Digging into the Old Testament: Marcion

Encore Post: If we think of a pendulum, it swings one way or the other. Let’s imagine the Ebionites to one extreme. At the other extreme would be the man named Marcion.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge we do not have any of Marcion’s own writings at our disposal. However, we have the early Church Fathers and their writings against his teachings. Ireaneaus of Lyon wrote against him in his work Against Heresies.

From Ireaneaus and some of the other Apostolic Fathers we learn that Marcion held to the idea that the the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New were not the same. Marcion saw the god of the Testament as a lesser Creator god who even was possibly evil. The god of the Old Testament was the Jewish God, and not the Father of the True Christ. The Old Testament may have prophesied about a Christ, but not the true one.

For Marcion, Jesus (the true Christ) came to subvert the Creator and overthrow the law and the prophets. Marcion even went so far as to change the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew to make Jesus say, “I have not come to fulfill the law but to abolish it.” This is the exact opposite of what Jesus says He came to do.

This is a major problem. If the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New, there is no promise of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. There would not be those who are righteous by faith. For all this flows out of the Old Testament. There would be no hall of faith, there would not fathers of the faith like Abraham. Jesus, Himself points us to them in the Old Testament to emulate, to rejoice with Abraham at Jesus’ Day. There would be nothing to learn from the Old Testament, even though Paul, one of the New Testament writers who is okay for Marcion, says we ought to learn from the ancient Israelites in the wilderness.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

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