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