stable, his being visited by shepherds and angels, his circumcision at the Jewish Temple, his genealogy, his visit to the Temple as a twelve-year old boy—in short, most of the stories now found in canonical Luke chapters 1-3.
Now, I should be clear. Marcion was a Christian, a follower and worshiper of Christ. He himself did not think that the man Jesus was a myth. He did not deny that a real crucifixion happened, or a real Last Supper, or a real resurrection. But the material that was added to Marcion’s Gospel—all the so-called prophecies, the infancy narratives, the genealogies—that was pure myth.
What we see unfolding, in other words, is an intra-Christian debate. A Christian accuses other Christians of inventing a fictional Christ. This is what we might call “intra-Christian mythicism,” Christians saying to other Christians, “you got Jesus wrong—way wrong.” And it teaches us a lot about how early Christians viewed the process of Gospel creation. Celsus was not the only writer to think that the Gospels contained myths. Some Christians thought that as well.
Marcion and his followers proposed that these other Gospels had been created or edited for apologetic reasons—to deal with objections raised against Christianity as a newfangled faith. But these Gospels also included some purely invented material. For Marcion(ites), any material not in their original Gospel was seen, not just as uninspired and illegitimate, but as invented and false.
I find this quite fascinating, because this early Marcionite mythicism has the opposite purpose as modern atheistic mythicism. Modern mythicism aims, as far as I can tell, to delegitimate and even destroy Christianity—to kill it at the roots, so to speak. But ancient, Marcionite mythicism has the goal of preserving Christianity by purifying it of its own gospel myths, the myths which made Jesus into a Jewish messiah as opposed to a cosmic Christ. For Marcion, the cosmic Christ was the true historical Jesus, and the Jewish messiah was the myth.
For a long time now, I have believed that the Gospel of Thomas (hereafter Thomas) was written in Egypt and in Alexandria specifically. After several years of research, my argument has finally been published by the flagship Journal of Biblical Literature.
M. David Litwa
“Thomas in Alexandria: Arguments For Locating the Gospel and Book of Thomas in Alexandria,” Journal of Biblical Literature 143:1 (2024): 163-83.
Here’s a summary of my argument to whet your appetite.
There are many reasons for supporting Thomas’s Egyptian provenance. First, Thomasine sayings and a main character (Salome in Thomas 61) overlap with sayings and a main character from the Gospel according to the Egyptians. In particular, we have Thomas 37, where Jesus’s disciples ask: “‘When will you appear to us and when shall we see you?’ Jesus said, ‘When you strip without being ashamed. . .’.” According to the Gospel according to the Egyptians, “When Salome inquired when what she asked about would become known, the Lord said, ‘When you trample the garment of shame . . .’”[1] In both texts, stripping off the garment of shame is likely a metaphor for leaving the fleshly platform. For the Egyptian provenance of The Gospel of the Egyptians, see my book Early Christianity in Alexandria (https://amzn.to/3w51nGD).
Second, both Julius Cassianus and Thomas present Platonizing interpretations of Genesis. One could say that Cassianus interpreted Genesis in a Thomasine way by appealing to the soul’s preexistence and original androgyny. For the Egyptian provenance of Julius Cassianus, see my book Found Christianities (https://amzn.to/3JmULGH) and Early Christianity in Alexandria.
Third, Thomas’s ascetic sayings (e.g., 79, “Blessed is the womb that has not conceived”) fit Cassianus’s ideological context and rejection of fleshly birth. Not bearing children was a Thomasine ideal, but for Cassianus it was a requirement.[2] We could say that, if Cassianus read Thomas in the mid second century, then he took it in an even more ascetical direction.
In fact, Cassianus evidently quoted the Thomasine saying, “fast from the world.”[3] This saying is also cited in the fourth or fifth century CE Liber Graduum, but its second-century attestation only occurs in Cassianus, Thomas, and P.Oxy 5575.
If Cassianus (between 160 and 180 CE) quoted the Gospel of Thomas, then he is one of our earliest—if not the earliest—receiver of this gospel, which was probably completed about 140 CE (when hope for the rebuilding of the Temple was quashed, Thomas §71). This would mean that the earliest documented use of Thomas was in Alexandria.
To this we can add likely quotations of the Thomas by the author of Testimony of Truth and the Naassene Preacher.[4] For these quotations, please see Early Christianity in Alexandria and The Naassenes: Contours of an Early Christian Identity (https://amzn.to/4aE1Wq9).
Lastly, the surviving versions of Thomas are attested solely in Egyptian papyri—and in fairly early witnesses found in Middle Egypt (late second to early third centuries).
Again, these are only quick summaries of my arguments. For their full forms, please see my articles and books. And if I’ve convinced you—or not!—say why by leaving a comment or question below.
M. David Litwa, Ph.D. 
Leave a comment