Existence of Marcion questioned?

[JairCrawford]

Justin writes somewhere between 150 and 160. They had no personal contact, directly or indirectly, as justin demonstrates in his routinely mistaken description of marcionite christianity.

Right. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you mean by anachronistic. It would seem even by Salm’s late date hypothesis that the proto-Catholic movement and the First Apology are contemporary to each other. Wouldn’t that just make Justin’s writings simply a sloppy polemic? I always thought an anachronism meant inserting something from a modern time into a text with a setting in which said thing would not have existed, but I don’t see a smoking gun to prove that to be specifically the case here. I could totally be misunderstanding what you’re saying, though.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sloppy polemics are commonly anachronistic. Today we call it revisionism. A deliberate misinterpretation of history for rhetorical effect.

[JairCrawford]

Sloppy polemics are commonly anachronistic.  Today we call it revisionism.  A deliberate misinterpretation of history for rhetorical effect.

I’m thinking I probably need to read “Against Marcion” specifically. I have not yet. I get the impression that the work does a poor job putting on the appearance of criticizing only one specific branch of heresy.

[The Grand Nudger]

He couldn't have contained himself if he tried (which he didn't), since the thrust of his work was in laying out the borders of "true christianity" and what he saw all around him was most definitely not what he had in mind. He was a christian identitarian. Probably the first.

[Ranjr]

Irenaeus rails against Marcion too many times to mention, but I like this one because we find out the gnostic heretics who really got to him, plus the irony.

Book 3

• Chapter II.-The Heretics Follow Neither Scripture Nor Tradition.

1. When, however, they are confuted from the Scriptures, they turn round and accuse these same Scriptures, as if they were not correct, nor of authority, and [assert] that they are ambiguous, and that the truth cannot be extracted from them by those who are ignorant of tradition. For [they allege] that the truth was not delivered by means of written documents, but vivâ voce: wherefore also Paul declared, "But we speak wisdom among those that are perfect, but not the wisdom of this world." And this wisdom each one of them alleges to be the fiction of his own inventing, forsooth; so that, according to their idea, the truth properly resides at one time in Valentinus, at another in Marcion, at another in Cerinthus, then afterwards in Basilides, or has even been indifferently in any other opponent, who could speak nothing pertaining to salvation. For every one of these men, being altogether of a perverse disposition, depraving the system of truth, is not ashamed to preach himself.

[Disagreeable]

I first read this as "existence of macaroni questioned".

[brewer]

If a Marcion preaches in the woods................

I certainly didn't hear.

[JairCrawford]

I first read this as "existence of macaroni questioned".

Well, I mean he did supposedly visit Rome, so… lol

[The Grand Nudger]

More than just a visit. He joined the clergy, made a huge donation, had the donation given back, had his words declared heresy, and then..we're told, accepted that judgement and the terms that the church imposed (which was to bring back every wayward soul he'd misinformed) and the only thing that stopped him from completing that task - was his death. Consider all of the absurdities hiding between the lines at every point of that later christian version of events.

It's extremely difficult to cut through early christian bullshit. They were making a new world, and to them - that definitely included making a new history - so they had to lay it on pretty thick. There's absolutely no doubt that they were eager revisionists, and it's more than a little concerning that there may have been no suitable target, in mere reality, for that revisionism. So..when you don't have a villain, you make one. Just like when there was no god-man, christians made one.

Tell you what they really liked about him, though, was his magic book. They gave him the boot, and kept that.