Adolf von
Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God. Trans. John
E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma. Labyrinth Press, 1990.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
The
outlines of Harnack's landmark monograph on Marcion are well known from
summaries and discussions of it as well as through the German original.
But it is an event worthy of note for the work to appear in English, where
the complexities and nuances of Harnack's presentation are now opened up
to a wider readership. It is to be hoped that this fresh look thus
provided may bring some of Harnack's neglected arguments and insights back
into the contemporary discussion where they belong. Students of Paul and
his reception in the second century (a key feature of the Walter Bauer
thesis), of the history of the New Testament canon, and of the related
phenomenon of Gnosticism should also avail themselves of a second look at
the Harnack classic. Even with the regret table omission of the extensive
appendices of the original, the book still offers a feast. One could do
worse than to read Harnack along with John Knox's Marcion and the
New Testament (together with the discussion of Knox and his theses in the
recent symposium Cadbury, Knox, and Talbert: American Contributions to
the Study of Acts, edited by Mikeal C. Parsons and Joseph B. Tyson,
SBL, 1992), and Joseph R. Hoffmann's superlative Marcion: On the
Restitution of Christianity, which provides a helpful corrective and
several counterproposals to Harnack, as well as breaking significant new
ground.
It is
interesting to read over Harnack's shoulder, so to speak, venturing to
apply more recent theoretical tools to his discussion. What would Harnack
have been able to reveal with the aid of the paradigm-conceptuality of
Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of
Scientific
Revolutions)?
Implicit in Elaine Pagel's books on the Gnostic reception of the Pauline
Epistles and the Fourth Gospel (The Gnostic Paul and The
Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis) is the Kuhnian approach whereby
it becomes evident that these early "heretical" exegeses of New Testament
texts were alternative exegetical paradigms in Kuhn's sense: they sought
to provide heuristic frameworks to make comprehensive sense of the data of
the texts, especially of various texts that acted hitherto as "anomalous
data" grinding in the gears of the "orthodox" paradigms. Valentinians
could perhaps make better sense of the "psychic/sarkic/pneumatic" typology
and of baptizing for the dead than their opponents. Tertullian sometimes
seemed to admit as much. The thing to do was to eject them from the
stadium before the game could begin.
In
Marcion's case, he transfers from periphery to centrality several texts
such as Paul's reference to "the God of this world" (2 Corinthians 4:4)
and the giving of the Law by entities subordinate to the Father (Galatians
3:19-20), the Akhneton-like proclamation by Jesus of a God hitherto
unknown (Luke 10:22), passages which ought to strike us as more
problematical than they do on the usual reading. And then Marcion's
various textual excisions are to be understood as "epicycling," the
multiplication of hypotheses, special pleading on behalf of his paradigm.
The community of exegetes decline his paradigm because it leaves more
texts outstanding as "anomalous data" than the paradigm it sought to
replace. Of course, had Marcion read Feyerabend, this wouldn't have
stopped him (it didn't anyway!), as his approach would be a prime case of
the "counterinductivity" commended by Feyerabend: who says simpler is
better?
Another
tool Harnack might have used to good advantage is the notion of a
"plausibility structure," as set forth by Thomas Luckmann and Peter L.
Berger (The Social Construction of Reality). Harnack can be
understood as laboring mightily to bring his readers to view Marcion as
standing in continuity with the Lutheran tradition. Berger would say he is
trying to assimilate Marcion to the plausibility structure, the cognitive
universe, of the implied reader. The reason Marcion could never before
have been taken as seriously as Harnack took him was that Marcion existed
primarily as a "heretic," a bogeyman falling outside the orthodox
plausibility structure. One was at liberty to think of him merely as a
sorry chapter in the history of heresy. And this is due to the fact that
Roman orthodoxy prevailed in the great contest of rival Christianities in
the early centuries.
But what
was the view from within the Marcionite churches? In this communion, which
throve all over the Empire for several centuries, things would have looked
different. It is disturbing to ask oneself whether some things look
natural simply because we are used to them, others implausible because
they are alien to us. Oh for the chance to jump for the moment out of
one's historical skin and change places with Marcionite exegetes!
Perhaps through those lenses we might view the exegesis of the Alien God
as no less unbecoming an elaboration of scripture than most of us now
consider the Triune God. Who knows?
Perhaps
the most controversial aspect of Harnack's presentation of Marcion's case
was his seconding of his ancient counterpart's motion that Christians cut
loose the Jewish Scriptures as a non-Christian book. Indeed, here is
another aspect of the book that looks a good bit different from the
perspective of the late twentieth century. Hoffmann has shown how unjust
it is to count Marcion as an anti-Semite. In the same way, we might
reconsider whether Marcion's proposal is not the Christian option on the
question of the two Testaments that is not the most respectful of Judaism.
In Marcion's estimation, the Jewish Scriptures are true enough in the
Jewish frame of reference, a book antithetical to Christianity as he
understood it (we still have many of the same difficulties) and in no way
to be Christianized by the hermeneutical ventriloquism of allegory and
typology. Here is a frank recognition that there is no meaningful
"Judeo-Christian Tradition," that to maintain that there is, is a veiled
attempt to co-opt the older religion in the interests of the younger.
Should Jews take exception to such a posture?
As moderns
we are perhaps most embarrassed by Marcion's delineation of two different
Gods. But even this need not trouble us overmuch. Was not Marcion
straining to say something that is said better in our conceptuality as a
difference between two different God-concepts, between two different
God-experiences? Or do we believe there is such a difference? When we are
playing the role of ecumenists we tend to minimize or eliminate any
differences, while as theologians we are quick to accentuate (or create)
them, stoutly maintaining that Christian theology defines God "from below"
through the Christian encounter with Jesus Christ. The latter is perhaps
all Marcion was saying in his crude and shocking way. Do we want to say
it? Would it be anti-Jewish to say it? Any more than it is anti-Hindu to
draw distinctions between the Christian and Vedanta God-concepts?
Just now
scholars are rethinking their theories on the origins of Gnosticism,
whether it evolved from within Judaism or from Christianity, how much
Platonic or Iranian influence there might have been. Here is another
discussion in which Harnack should have a posthumous say. His acute
sorting out of the similarities and differences between Marcionism and
Gnosticism show that Marcion was by no means a Gnostic, nor even an heir
of Gnosticism. Hoffmann is clear on this point as well. But I wonder if
sufficient recognition has been given to the importance of this piece of
taxonomy. If Marcion held beliefs so similar at point after point to the
Gnostics, yet with such decisively significant differences, should we not
conclude that the distinctive thing about Gnosticism was not a full-blown
cosmological scheme pitting a superior God against an inferior demiurge,
Christ being the envoy of the former, and a rejection of the Jewish
Scriptures and eschatology--but rather a particular spin on these
pre-existing ideas which the Gnostics and Marcion alike derived from a
common source? Perhaps the Gnostics inherited and interpreted much more
than they created. Perhaps it is the roots only of these Gnostic
reinterpretations of established mythemes that we ought to be tracing, not
the whole mythos.
One last
word: it is a pity that this greatest interpreter of Marcion neglected to
address the astonishing hypothesis of W. C. van Manen that Galatians
itself is at root a Marcionite pseudepigraph. Of course, as a loyal
Ritschlian, Harnack was no great friend of the Tübingen School and
wouldn't have given the ultra-Tübingenism of the Dutch Radical School the
time of day. But, as Feyerabend contends, even the most outlandish-seeming
theory may provide just the lens we lacked to see some things about the
text that remain invisible otherwise. Just imagine that the Epistle had
first existed in a Marcionite draft. Then the analogy between Paul's
uneasy reception by the Jerusalem Pillars and subsequent bitterness toward
them, and Marcion's less-than-successful bid for recognition at Rome might
seem no mere analogy. And, come to think of it, that strange business
about the Law being the gift of the angels rather than the true deity
would take on new meaning. The implied notion that Paul as a Jew had
served the beggerly elements of this world would make new sense.
Harnack
notes the similarity between Marcion's repudiation of the writing Prophets
and the neglect of the same figures in the Qur'an (on this see also Tor
Andrae's Muahammad: The Man and His Faith). But if van Manen were
right, we would certainly have a striking Qur'anic analogy for the
retrojection of Marcion in Rome as Paul in Jerusalem. Very frequently the
Prophet tells forth "secret histories" of the biblical Patriarchs in which
their exploits mirror those of Muhammad himself in mirror-fashion. The
opponents of Abraham, Noah, Moses, Jesus all echo in verbatim fashion the
jibes hurled at Allah's last Prophet by the hecklers of Mecca. And think
of the Johannine retrojection of the quarrels and excommunications of his
own day into the story of Jesus, as Louis Martyn has demonstrated (History
and Theology in the Fourth Gospel).
Harnack by
no means uttered the last word on Marcion. Knox, Blackman, Hoffmann, and Ldemann
have all helped us refine our understanding of Marcion, but one is tempted
to apply to Harnack the remark once made of Marcion himself. Marcion, we
are told, is the only one in the early church who understood Paul, and
even he misunderstood him. Perhaps we might be excused for saying that,
even in Harnak misunderstood Marcion at this or that point, no one in the
history of scholarship has understood Marcion as empathetically as Harnack.
CopyrightŠ2007 by
Robert M Price
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