Chapter XI · MARCION

We have seen that Valentinus left Alexandria to settle in Rome before promulgating his new doctrine^[685], and the Eternal City seems at that time to have drawn to itself as with a magnet all those Oriental teachers of Christianity who wished to make innovation in religion. Rome in the IInd century had become a veritable sink into which poured men of all nations and creeds whether old or new. Besides the great flood of Isiacists, Mithraists, and worshippers of the Great Goddess and of the Syrian Baals, that now began to appear there, Alexander of Abonoteichos came thither under Marcus Aurelius to celebrate his newly-invented mysteries^[686], and succeeded in gaining a foothold at the Imperial Court. Moreover in A.D. 140, the terrible war of extermination which Hadrian had been compelled much against his will to wage against the Jewish nation was at length over, and the effect of this was to transfer a great number of Asiatic and African Christians to the world’s metropolis, while making it more than ever expedient for them to disclaim connection with the Jews. The slightly contemptuous toleration, too, which the statesmanlike Hadrian seems to have extended to the Christians^[687], was not likely to be withdrawn without reason by his philosophic successor, Antoninus Pius; and it was doubtless the consciousness of this which led to the appearance of the various “apologies” for, or defences of, Christianity which Quadratus, Aristides, Justin Martyr, and other persons with some philosophic training now began to put forth. In such of these as have come down to us, the desire 204of their authors to dissociate themselves from the Jews, then at the nadir of their unpopularity, is plainly manifest, and no doubt gave the note to the innovators^[688]. It is certainly very marked in the heresy of Marcion, which, unlike those of Valentinus and the other Gnostics, was to culminate in the setting-up of a schismatic Church in opposition to that founded on the Apostles.

Marcion was, according to the better account, a wealthy shipowner of Pontus and probably a convert to Christianity^[689]. He seems to have been born at Sinope, at one time the most important of the Greek towns on the Southern shore of the Euxine or Black Sea. Mithridates the Great, who was also born there, had made Sinope his capital, and though it had no doubt declined in rank since his time, it must still have been, in the year 100 A.D. (the probable date of Marcion’s birth), a flourishing and prosperous place^[690]. As in all the cities of Asia Minor, the Stoic philosophy had there obtained a firm hold, and there is some reason for thinking that Marcion received lessons in this before his conversion^[691]. Of the circumstances which led to this event we have no knowledge, and it was even said in later times that he was born a Christian, and that his father had been a bishop of the Church. A better founded story is that, on his conversion, he brought into the common fund of the Church a considerable sum of money, which is said to have been paid out to him on his expulsion^[692]. When at the 205mature age of forty he went to Rome, it seems reasonable to suppose that he accepted the orthodox teaching, as it is said that there was some talk of his being made bishop of what was even then the richest and highest in rank of all the Christian Churches. At Rome, however, he fell in with one Cerdo, a Syrian, who seems to have been already domiciled there and to have taught in secret a pronouncedly dualistic system in which God and Matter were set in sharp opposition to one another, and in which it was held that a good God could not have been the author of this wicked world^[693]. This opinion Marcion adopted and elaborated, with the result that he was expelled from the Catholic Church, and thereupon set to work to found another, having bishops, priests, deacons, and other officers in close imitation of the community he had left^[694]. It is said that before his death he wished to be reconciled to the Church, but was told that he could only be readmitted when he had restored to the fold the flock that he had led away from it. This, on the authority of Tertullian, he would have been willing to do; but his rival Church had by that time so enormously increased in numbers, that he died, probably in 165 A.D., before he was able to make the restitution required^[695]. This story also can only be accepted with a great deal of reserve^[696].

It is abundantly plain, however, that Marcion was regarded not only by the professed heresiologists of the succeeding age, but also by teachers like Justin Martyr and the learned Clement of Alexandria, as one of the most formidable enemies of the Church, whose evil influence persisted even after his death^[697]. By the reign of Gratian, his rival Church had spread over Italy, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, and Persia^[698]; and, although the main authority for the increase is the always doubtful one 206of Epiphanius, this last was not likely to have unduly magnified the success of the Church’s rival, and his story has the confirmation of Tertullian that in his time the Marcionites made churches “as wasps make nests^[699].” Every Father of note seems to have written against the heresiarch who had thus dared, as was said, to turn away souls from Christ, and Polycarp, the saint and martyr, when Marcion claimed acquaintance with him in Rome on the strength of a former meeting in Smyrna, replied with much heat, “Yes, I know thee! the first-born of Satan^[700].” So late as the Council in Trullo in the VIIth century, special arrangements had to be made for the reception of Marcionites who wished to be reconciled to the Church, and forms of abjuration of the sect are said to have lingered until the Xth^[701].

That this longevity was purchased by no willingness to make the best of both worlds or to enjoy peace by compromising with heathenism in the way we have seen prevalent among the Alexandrian Gnostics, is at once evident. Alone among the heretics of the sub-Apostolic Age, the Fathers declare, the Marcionites held fast their faith in time of persecution, while they refused to frequent the circus and the theatre and practised an austerity of life putting to shame even the ascetics among the orthodox.^[702] Marcion himself underwent none of the slanders on his personal morals which theologians generally heap upon their opponents^[703], and none of his tenets are said by either Tertullian or Epiphanius, who took his refutation most seriously in hand, to have been borrowed from those Pagan rites or mysteries which they looked upon as forming the most shameful 207source from which to contaminate the pure doctrine of the Church. Irenaeus, who was his junior by some twenty or thirty years, and may have known him personally, says indeed that he was a disciple of Simon Magus^[704], but in this he may have alluded merely to his position as the founder of a rival Church. Hippolytus is silent about this; but, true to his system of attacking philosophy on account of its supposed connection with heresy, says that Marcion is a disciple, not of Christ, but of Empedocles^[705]. There is much to be said for the view that Marcion’s heresy was so well and firmly established before the end of the IInd century, that those who then denounced it really knew little of its beginnings^[706]. They are, however, unanimous as to the more than Puritanical attitude adopted by its founders. The Marcionites were allowed neither to drink wine nor to eat flesh, and those believers in their tenets who were married had either to separate from their wives or to remain among the catechumens until about to die, it being unlawful for them to receive baptism save on their deathbeds^[707].

Marcion’s, indeed, seems to have been one of those ruggedly logical and uncompromising natures, not to be led away by reverence for authority or tradition, which appear once or twice in the history of most religions; and it is doubtless this quality which has led Prof. Harnack, as did Neander in the last century, to claim him as the first reformer of the Catholic Church^[708]. Like another Luther, Marcion declared that the Church had become corrupted by the additions made by men to the pure teaching she had received from her Founder, and that only in return to her primitive faith was safety to be found. For this primitive faith, he appealed, like the makers of the German Reformation, to the words of Scripture, but he differed from them most widely in the limitations that he placed upon them. It was, he declared, impossible to find any attributes 208in common between the God of the Old Testament and the Supreme (and benevolent) Being of whom Jesus announced Himself the Son, and he therefore rejected the Old Testament entirely. In the same way, he said that the Canonical Gospels then received among Christians had become overlaid with Jewish elements introduced by the Asiatic converts among whom they were first circulated; and that the narrative in the Gospel according to Luke was alone trustworthy^[709]. From this also, he removed the whole series of traditions concerning the Birth and Infancy of Jesus; and made it begin in effect with the words of the fourth chapter in which is described the coming-down of Jesus to “Capernaum, a city of Galilee.” These he combined with the opening words of Luke iii., so that the event was described as taking place in the “fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar^[710].” He also excised from the Gospel everything which could indicate any respect shown by the Founder of Christianity to the Torah or Law of the Jews, the allusions to the Jewish traditions concerning Jonah and the Queen of Sheba, the supposed fulfilment of the Jewish prophecies in the person and acts of Jesus, and the statement that He took part in the Paschal Feast. He further removed from it every passage which represents Jesus as drinking wine or taking part in any festivity, and in the Lord’s Prayer he struck out the petition for delivery from evil, while modifying the “Hallowed be thy name!” It has been suggested that in this last case he may have given us an older version than that of the Canon^[711].

With the remainder of the New Testament, Marcion took similar liberties. He rejected entirely the Acts of the Apostles, The Apocalypse of St John, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Epistles generally called “Pastoral,” as well as all those passing under the names of St John, St James, St Peter and St Jude. 209For the Apostle Paul, however, Marcion had a profound admiration, pronouncing him to be the only true follower of Jesus, and he accepted with some alterations the ten epistles which he thought could with confidence be attributed to him. These were the Epistles to the Galatians, the two to the Corinthians, the one to the Romans, both those to the Thessalonians, that to the Ephesians or, as he preferred to call it, to the Laodiceans, and those to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Philippians. From these ten epistles, he removed everything which described the fulfilment of the prophecies of the Jewish prophets, all allusions to the Parusia or Second Coming, and some expressions which seemed to him to militate against the asceticism that he himself favoured^[712]. All these alterations seem to have been set down by Marcion in a book to which he gave the name of the Antitheses, and which contained his statement of the incongruities apparent between the Old and New Testaments. This book is now lost, and the details of Marcion’s emendations have in consequence to be picked out from the treatise of Tertullian against him, the statements of Epiphanius, and the anonymous discourse de Recta Fide which is sometimes included in the works of Origen^[713].

If these alterations of the Scriptures generally received depended on any independent tradition, or even upon a rational criticism, they would be of the greatest use to modern textual critics, who have in consequence hoped eagerly that some lucky chance might yet give us a copy of Marcion’s Gospel.^[714] But the Fathers make no allusion to any claim of the kind; and in the absence of Marcion’s own words, it seems likely that his alterations were merely dictated by the preoccupation regarding the Divine nature which seems with him to have amounted to a passion. Never, he said, could the jealous and irascible God 210of the Jews be identified with the loving and benevolent Spirit whom Jesus called His Father. Hence there was not one God; but two Gods. One of these was the Supreme Being, perfect in power as in goodness, whose name, as perhaps the Orphics and the Ophites taught, was Love^[715]. Too great to concern Himself with sublunary things, and too pure, as Plato and Philo had both said, to have any dealings with an impure and sinful world, He remained seated apart in the third or highest heaven, inaccessible to and unapproachable by man, like the unknown Father of Valentinus and the other Gnostic sects^[716]. Below Him was the Creator, or rather the Demiurge or Fashioner of the World, in constant conflict with matter, which he is always trying unsuccessfully to conquer and subdue in accordance with his own limited and imperfect ideas. Just, according to Marcion, was the Demiurge, whom he identified with the God of the Jews; and it was this attribute of justice which prevented him from being considered wholly evil in his nature, as was Satan, the active agent of the matter with which the Demiurge was always striving. Yet the Demiurge was the creator of evil on his own showing^[717], and as such is entitled to no adoration from man, whom he has brought into a world full of evil. Man’s rescue from this is due to the Supreme God, who sent His Son Jesus Christ on earth that He might reveal to mankind His Heavenly Father, and thus put an end to the sway of the Demiurge.

That Jesus on His coming was seized and slain by the Jews, with at least the connivance of the Demiurge, Marcion admitted. But as this might seem like a defeat of the Supreme Being by His inferior, he was forced to accept the theory called Docetism which was in favour with many other Gnostics. According to this, the body of Jesus was not real flesh and blood, and had 211indeed no actual existence, but was a phantasm which only appeared to mankind in the likeness of a man^[718]. Hence it mattered nothing that this body, which did not really exist, appeared to suffer, to be slain, and even to rise again. The Supreme God was not mocked, and the resurrection of the body was to Marcion a thing unthinkable.

In lesser matters, Marcion’s dislike of the God of the Jews is, perhaps, more marked. Man’s body, according to him, was made by the Demiurge out of matter^[719], but without any spark from a higher world infused into it, as the Ophites and Valentinus had taught. Hence man was naturally inclined to evil, and the Law which the Demiurge delivered to him was more or less of a snare. Man was sure to give way to the evil desires inherent in matter, and on doing so became with all his race subject to the power of matter and the evil spirits inhabiting it. It is true that the Demiurge had devised a plan of salvation in the shape of the Law of the Jews delivered to them on Sinai. But this concerned one small people only, and it was but a fraction of that community which could hope to observe it in all its forms and ceremonies. Did they do so, the Demiurge would provide for them a modified felicity in that region of Hades called the Bosom of Abraham^[720]. For those Gentiles, and even for those Jews who from weakness or obstinacy did not obey the Law, he had prepared punishment and, apparently, eternal tortures. It is true that he promised the Jews a Messiah who should lead them to the conquest of the earth, but this leader certainly was not Jesus^[721]; and it is probable that Marcion thought that His Mission had put it out of the power of the Demiurge to fulfil any of these promises.

Possibly it was the same dislike of the Jews that led Marcion to consider St Paul as the only real apostle of Jesus. The others, he said, had overlaid the faith that they had received with Jewish traditions; but Paul, chosen by Jesus after His Ascension^[722], had resisted their attempt to reintroduce the Law of the Jews, and was, in his own words, an apostle sent not 212from men, nor by man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from the dead.^[723] Marcion also seems to have laid stress upon St Paul’s wonder that the Galatians were “so soon removed from Him who hath called you to His grace to another Gospel^[724],” with the suggestion that this second gospel was the contrivance of the Demiurge; and generally to have accentuated the controversy between St Peter and St Paul mentioned in the Epistle bearing their name^[725]. From the same Epistle to the Galatians, Marcion appears to have erased the name of Abraham where his blessing is said to have “come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ^[726]”; and in like manner, to have read into the passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians^[727], where it is said that “the world by wisdom knew not God,” expressions implying that it was the “Lord of this World,” i.e. the Demiurge, who was ignorant of the Supreme Being^[728]. As this ignorance of the Demiurge was a favourite theme of the Ophites and other Gnostics, it is possible that Marcion was more indebted to these predecessors of his than modern commentators on his teaching are inclined to allow; but he perhaps justified his reading by tacking it on to the passage in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians which says that “the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine upon them^[729].” From the Epistle to the Romans, in which he seems to have made very large erasures^[730], Marcion draws further arguments in favour of his contention that the Jews were kept in ignorance of the Supreme God, relying upon texts like:

“For they [i.e. Israel] being ignorant of God’s righteousness and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God^[731].”

So, too, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, Marcion rejects the passage which declares that Jesus shall 213come “in flaming fire taking vengeance^[732],” which he considered inconsistent with the benevolence of Himself and His Father. We do not know whom he considered to be the Antichrist there predicted, as Epiphanius leaves us in doubt whether Marcion accepted the verses which go by the name of the Little Apocalypse, but Tertullian seems to imply that Marcion may have assigned this part to the Messiah of the Demiurge^[733]. In like manner, he is said to have altered the passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians which speaks of “the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God^[734],” so as to make it appear that the mystery was hid not in God, but from the god who created all things, meaning thereby the Demiurge^[735].

Until some lucky discovery gives us the text of Marcion’s Antitheses it is difficult to say whether he has been correctly reported by his adversaries, or whether, which is probable enough, they have suppressed evidence brought forward by him in support of these erasures and interpolations. That in putting them forward, he did so in such a way as to leave many an opening to a skilled controversialist is easy to believe, and there are many passages in Tertullian’s refutation which show that his forensically-trained adversary took advantage of these with more eagerness than generosity. But the noteworthy thing about the long drawn out dialectic of Tertullian’s treatise Against Marcion, is the way in which Marcion throughout resolutely abstains from any of the allegorical or figurative interpolations of Scripture which we have seen so prevalent among all the Gnostic writers from Simon Magus down to the authors of the Pistis Sophia and its connected texts. Everywhere, it would seem, he took the Biblical texts that he quotes at their literal meaning and never seems to have attempted to translate any of them by trope or figure. In like manner, we find him, so far as his adversaries’ account goes, entirely free from that preoccupation concerning the divisions and order of the spiritual world which plays so large a part in the speculations of the systems hitherto described. Nor does he show any tendency to the deification of abstract ideas which is really at 214the root of all Gnostic systems whether before or after Christ. Nowhere does Marcion let fall an expression which could make us think of the Sophia or Wisdom of God as a separate entity or personified being, nor is the Logos of Plato and his Alexandrian admirers ever alluded to by him. Hence, he in no way contributes to the growth, so luxuriant in his time, of mythology and allegory^[736]. In everything he exhibits the hard and unimaginative quality of the practical man.

These considerations have great bearing on the question of the source of his heresy. Had he busied himself, like the Gnostics, with elaborate descriptions of the invisible universe, one would have thought that he owed something to the ancient Egyptian theology, in which such speculations occupied nearly the whole care of its professors. Had he, on the other hand, studied to personify the attributes and qualities of the Supreme Being, one would have been able to connect his teaching with that of the Persian religion, in which, as will be seen in the next chapter, the idea of such personification took the principal place. This connection would have been natural enough, because the province of Pontus, whence Marcion came, had long been subject to the Persian power, and did not become Roman in name until the reign of Nero. Yet no trace of such a connection is even hinted at by adversaries perfectly well informed of the main tenets of the Persian religion^[737]. The inference is therefore unavoidable that Marcion’s views were original, and that they were formed, as was said by a critic of the last century, by a sort of centrifugal process, and after rejecting in turn all heathen and Jewish elements, as well as most of the traditions which had already grown up in the Catholic Church^[738]. That Marcion 215was aware of this seems probable from the many efforts made by him to be reconciled to the Church, or rather to convert the whole Church to his way of thinking. In this, as in the emphasis which he laid on faith rather than knowledge as the source of man’s happiness in this world and the next, he again anticipated in a most striking manner the views of the German Reformers some fourteen centuries later^[739].

A like analogy is to be seen in the practices of the Marcionite churches, so far at any rate as we may trust to the reports of their orthodox opponents. True, as it would seem, to his conviction of the complete failure of the scheme of the Demiurge, Marcion set his face even more sternly than our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time against anything that should look like enjoyment of the things of this world^[740]. His followers were enjoined to eat no meat, to abstain from wine even in the Eucharist, which in the Marcionite churches was celebrated with water, and to observe perpetually the strictest continence^[741]. The Sabbath was kept by them as a fast and, although this may look like an obedience to Jewish custom, Epiphanius, who is our sole authority for the observance, tells us that Marcion expressly rejected this attribution^[742]. Virginity was, according to him, the only state of life for the true Christian; and although he freely baptized unmarried men and eunuchs, he refused baptism to married persons, as has been said, until they were divorced or on the point of death^[743]. To the enticements of the circus, the gladiatorial shows, and the theatre, the Marcionites used, according to Tertullian, to return the answer “God forbid!”; and they made the same reply, he tells us, when invited to save their lives in time of persecution by sacrificing a few grains of 216incense to the genius of the Emperor^[744]. The reason of all this austerity was apparently their contempt for the kingdom of the Demiurge and their resolve to do nothing to prolong his rule.

Of the spread of the Marcionite heresy we have very little more information than that given above. Prof. Harnack thinks 150-190 A.D. was the “golden age of the Marcionites^[745],” but Tertullian evidently considered that some thirty years after the last of these dates they were nearly as numerous as the Valentinians, whom he speaks of as the largest sect of heretics^[746]. An inscription found in a Syrian village refers to a “synagogue” of Marcionites occupying a site there in 318 A.D.^[747], which is, as has been remarked, older than the earliest dated inscription of the Catholic Church. Theodoret, too, about 440 A.D., boasts of having converted more than a thousand of them, a statement which afterwards swells into eight villages and supposes that they were pretty thickly clustered together^[748]. Yet they must have led a miserable existence, being persecuted by the Imperial authorities and their Christian brethren at once, and it is not to be wondered at that Marcion himself addresses some followers in a letter quoted by Tertullian as “my partners in hate and wretchedness^[749].” It speaks volumes for their faith that they continued to hold it in spite of everything.

This was the more to their credit that they were by no means at one in matters of belief. In a passage quoted in a former chapter, Tertullian says that the Marcionites thought it fair to do what Marcion had done, that is, to innovate on the faith according to their own pleasure. This is a rhetorical way of putting it; for the successors of Marcion seem to have differed 217among themselves mainly upon one point, which was, in fact, the number of “principles” which lay at the beginning of things^[750]. Thanks to his Stoical training, Marcion was forced to assign a large part in the formation of the cosmos to Matter, which he nevertheless thought to be essentially evil. But in that case, how did it come into existence? It surely could not be the creation of the Supreme and benevolent Being whose name was Love; and if not, how did it come to exist independently of Him? To these questions it is possible that the essentially practical genius of Marcion saw no need to return any answer, and was content to regard them, like Epicurus before him, as insoluble problems. But his followers apparently refused to do so; and hence there arose considerable diversity of opinion. According to an Armenian author of late date, Marcion himself taught that there were three principles, that is, the Supreme God, the Demiurge or Creator, and Matter, which he regarded as a sort of spouse to the Demiurge^[751]. This, however, 218is extremely unlikely in view of the unanimous assertion of the Fathers nearer to him in point of time that he taught the existence of two principles only; and it is probable that the theory of three principles, if seriously advanced, must have been the work of one of his followers. Tertullian, whose sophistry in combating Marcion’s teaching in this respect is here particularly apparent, points out, indeed, that if the Creator be held to be self-originated and not himself the creature of the Supreme God, there must be nine gods instead of two^[752]; but there is no reason to suppose that Marcion ever troubled himself about such dialectical subtleties.

The case was different with Apelles, who was certainly later in date than Marcion and perhaps succeeded him in the headship of the sect, either immediately or at one remove^[753]. According to Tertullian, Apelles left Rome for Alexandria where he no doubt came in contact with the Gnostic opinions there rife^[754]. The slander that Tertullian sets on foot about him to the effect that he forsook his master’s continence and was addicted to the company of women is unexpectedly refuted by Tertullian’s contemporary, Rhodo^[755]. But Apelles must have come in contact in Alexandria with the followers of Valentinus and other Gnostic teachers, and their arguments no doubt compelled him to modify the strict dualism of his master. According to Rhodo, Apelles asserted that there was only one principle of all things, which would imply that the Demiurge was the creature of the Supreme God, and that Matter, instead of being essentially evil and independent, must have been also created by Him. Hippolytus, who was possibly a little later than Rhodo, amplifies this by the statement that Apelles held the Demiurge to be the fashioner of things coming into being 219(subsequent to him)^[756], and that there was a third god or angel of a fiery nature who inspired Moses, and even a fourth who was the cause of evil. In this the Gnostic idea of correspondence or reflection of one world in another is manifest; but it is evident that it also approaches more nearly than does the uncompromising dualism of Marcion himself to the teaching of the Catholic Church. The same tendency to compromise is evident in Apelles’ willingness to use the books of both the Old and the New Testament, quoting with regard to them, if Epiphanius is to be believed, the apocryphal saying of Jesus “Be ye wise money-changers!” to be found in, among other works, the Pistis Sophia^[757]. Apelles seems also to have modified his master’s teaching with regard to the body of Jesus, which was, he said, no phantasm, but a real body of flesh and blood assumed by Him on His descent to the earth, and returned by Him piece by piece on His Ascension to the different elements whence it was drawn. His indebtedness in this to the sources from which the author of the Pistis Sophia drew the same doctrine needs no demonstration. Yet there is no reason to assert that Apelles considered these “corrections” of Marcion’s teaching in any way essential or binding on his followers. He seems, too, to have adopted one of the practices of the primitive Church in paying attention to the ecstatical visions of “prophets” of both sexes, his faith in the prophecies of a virgin named Philumene being the foundation of Tertullian’s slander on his morals. There can be no doubt, however, that in spite of these tendencies, he remained in essentials a true follower of Marcion, and that like his master, he deprecated enquiry into insoluble problems. “One ought not,” he said, as Rhodo reports, “to examine doctrine, but everyone should be steadfast in the faith. Those who trust in Him that was crucified will be saved, if only they do good works^[758].” Herein he also, like Marcion 220himself, seems to have anticipated by many centuries the teaching of the German Reformers.

Other followers of Marcion there were who, thanks to our lack of information concerning them, are to us merely names. Thus Tatian, who was according to tradition a disciple of Justin Martyr but fell away from orthodoxy after his teacher’s death, seems to have held a kind of intermediate position between the two great schools of heresy. While teaching, according to Irenaeus, a system of aeons not unlike that of Valentinus, he adopted in full the notions of Marcion as to abstinence from marriage, from the eating of flesh, and from the use of wine, and may have been the founder of a separate sect called Encratites^[759]. We hear, too, of one Prepon, “an Assyrian” or native of Syria, a follower of Marcion, whom Hippolytus represents as teaching that Jesus Himself was intermediate between the good and evil deities and came down to earth to be freed from all evil^[760]. Rhodo also speaks^[761] of Potitus and Basilicus, followers of Marcion, who held fast to his doctrine of two principles, while Syneros, as he affirms, led a school which asserted that there were three “natures.” Lucian also, who, according to Hippolytus and Epiphanius, came in point of time between Marcion and Apelles^[762], may have inclined to the same doctrine, and taught, unlike Marcion, that there would be a resurrection, not of the body nor of the soul, but of some part of man which he also defined as being of a “third nature^[763].”

The conversion of Constantine put a violent end to any open propagation of the doctrines of Marcion or his successors. In the picturesque words of Eusebius “the lurking-places of the heretics were broken up by the Emperor’s commands, and the savage beasts which they harboured were put to flight.” Hence, he goes on to tell us, many of those who had been “deceived” crept secretly into the Church, and were ready to 221secure their own safety by every sort of dissimulation^[764]. This practice, as we have seen, had always been popular among the Gnostics properly so called, whose religion consisted in part in the knowledge of the formulas secretly imparted and preserved with jealous care from all but the initiated. Although there is no distinct proof that the same course was now adopted by the Marcionites, there is some reason for thinking that this was the case. The postponement of baptism noticed above must have early divided the members of the Marcionite churches into grades of which the largest was in an inferior position to the others. It is unlikely that these catechumens, who might witness but not share in the sacraments celebrated for their higher-placed brethren, should have courted persecution on behalf of a faith with which they were not fully entrusted. The outbreak of the Arian controversy, which followed so closely on the conversion of Constantine, also carried within the Catholic Church those speculations about the Divine nature which had hitherto formed a fruitful source of dissension among the Marcionites themselves. With their synagogues and meeting-places taken away from them and handed over to the Catholics, many of them must have looked about for some tolerated community which they could join, and of all that thus offered themselves, the Catholic Church offered the greatest inducements to them.

Yet another way was open to the convinced Marcionite who could not bring himself to reject Marcion’s view that the true purport of Jesus’ teaching had been obscured by the additions of Judaizing apostles. The sect of the followers of Manes, who began to show themselves in the Western part of the Roman Empire shortly before Constantine’s conversion, professed a dualism more uncompromising than any that Marcion had taught, and coupled with it an organization so skilful and effective that it was able for some ten centuries longer to defy the efforts of the rest of Christendom for its suppression. In its division of all Manichaeans into the two great classes of Perfect and Hearers it drew very close to Marcionite practice; and the liberty which it allowed the Hearers of outwardly 222professing any faith they pleased must have enabled the Marcionite who joined it to keep those articles of his former creed most dear to him without coming into violent collision with either Church or State. Hence the tradition seems well founded which asserts that the majority of those Marcionites, who did not become reconciled with the Catholic Church after Constantine’s alliance with it, joined the ranks of the Manichaeans, and so ceased to exist as a separate community^[765].

The direct influence of Marcion’s teaching upon that of the Catholic Church was probably very small. In spite of the efforts of recent writers to maintain the contrary^[766], it is difficult to see that this first attempt, honest and sincere as it undoubtedly was, at the reformation of Christianity ever bore fruit of lasting value. Its main principle which, as we have seen, was the rejection of the Jewish scriptures and their bearing upon the Mission of Jesus, has been ignored, since Marcion’s death as in his lifetime, by every other Church and sect professing Christian doctrines. His common-sense view, that the words of the Christian Bible must mean what their authors and their contemporaries would have naturally taken them to mean, and do not for the most part contain any deeply hidden or allegorical significance, was in like manner repudiated by the whole of Christendom, which, up to the latter part of the XIXth century, continued to construe the greater part of its sacred books by trope and figure^[767]. There remains then only the asceticism and austerity that Marcion practised which the orthodox could have borrowed from him. But, we have seen that the religious abstinence from procreation, and from the use of meat and wine, can be traced back to the appearance of Orphism in Greece some five hundred years before the Birth of Christ; and if the Christian Church adopted, as it partly did, 223these practices in a modified form, it was by way of inheritance from a source which was much nearer to it than Marcion’s heresy. That many of Marcion’s ideas have been revived in our own day is likely enough, and this opinion has been put forward with much skill and point by Dr Foakes-Jackson in his Hulsean Lectures. But this is a case of revival rather than of descent, and a reformer who has to wait some eighteen centuries before his ideas meet with acceptance, may well be held to have failed to influence after ages.

Notwithstanding this, the heresy of Marcion will always have great interest for the student of the History of Religions. The success—fugitive as such things go, but real enough for a time—with which Marcion set up a Church over against that tremendous polity which has been called without much exaggeration “the very master-piece of human wisdom,” would be alone sufficient to make it precious in the eyes of those who are not blind to the romance of history. To archaeologists it is the more interesting that it is only in its direction that we are likely to receive in future much additional light upon the struggles of nascent Christianity with one category of its competitors. The very voluminous writings of the other Gnostics were destroyed by the triumphant Church with such minute care that the Coptic texts described in the last chapter form the only relics of this once enormous literature that have survived to us. The heathen religions which for some time disputed the ground with the Church have also left few traces partly for the same reason, and partly because the secrecy to which they pledged their votaries made it unlikely that many written documents of these faiths would survive. But the Antitheses of Marcion were in the hands of Photius in the Xth century; and, although it is dangerous to prophesy in such matters, it is by no means impossible that some lucky discovery within the borders of the Turkish Empire may yet give us a MS. that will enable us to reconstruct them. If that should ever be the case, we shall be in a far better position than we are now to decide whether the analogies between Marcionism and Protestantism that have been detected of late years are essential or superficial.

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