Student years are meant to be amazing! In my case, they truly were! Besides traveling and partying (and studying of course!), I became, for the first time in my life, interested in the big questions of life. Sooner than later, I figured out that all philosophizing on life’s purpose is ultimately based upon two fundamental questions. The first is: Does God exist? The second is: If God exists, what is His nature? The questions are just impossible for me to ignore. They are too important! As it turns out, my life’s journey took me to the mountain of books by different kinds of philosophers (both atheists and theists). From Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell to G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. In the course of this journey, I stumbled upon a book written by an English biologist Richard Dawkins entitled God delusion. As the title suggests, Dawkins is by no means a believer. He is an outspoken atheist with a firm materialistic and positivistic worldview.

Among other bullets that Dawkins fired into the direction of religion (predominantly Christianity), his view about the Old Testament God is still one of the favorite things to quote among atheists on the internet. With the smooth writing style, he asserts:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

In his opinion, the God of the Old Testament can not be the same as the God the father of Jesus Christ revealed in the Gospels of the New Testament! In a nutshell, the God of the Old Testament is the violent, jealous and bloodthirsty God while the God of the New Testament is the God of love and mercy. As it turns out, Dawkins wasn’t the first who came up with a similar idea! Long before him, there was an early Christian teacher and philosopher Marcion (85 – 165 CE) who just couldn’t reconcile the Old Testament God with the God the Father of Jesus Christ!

Marcion and Marcionites

Marcion was born in Pontus (today: Turkey) at the end of the 1st century. According to the surviving sources, Marcion was a rich man because he owned a prosperous shipping business. Marcion was wealthy enough, at least, to make a large donation to a church network in Rome when he arrived there probably in the late 130s CE. Probably even before his trip to Rome, Marcion developed a particular theology. Agreeing with the Platonic idea of God that is pure good – the source of all good, Marcion looked back at the Old Testament Scriptures and became worried. He read the stories about the Old Testament God where it seems as if this God is everything but good. So, for example, in the Book of Isiah God himself confessed that he “creates evils”! Elsewhere in the Old Testament, Marcion found a God who explicitly states that he is a jealous God who will punish those who disobey him by worshiping other divine beings. Furthermore, Marcion was deeply impressed by the writings of the apostle Paul. Especially, the distinction that Paul drew (e.g. Galatians) between the Law of the Jews and the gospel of Christ. This distinction became a fundamental point of departure for Marcion.

All of this meant that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous divine being filled with rage and a sense of revenge. But, wait a minute! Plato had written: “There is no jealousy in the divine choir.” Moreover, Paul wrote about the gospel of Christ in opposition to the Law of the Old Testament! How could that be? Does that mean Jesus was opposed to the Old Testament God? Based on all this, Marcion concluded there were two distinctive divine beings! On one hand, there is the ultimate God of love and mercy that Jesus spoke about. He is Jesus’ father and the only God worthy of worship! He is the ultimate source of the good news of Christ that Paul spoke about! On the other hand, there is an evil and inferior divine being who created this world revealed by the Old Testament. The latter is the God worshiped by the Jews. A lot of scholars think that Marcion believed in the existence of two Gods, but that is not the right way of looking at his theology. Marcion would never describe his worldview this way. For him, the only God was the ultimate God of love and mercy! The other divine being was not a God in the full sense of that word – he was only an intermediate divine being that is opposed to the real God! Marcion was a dualist only if by dualism we mean he opposed two superhuman beings. Yet in this sense, Marcion’s dualism was not significantly different than the mitigated dualism upheld by a wide range of Christians during his time. Marcion discovered a lower, evil being lurking in what were considered to be scriptural texts (both the “Old” and “New” Testaments). For most other Christians of the era, this being was Satan. For Marcion, it was the creator. Furthermore, Marcion was apparently the first one to put together a canon of Scripture! Obviously, he rejected the Old Testament. After all, these were books written by and about the inferior and evil divine being, the creator of this world, and the being that Jews mistakenly worship. Marcion’s New Testament consisted of eleven books: ten letters of Paul and a revised version of the Gospel of Luke. We are not sure why Marcion choose Luke’s Gospel. It could be because of the rumors that the author of this document was a companion of the apostle Paul or it could be that this was the Gospel he was raised on in his home church of Sinope.

Anyways, with this message, Marcion came to Rome and try to convince the “proto-Orthodox” Christians that he has discovered the true meaning of Scripture. Unfortunately for him, the “proto-Orthodox” leaders rejected his ideas. By that time the “proto-Orthodox” Church have developed the idea of continuity with the Jewish religious tradition. In their belief system, there was only one God revealed both in the Old and the New Testament. In fact, numerous Old Testament prophesies anticipated the coming of Christ, his redemptive death, and his resurrection. It was all the plan of one and only God! When Marcion found out that the Church had rejected his ideas, he left the Church. He wasn’t (as some scholars imagine) excommunicated. He simply left the network of “proto-orthodox” church communities in Rome. Probably using the cash of his previous donation – dutifully returned to him – Marcion organized his own independent ecclesial network in Rome. From Rome, Marcion began an ambitious recruiting movement to establish his form of Christianity in other parts of the empire.

Eventually, his movement was stamped out by the growing “proto-orthodox” Church that had a much tighter structure and system of organization. Today it may seem strange how a person could read a Bible and conclude that there are two different divine beings in there. However, the early Christian world (2nd and 3rd centuries) was a place of conceptual growth and diversity accompanied by all sorts of polemical discussions and battles. Different “Christians” came to different conclusions about the crucial theological elements (the nature of God, the creation of the world, the nature of Christ, the question of salvation, etc.). Some of those Christians, such as Marcion, even started their own “Christian” movements. From Ebionites who wanted to remain closely tied with the Jewish tradition to Marcionites who wanted nothing to do with the Jewish “false” God. In between these two poles of the early Christian world stood the stream of Christianity that eventually triumphed and marginalized all other groups. In that process, this stream developed its own view on Christian history where there is only one “orthodox” group (which is, of course, them!). Everybody else erred and slipped into the heresy! More about this victorious stream of early Christianity in the next post!