When I am reading the Old Testament, I often ask, “Did any other ancient people write like this?” The Old Testament is filled with the material that is the opposite of national glorification. Kings act badly; prophets act badly; an entire people acts badly. It’s all preserved in the canon of the Hebrew Bible as if the Jews had some fixation with self-humiliation. My sense is that other people have national epics that glorify their kings and people.

So, is the Old Testament really so different from the writings of other nations?

In many ways it is, and in many ways it isn’t.

The purpose of this book is to collect and present a broad selection of ancient writings and offer them as parallels to Biblical writings. Thus, we get texts that run the gamut of genres. In one, a worker pleads for the return of his cloak, which was being held to ensure he performed his rice-harvesting contract. In another, an Egyptian emissary loses his gold on a buying expedition but makes up for the loss by looting another ship. There are also tales of a god who enters the underworld in search of her lost spouse. There are invoices and lists of proverbs. One of the lists of proverbs is written by a scholar who is in prison after failing to turn in a culprit who plotted the assassination of a pharaoh, two thousand years before Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy.

These stories are dry but interesting. The authors provide a brief introduction for each story, but, in general, the texts have a surface-level presentation and a simple writing structure of ancient texts. In general, they don’t quite measure up to the Hebrew canon. Perhaps that is because these texts were rescued from the midden, whereas the Old Testament books were the living expression of a people and underwent revisions and editing that gave them layers of meaning.

This is a good read for the curious and the scholar, but it may make for a tough slog for the casually interested.

Framing a Legend by M. Andrew Holowchak

This book is written by a philosophy professor who takes the charge against Thomas Jefferson (”TJ”) very personally. Holowchak does a solid job of attacking the Relationship position. His personal investment stems from his respect for Jefferson as a thinker instrumental in founding the United States. At times, I found this zeal detracted from his arguments since much of his argument turns on an argument from character, namely, TJ did not have sex with SH because he was not the kind of man who would do that. Perhaps, but we have a history of people acting against type. People fall from grace. It’s sad but true. So, perhaps because I don’t share the same intimate relationship with TJ that comes from a lifetime of study, I am more agnostic.

Nonetheless, Holowchak defenestrates Relationship Revisionists - Fawn Brody, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Andrew Burstein. Brody wrote in the 1970s from a Freudian perspective. Her thesis was properly derided as unsubstantiated at the time and largely forgotten. Unfortunately, Annette Gordon-Reed is a black lawyer who managed to catch the wave of Wokeness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was helped by the Dark Arts of ideological propaganda, including mischaracterizing a DNA study in order to declare the debate over and accusing dissenters from the new orthodoxy of being racists.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area are redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ’s records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ’s younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, where Mrs. Adams commented on her immaturity, but nothing is known from that period. We know that SH had six children. This is the sum total of everything known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is Callender's bias and the fact that there was no Heming’s son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of descent from TH, but a DNA analysis of his descendants showed they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can’t trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, in 1873, SH’s son, Madison Hemings, told a reporter that he was TJ's son. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an “uncle” of TJ (although probably TJ’s younger brother) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH’s room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison’s credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn’t get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don’t know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ’s paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene-carrying relatives.

The bottom line is that we don’t know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not, and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there was background evidence I would have liked to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don’t know. Where was SH’s room in relation to TJ’s room? Don’t know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don’t know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem, or was it ignored? Don’t know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at present and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might have actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation given the evidence we have.

The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy by Robert F. Turner

The political Zeitgeist is intent on portraying Thomas Jefferson as a pedophile rapist. The charge is presented as unquestioned fact. Cultural institutions, which one would expect to push back, seem to accept it as an unquestionable fact. Because the charge fits so perfectly with the political Zeitgeist, I decided to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It’s hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of “Relationship? Yes.” What I learned was that the evidence for “the Relationship” is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.

Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings (”SH”) was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother’s side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as “free white” on local census rolls.

That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as by ancestry. This meant that Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in " Puddinghead Wilson " by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master’s child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)

This book was written by a consortium of scholars who took upon themselves the burden of reviewing and analyzing the evidence. The diversity of voices adds to the power of this book, although the same evidence and arguments are repeated due to the scarcity of evidence. Virtually all of the scholars concluded that the charge of a sexual relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson was not more probable than not on the basis of the evidence, although one scholar thought the evidence rose to that level. That scholar - Paul Rahe - was impressed by the timing of SH’s pregnancies with TJ’s sojourns at Monticello, which normally occurred within the first month of his visits. Rahe acknowledges that we don’t have affirmative evidence that SH was even at Monticello on those occasions, but also that we don’t know that she wasn’t. Ultimately, Rahe concludes:

“What we do know, however, is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man.

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 352). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

This is a fair point, but again, I would like to know more about the culture's attitudes. Would TJ not have known about his white slaves having whiter children? Was there a concern about the sexual behavior of slaves? Were trysts among masters and slaves something that Jefferson knew about? Who knows. A lot is presumed rather than explained.

In the same vein, Rahe’s conclusion has the scent of a politically tinged moral condemnation, which is neither evidence nor a basis for weighing evidence. Even if Jefferson was self-indulgent, that doesn’t make inadequate evidence more probable than not.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area are redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ’s records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ’s younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, where Mrs. Adams commented on her immaturity, but nothing is known from that period. We know that SH had six children.

This is the sum total of everything known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of the Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is Callender's bias and the fact that there was no Heming’s son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of descent from TH, but a DNA analysis of his descendants showed they were not related to the Jefferson Family. If we can’t trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, in 1873, SH’s son, Madison Hemings, told a reporter that he was TJ's son. The problem here is that other members of the Hemings family claimed a family tradition of descent from an “uncle” of TJ (probably TJ’s younger brother). Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH’s room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison’s credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn’t get the message. There is also the significant detail that some other guy visited his mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don’t know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ’s paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, his Jefferson-gene-carrying relatives were there as well.

The bottom line is that we don’t know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for the Relationship is more probable than not, and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there was background evidence I would have liked to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don’t know. Where was SH’s room in relation to TJ’s room? Don’t know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don’t know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem, or was it ignored? Don’t know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at present and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that the Relationship might have actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation given the evidence we have.

I want to call special attention to the contribution of David N. Mayer, who observed:

I write my own separate report to state my views on the matter and to discuss the Jefferson-Hemings controversy in a broader context. As I see it, belief in the paternity allegation—which, to me, is quite literally a myth—is a symptom of a disturbing trend in the history profession in recent years, discussed below.

Turner, Robert F., The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 285). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

We are now 20 years on, and this trend has gotten worse.

Obviously, I sensed that there was a deep political game involved in this issue. I assumed that it was on the level of Marxists undermining American traditions. What I didn’t realize was how banal and puerile the political partisanship was. The traction this new trend obtained was due to the momentary need to salvage a particularly lusty president from his own scandals, i.e., Clinton was being impeached:

“Thus began the “spin” on the DNA test results—and the most recent telling of the Jefferson-Hemings story. No doubt referring to his own book which portrayed Jefferson as an enigmatic “sphinx,” Professor Ellis wrote, “Recent work has also emphasized his massive personal contradictions and his dexterity at playing hide-and-seek within himself. The new evidence only deepens the paradoxes.” And, further evidencing new uses for the Jefferson image in modern American politics, Professor Ellis concluded, “Our heroes—and especially presidents—are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties and imperfections that this entails.”20

The timing of the Nature article’s publication—on the eve of the November 1998 Congressional elections and just weeks before the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to impeach President Bill Clinton—was not purely coincidental. Professor Ellis’ accompanying article also noted, quite frankly, “Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role.” In television interviews following release of the article, Professor Ellis elaborated on this theme; and Clinton’s apologists made part of their defense the notion that every President—even Jefferson—had his “sexual indiscretions.” (It should be added that Ellis was among the so-called “Historians in Defense of the Constitution” who signed an October 1998 ad in the New York Times opposing Clinton’s impeachment.)

Others besides Clinton apologists seized upon the alleged DNA “proof” of Jefferson paternity to advance their own ideological agendas. British journalists and commentators used the story much as they had in the 19th century, to denigrate American Revolutionaries by associating them with slaveholding. Thus, for example, Christopher Hitchens suggested in The Nation that Jefferson henceforth be described as “the slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict, and kinsman to ax murderers.” (One is reminded of reviews in the British press of the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot,” last summer. The Express noted that the real Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” on whom Gibson’s Benjamin Martin character was based, “raped his slaves and hunted Red Indians for sport.”) And for many scholars of race and race relations in America, the Jefferson-Hemings story and reactions to it (particularly by those who continued to be skeptics) provided further evidence of the racism they say permeates American society. Indeed, for many, acceptance of the paternity thesis has become a kind of litmus test for “politically correct” views: those of us who continue to question it have been denounced as racially insensitive, if not racist. (For more on this, see the discussion of Annette Gordon-Reed’s views, below.)

Turner, Robert F., The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 291). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

So, a partisan defense by a partisan masquerading as a scholar - one being fired for his own lies because he was so useful to the partisan left - and - voila!!!! - we mint new conventional wisdom that can’t be questioned on pain of cancellation by “anti-racists.”

The monopolization of academia by the Left has paid loathsome dividends.

My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy by Kim Philby

This is a hard book to evaluate. The author, Kim Philby, was the most notorious traitor in the modern history of spycraft. During World War II, Philby joined MI5 - the British counter-espionage department working on British soil - then moved to the SIS (the former MI6) doing counter-espionage work on foreign soil. In that capacity, he became the head of the division responsible for all counter-espionage relating to the Soviet Union. After a stint in Turkey, Philby was assigned to Washington, D.C., to work in the heart of American intelligence.

He did all this while serving as a secret Soviet intelligence officer, a mole, loyal to the Soviet Union, whose trafficking of information risked the safety of his family and friends in the interest of a country he had never visited.

The difficulty with this book is that Philby is still playing the “mole game”: he discloses nothing that is not already known, and he misdirects attention simply to stay in practice. Philby offers virtually nothing about his inner life; his wife gets a single mention, and it is only about four pages from the end that he mentions his mother is still living in England. As for what they thought about his secret life, or how he viewed his family’s fate if he were uncovered or the Soviets prevailed, he offers no insight.

The book begins around the start of World War II, when Philby was recruited to MI5. Philby mentions that Guy Burgess was present in one of his recruitment meetings, but he fails to mention that he and Burgess were friends in Cambridge, where Burgess was instrumental in Philby’s recruitment to the Soviet cause. We get no information about how that took place. The only idea about Philby’s motivations is that he believed the Soviet revolution offered a path to a better world. He maintained that belief despite the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union because he believed that, ultimately, despite short-term failures, the Revolution would be vindicated. Besides, Philby viewed himself as a soldier, and soldiers did their duty even when they disagreed with national policies.

I had always been impressed by Philby’s rise to power, thinking it must have been the result of some singular mental power he possessed as a spy. That turned out not to be the case, although Philby had spent time acting as a spy in the field in Franco’s Spain. In the book “Mine Were of Trouble” by Peter Kemp, Philby is mentioned as one of four journalists in Spain hit by a bomb, killing the other three and seriously injuring Philby. Kemp and Philby were friends at Cambridge with obviously different political views since Kemp went to fight for the Nationalists in Spain. In this book, Philby mentions Kemp as a friend who described a run-in with Spaniards trained by Philby (working on behalf of SIS) in Kemp’s book “No Colours or Crest.”

It is indeed a small world at certain levels.

Philby’s true gift lay in office politics. Philby rarely worked in the field when he was in MI5 or SIS. This book is filled with Philby’s concerns about the quotidian world of administration, such as setting up an office and getting it properly staffed. Philby’s keen interest was in the personalities around him. His descriptions of those personalities rival the best of John LeCarre, which is good for a reader interested in the staffing of SIS circa 1940 to 1950, but there is not much nourishment to be found in the text.

The other effect of the book is to take down one’s professional respect for the spy profession. Philby is often slighting about the abilities and intelligence of those around him, although there are some that he respects. But there was a lot of deadwood. The fact that Philby got into MI5 without a background check is notable, as is the ease with which he gained access to SIS files.

Amid these quotidian details, the chapter on the “Volkov Affair” stands out. Shortly after the end of the War in Europe in 1945, a Soviet diplomat, Volkov, presented himself at the British station in Istanbul with an offer of information about Soviet spies in Britain’s Foreign Office and one who was the head of Britain’s counter-espionage department. This information was handed to said spy. Philby looked at it, agreed that it needed to be investigated, and then proceeded with all deliberation to head to Istanbul to vet Volkov. However, by the time Philby reached Istanbul, Volkov had mysteriously disappeared.

Philby hints that he tipped off his “Russian friends,” who put a bullet in Volkov’s skull, but he doesn’t admit it. It also becomes clear that Philby deliberately dragged out the journey to Istanbul so the deed could be done before he arrived, but he never admits this.

In 1950, things came apart for Philby. He didn’t know about the Venona Intercepts, but he was told that a Soviet spy in the Foreign Office, under the code name Homer, was being investigated. The FBI had made a thorough hash of the investigation, but Philby knew it was a matter of time before Donald MacLean was identified as Homer. MacLean had been recruited at Cambridge by Burgess, but Philby had only met MacLean twice before. Since Guy Burgess was rooming with the Philby family, Philby had Burgess tip MacLean off, and the two fled to the Soviet Union.

Attention then turned to Philby - again, thanks to the unknown to Philby, Venona Intercepts. Philby remained calm, knowing MI5 did not have actionable legal evidence against him. He was terminated from SIS with a $4,000 pension but remained free and able to continue to work for the Soviets until 1963, when he finally came in from the Cold. Philby offers several scenarios for why he defected at that time, so his explanation is unclear.

Ultimately, this book is frustrating for a variety of reasons. First, I developed a feeling similar to that which I have had with recent revelations of FBI corruption involving the abuse of FISA warrants during and after the 2016 election. It seems that the professionals consider themselves a class above the average person. In 1950, Philby received an indirect warning from a supervisor about his arrest, as if it were intended to prompt him to defect. In 1955, the British government vouched for Philby’s government career. Finally, in 1963, Philby was permitted to remain free while government agents were receiving his confession. It’s almost as if “professional courtesy” extended to Philby's defection. All of this tends to show the incompetence of the Deep State long before our age. Either the Deep State wanted to give Philby every opportunity to escape, and thereby relieve them of their embarrassment, or its members are incompetent.

Second, there is Philby’s attitude toward his service. In this book, Philby often says things that seem to express pride in the work he did for the British, work that he betrayed. He also expresses his respect for some of his superiors, people whom he was betraying. Philby allows that an undercover operative has to live his cover persona, but this is psychopathic.

Finally, there is the attitude of his friends, like Graham Greene, who writes the foreword and finds in the memoirs the voice of his friend. Greene visited Philby several times after Philby fled to Moscow.

Friendship and loyalty are difficult things to give up, but Philby endangered the lives of every friend and family member that Greene had. Philby sent British agents into the Soviet Union knowing that they would be captured and shot. Philby worked for the victory of one of the most savage tyrannies in human history. Philby’s life was a lie; he simply was not the person that Greene thought he was.

But what the heck, upper-class people have to stick together, and what does a little genocide matter? After all, if Philby had been really, really successful, Graham and everyone he loved would either have been immolated by nuclear weapons or sent to concentration camps by Communists.

The ultimate mystery remains: why did Philby become a traitor? His explanation was that he expected the Revolution to bring in some utopia, despite the evidence to the contrary. Interestingly, we don’t see any concern for the poor or hatred of the West and capitalism anywhere in the book. In the end, as in the Hiss case, some mysteries remain.

Recently, I decried the sorry state of horror short story writing. My opinion is that horror short stories are being written as treatments for television or movies. The writers seem to be going for some striking or memorable final image, rather than resolving the conflict arc of the story (unless “you lose” is the resolution)

This collection leaves me a little more optimistic about the state of science fiction writing. On the whole, this was a good collection. Ball starts each story with the situation already developed. The characterization is very personal. The conflict is clearly established. Where he falls down, I think, is the quality of the endings. Ball’s standard ending seems to be a fade to black. This is not a bad ending, but it gets used consistently and seems to be a cop out that avoids coming up with something more definite.

Two of the stories put the reader in the middle of odd invasions. In “One Saturday Night, with Angel,” the protagonist works at a convenience store where he is being monitored by an angel. The angel is huge and stands on the top of his store. Prior to the story, angels appeared and started taking random sinners to some unknown spot at random times. In “The Last Thing Said Before Silence,” the weird invasion involves mimes who take people to temples for sacrifice. The mimes represent some invader from space, I think, and the mimes are just the local version of equally weird invading forces in other cities. Ball doesn’t explain how either invasion began or the initial reaction of the Earth's population, but it has been going on long enough for these situations to be considered normal by the story's characters. In one story, the protagonist escapes; in the other, it is a pyrrhic victory. Both stories are long on effect. I don’t think there was anything deeper to either story.

“To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament” is a weird parallel history story. John Flamstead wants to be an astronomer in 17^th-century England, which means pledging himself to the Royal Observatory, where he has sex with aliens. The Queen of England is an alien. Over time, he learns about and writes about the aliens until Edmund Halley leads a rebellion, with Isaac Newton supplying the weapons to defeat them. The story is quiet, distant, and unsettling. In his notes, Ball says this story gets him more fan mail than any other. I can see that; the story is unsettling.

In “Say Zucchini, and Mean It,” the words “I Love You” transmit a stupefying plague.

In “Clockwork, Patchwork, & Raven,” we are introduced to a world of cyborgs and recombinant gene manipulation. Jackson is a master craftsman of such work, who gets into a war with a street gang of Raven-like thugs. Like all the rest, it is a weird story. I don’t think it went anywhere in particular.

In “52 Pick Up” and “The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again,” we have telepaths and their problems. The protagonists in both stories use their gifts for an underworld boss and are desperately looking to leave their situation. One finds a kind of absolution in release; the other is malicious in not finding a solution to his position.

In “Memories of Chalice,” the protagonist is a dealer in memories in the city of Chalice, where memories can be harvested, stored, and sold. He does something awful and loses his wealth and memories. The story involves him recounting his past with the few scraps of memory he still possesses. Not surprisingly, the story involved an effort to follow.

From “Tuesday to Tuesday,” we have a man, a woman, and a bathtub. Is the man a ghost? Is the woman a ghost? It’s unclear, but it seems that, somehow, when he tells her story, she changes reality. What’s happening is obscure.

In “Visitors,” some people are “attuned” and can see the Kaiju who wreck their cities. The rest simply see storms and earthquakes. The protagonist allows a young woman to join his team investigating Kaiju. She discovers something in the Australian Outback attracting Kaiju. She disappears in a great Kaiju attack, and he suffers anguish. The setting is more interesting than the unresolved story about the girl.

“Dying Young” is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world where a dragon comes for revenge against another mad scientist. The main protagonist can see the future. The dragon breathes fire, drinks whisky in bars, and is a mutated human. The story comes to a conclusion, and the story setting is enticing.

“Inside an Egg, Inside a Duck” has a wet work team that specializes in killing wizards and witches. One of them falls in love, which doesn’t work out well as she sets them up, and then they are trying to escape an international crime cartel. The opening paragraph is:

I hear you’re dead, Sebastian. I hear they tracked to Korea, snuck a curse past your defenses and left you to rot in a hotel room. I hear you jumped, rather than watch yourself decay. Sixteen floors, hard concrete, splat. The kind of death that makes a good story, and stories have always been better than truths in this business we engage in.

That is a great opening paragraph. The ending works but is not quite as good as the start.

On the whole, I liked the stories in this collection. In many ways, the weirdness reminded me of avant-garde stories from the 1970s. Clearly, Ball has a tendency to mash up different genres, e.g., Western, Steampunk, Fantasy, etc. The weirdness of angels and mimes is something I might have expected to read in Ellison’s Dangerous Visions.

However, it may have been a mistake to read all the stories at one time. There was a sameness to the stories. Several of the stories seem to be variations on a theme. Likewise, a weird tone without insight or depth only goes so far.

That point may be what I miss in short stories in general, and in this collection. The protagonists are two-dimensional. They are devices to explore the setting. I have no reason to care about these characters. The setting is weird, which makes me curious to see how it plays out, but I am not sure I care that the characters are trapped. I might have cared about the protagonist in “52 Pick Up,” but he turned out to be a villain. The protagonists in the Angel story and the Mimes story were in horrific situations, but they seemed to accept them with little explanation, which made them less empathetic.

In contrast, consider short stories like “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.” The main character in that story was in a situation every bit as weird as any character in any of Ball’s stories. However, we know why he is in that situation, and it is frightening. Also, he does not give up; he acts like a man and sacrifices himself for others. This is a character we embrace and remember.

Likewise, Roger Zelazny wrote many very good short stories. “Lucifer,” “Corrida,” and “Love is an Imaginary Number” are as cryptic as any story in Ball’s collection, but they seem more human. In “Lucifer,” a man powers a city for a brief moment. It is a story about the grief of something lost. “Imaginary Number” is about sacrificing for love. “Corrida” is being thrown into existence. These are human themes that humans can resonate to.

I am not sure that Ball has given me any themes. The stories are interesting, but they don’t have the same humanity I used to find in science fiction short stories.

Looking at the reviews on Goodreads, it is obvious that I am not a part of the target demographic for this book. Those reviews share observations like “tamsyn muir (sic) continues to corner the market on fucked up lesbians” and “joining the war on toxic lesbian representation on the side of toxic lesbian representation.” Apparently, Muir writes for an audience looking for ‘representation,” which generally makes for shallow writing and even shallower reading.

Obviously, I noticed that the three main characters were lesbians. One was a gang leader, the other was her showgirl “wife” turned ghoul, and the third was some kind of female ghoul wrangler with a romantic past involving the showgirl. I noted these as data points for the story but invested them with no more significance than their hair color or names. Their sexuality was background noise used to distinguish and shape the characters. I didn’t understand that on some level I was supposed to be thrilled by the fact that they were lesbians or politically outraged by how lesbianism was being portrayed.

Silly me.

It’s weird that the GLBTetc has become a mirror image of the religious right they project against. They think that the religious right assumes that moral status is being assigned based on sexuality, while they go about doing the thing they oppose. It’s very much a “it’s different when my side does it” situation.

That said, to the story we turn. The story is a short story written for an Amazon Originals collection loosely based on the idea of “an enthralling collection of dark fantasy stories about the lure of forbidden knowledge.” I am not sure what the “forbidden knowledge was supposed to be in this case, except that various characters had “undercover” identities as suggested by the title. That’s not the kind of thing I would have thought that the story prompt was going for.

The story is quickly read. The plot is convoluted because of the undercover identity aspect. I thought that the ending reveal was out of left field and the resolution was inconsistent with the protagonist’s putative goals.

What I liked about the story was the setting. Muir doesn’t go into detail, but it seems that she has imagined a richly detailed alternative American Western setting. It seems that there are large mobile cities operated by crime cartels. The American West is a hellscape where a person can run into horse-sized lizards, and ghouls roam about destroying settlements and infecting others. Once infected, ghouls are dangerous, strong, stupid, and have a taste for human flesh, which makes them more sentient.

Into this setting comes a ghoul wrangler, who accepts the lesbian crime boss’s offer to take care of a petite show girl/ghoul who can destroy a small army. Everyone carries secrets. There is a law-enforcement operation poised to destroy ghouls, particularly those who become too smart.

I thought it was a decent read. Again, I gave not two raps that the characters were lesbian. I definitely didn’t think that made them more interesting or less interesting. I wanted to know more about the moving cities and what had happened to the West to make it such a changed place.

In other words, I read it as a story, not as an identity.

Silly me.

The Desolation by Andrew Gillsmith

Andrew Gillsmith dedicates this book to Walter M. Miller, Jr., author of the science fiction classic, The Canticle for Liebowitz. This is a strange choice since Miller’s book is science fiction and Gillsmith’s book is horror. Nonetheless, despite the genre confusion, there is a lot in this book that makes a callback to The Canticle, including the three-part structure and the appearance of a wandering Jew. Also, much in Gillsmith’s story seems quite Catholic.

The setting of Gillsmith’s story is mysterious, controlling, and compelling. At some point in the near future, something happened in the Holy Land that made it absolutely toxic to most life. The Holy Land is a desolation, and anyone who enters dies within hours or days.

And, yet, there are those who want to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, knowing that they are committing suicide. The Order of St. Lazarus has been established to control the border of the Desolation and help those who want to make the pilgrimage.

The first story involves Janusz, who has done something terrible and is seeking atonement. He joins a group making the pilgrimage, who die one by one in strange ways along the way. He meets a man who calls himself Liebowitz and makes offhand comments about remembering the Romans in the Holy Land.

The story is somber and mysterious. We are given no scientific explanation for what has happened to the Holy Land. It seems to be something supernatural reaching into our universe, and, perhaps, finally bringing peace to the land.

The second story involves two individuals who seem able to withstand the land's death-causing properties. One is called the Idiot, the other is called the Liar. Despite being a sociopath, the Liar thinks the Idiot is his friend, and goes to great lengths to protect the Idiot from the Order of St. Lazarus, which might be more proactive about the Desolation than we were previously led to believe.

The Liar meets Liebowitz, who asks him some probing questions about his mission.

The third story sees the Liar in the New Jerusalem that has been recreated in North Africa. This time Liebowitz comes to take him to the Old Jerusalem. Like the Liebowitz in the Canticle, this Liebowitz also alludes to an interaction with a man on his way to Golgotha. The Liar, now named Kalo, journeys to Jerusalem in search of redemption.

This is a story about tone and setting. I liked it for those reasons. However, I did not get answers to my questions. I didn’t find out what had happened to Israel, or whether it was a natural or supernatural event. Gillsmith told us that all life was dead in the Holy Land, but he also tells us that lions are returning. Why? Finally, I’m not really sure what happened to Liar/Kalo at the end.

Of course, the book's open-endedness is what gives it such a powerful tone.

If you are made uncomfortable by questions, then you will probably not like this book. If you like a book you can think about after you’ve finished it, then this may be your kind of book.

As a boy, Tom Carter had a supernatural experience in which the ghost of a child murderer haunted a hat. (This sounds more innocuous than it is.) This experience caused Tom to investigate the back story of the child murderer. Later in his life, Tom became a professional ghost hunter, renowned for providing films of hauntings. As this book opens, Tom is pitching a four-part documentary: one is a convent in the Italian Alps; the last – the putative fourth – is an abandoned warehouse in Chicago that used to be one of Al Capone’s brothels. Tom also has a gifted suicidal daughter in a mental health facility, a bitter ex-wife, and a budding romance with his researcher.

There is also a deep conspiracy going back to the child murderer that is reaching out into Tom’s life.

There are a lot of moving parts in this book. F.G. Cottam keeps the story moving as we learn about Tom’s life, his interactions with the supernatural, his concern for his daughter, and, ultimately, the existence of an old and powerful conspiracy that has been watching him the whole time.

Cottam keeps the story moving and makes all the pieces fit. I found it an engaging read that kept my interest. Also, it had two features I don’t usually find in horror stories. First, I liked the main character. He was solid and grounded, and he was prepared to love and care for his daughter. He had more of a backstory than a lot of horror characters do. Second, the story was optimistic. A lot of modern horror is designed to present a pitiless universe in which a character’s survival is a matter of chance. This was different. I felt that Cottam was moving into Dean Koontz territory, and I liked that.

Cottam has written a fair number of horror novels. I read his “Colony” trilogy, which I obviously liked well enough to complete. I was interested to learn that one of the characters mentioned in this book's backstory was featured in the earlier Cottam horror novel, Dark Echo. Also, the house and a party that feature prominently in Tom’s story are the centerpieces of Cottam’s novel, The House of Lost Souls.

So, there were more gears than I knew.

City of God by Saint Augustine

The City of God is a massive book written in response to a massive event. The event was the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 A.D. At that time, Catholicism had enjoyed nearly a century of ever-increasing hegemony over Roman culture. The Diocletian Persecution was a distant memory. Constantine had obtained complete control over the Roman Empire in 326 A.D. He and his successors favored Christianity and, in fact, were Christians.

In 381 A.D., Theodosius had imprudently survived an illness during which he had been baptized. As a baptized emperor, he really had little choice but to end paganism in the Empire. As a result, animal sacrifice was ended, the Vestal Virgins were disbanded, and the Altar of Victory was removed from the Senate of Rome.

Pagans remained a substantial part of the population. They were particularly strong among the aristocracy of Rome, where, thirty years later, they still held a grudge about the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Senate.

Then, in 410 A.D., the Visigoths engaged in a three-day sack of Rome. This was as shocking as it was inevitable. The Goths under Alaric had laid siege to Rome in 408 and 409 and had been bought off. In 410, the payment was not sufficient, or there was more to be gained from looting Rome than from another payment, and the Goths entered Rome and did to Rome what Romans had been doing to other cities for four hundred years.

While the Sack of Rome was symbolically significant, Rome was not, in truth, the center of the empire. It was not even the capital of the Western Empire. By 410 A.D., the capital was in Ravenna, which was far more defensible than Rome. Likewise, the real wealth, population, and culture were in the Eastern Roman Empire. Rome was an heirloom, but it doesn’t seem like either the Western or Eastern Roman emperors considered it worth protecting militarily.

In addition, the Roman-Gothic conflict had something in the nature of a civil war. By 410, Goths had been part of the Roman military apparatus for decades. Goths had also been part of Rome's leadership for decades. Stilicho, the “last Roman,” who had protected Rome from the Goths since 392 A.D., was part Vandal. Finally, the Goths were Christian, albeit Arian, which was not necessarily a deal-breaker, since many Roman emperors prior to Theodosius had also been Arian.

So, the “Fall of Rome” involved a three-day looting spree by Christian military auxiliaries on a backwater of the empire.[1]

Nonetheless, it gave some pagans a talking point, namely, “What has the Christian God ever done for us?” This message was amplified by the claim that “this kind of thing never happened when our gods were honored.”

Augustine starts The City of God against the Pagans to respond to this issue, but the book was written over twenty years, during which “the tale grows with telling.” Augustine’s work expands to twenty books, and he chases down rabbit trails on topics that don’t seem to have much to do with the topic of the sack of Rome, e.g., astrology and twins. The problem with such detail – a firehose of details – is that one can easily get lost in the trees and miss the jungle.

After chopping my way through the jungle, let me offer this map for the first ten books.

Books I through V are most concerned with the topic at hand, i.e., how the Christian should respond to the claim that “these kinds of things never happened when the pagan gods were in charge.” Augustine has two basic responses, i.e., “Not so” and “Let’s contextualize the disaster.”

Book One develops the contextualization strategy. Thus, Augustine points out that the Gothic barbarians were uniquely solicitous of Christian sensibilities. Thus, in the general episode of pillaging and raping, they did not attack Christian churches or the people who took refuge in those churches. It seems that Augustine suggests that the Christian God held sway over uncouth barbarians.

Augustine does not mention that the uncouth barbarians were Christians. They were Arian Christians, to be sure, but Christians nonetheless, and they had worked with Catholic Christian emperors and been paid off by Catholic Christians for decades. It’s not really surprising that they respected Christian holy sites as Christians and as people who might want to work for the empire in the future. In fact, the mere three days of looting have the feel of a negotiated settlement. The Roman magistrates could not come up with enough gold to buy off the barbarians a third time, so the negotiations may have turned into how long the Goths would stay and what limits they would set on looting. If this deal were cut, it would not be the only such deal in history.

Augustine also offers a kind of pastoral perspective on the real atrocities of the sack: people really suffered; nuns were raped; Christians and pagans were tortured to reveal hidden wealth. Augustine argues that in the long run, Christians had lost nothing of value. Nuns did not lose their holiness or virginity in a spiritual sense because they had not consented to the rapes. The Christian population was shown that their true wealth was not in this world.

Concerning those killed by the Goths, Augustine says, “I know this: that no one has died who was not going to die at some point.”

This is true, if cold.

So, where is the pastoral comfort for Christians? The answer is in salvation. Augustine writes:

Death should not be thought an evil when a good life precedes it. For nothing makes death an evil except what follows death. Consequently, those who are inevitably going to die have little reason to worry about how they are going to die, and much reason to worry about where they will be brought by dying. And since Christians know very well how much better was the death of the devout poor man with dogs licking his sores than was that of the impious rich man clad in purple and fine linen,[36] what harm did those terrible kinds of death do to the dead who had lived well?

Eternal life is a constant theme of The City of God. In this chapter, Augustine relativizes horror, such as bodies that went unburied, as temporary and trivial compared to the great good of eternal life. Augustine observes: “If anything the enemy wished to do with the bodies of the slain could in any way obstruct the future life, the Truth would certainly not have said, Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul (Mt 10:28).” In later chapters, he will ask whether any religion other than Christianity ever offered eternal life.

This may seem like cold comfort, but hope is the quintessential Christian comfort. The truth that Christianity teaches is that if God suffered in the Incarnation, then everyone will suffer in this life. Suffering is a given, but it must have meaning because (a) God suffered and (b) there is a hope beyond the suffering. [2]

This pastoral counsel may seem unpersuasive to moderns, who seem to think that they will get through this life without suffering, but in a time when suffering was more apparent and endemic, it may have had greater appeal.

Another theme of The City of God is that the good and evil, Christians and pagans, are not differentiated with respect to temporal goods. Christians suffer and the bad flourish in this world. The sun rises and sets on the good and bad equally. In this world, the City of God and the City of Man are intermixed and confused. The difference between the two is in their fundamental orientation to God, which can change over the course of a lifetime. Thus, Christians should not expect to see a radical difference in temporal goods. Augustine writes:

The Intermingling of the Two Cities in this World 35. Let these be the answers — and others, if more fruitful and suitable ones can be found — that the redeemed family of the Lord Christ and the pilgrim city of Christ the king make to their enemies. Remember, however, that among those very enemies are hidden some who will become citizens, and do not think it fruitless to bear their enmity until they come to confess the faith. By the same token, so long as it is on pilgrimage in this world, the city of God has with it, joined to it by participation in the sacraments,[95] some from the number of its enemies who will not be with it in the eternal destiny of the saints. Some of these are hidden, some out in the open, and, along with its enemies, they do not hesitate to murmur against God, whose sacrament they bear.[96] At one moment, they fill the theaters along with our enemies; at the next, they fill the churches along with us. But we have no reason to despair of the correction of at least some of these, for even among our most open adversaries there lie hidden, still unknown even to themselves, some who are predestined to be friends. In this world, in fact, these two cities remain intermixed and intermingled with each other until they are finally separated at the last judgment.

This also seems to be a counsel of hope. When we see a bad person flourish, we can’t be sure that he won’t be turned toward God somewhere along the way. Likewise, when we see a Christian commit a crime, we might reflect that they were one of the secret enemies hidden among our number, and we might also pray that they will be redeemed and turned toward the City of God. In its way, there is a deep counsel of tolerance and patience in this worldview, viz, we should not expect utopia or dystopia; life is complicated; things are not what they seem.

In Books II through IV, Augustine says “not so” to the pagan critics. Augustine quite properly points out that Rome suffered a number of disasters under the pagan gods, including a burning by the Gauls long before the decline of ancient virtue:

But then, where was this crowd of divinities when, long before the decay of the ancient morality set in, Rome was taken and burned by the Gauls? Perhaps they were present but asleep? On that occasion, the whole city fell into the hands of the enemy. Only the Capitoline Hill remained, and it too would have been taken except that the geese, at least, stayed alert while the gods slept.[77] As a result, Rome very nearly fell into the superstition of the Egyptians, who worship animals and birds, for they celebrated an annual goose festival.

In this passage, Augustine gives an example of his strategy of using caustic wit against those who trust in the traditional pagan gods. [8] Thus, Rome wasn’t saved by gods, but by geese, and the Romans then turned to worshipping geese—or, at least, they held festivals of geese.

Silly Pagans.

Augustine also mines more recent Roman history in the mutual slaughters of Sulla and Marius, and the noble Romans of that period who died under proscription lists. He does not enter the more target-rich environment of the first century, perhaps because Christianity’s pagan critics were relying on national myths about Republican virtues as the basis of their attack on Christianity. Augustine’s strategy in Book II is a shock-and-awe campaign designed to reduce arguments about “Republican virtue” to rubble, so that he can clear the field to construct his argument for a Christian worldview.

I think one of the most piercing examples of Augustine’s caustic wit is the following:

The Natural “Justice and Goodness” of the Romans

17. Perhaps the reason why the divinities established no laws for the Roman people is that, as Sallust says, “justice and goodness prevailed among them not so much by laws as by nature”? [46] It was from this “justice and goodness,” I suppose, that the rape of the Sabine women came about.

There is nothing edifying about the foundation of Rome. The first Romans obtained a female population by violating the norms of civility, and “carrying off” the daughters of the Sabines. This is the seminal national myth, and Augustine lampoons it as the archetype of Roman virtue.[3]

Augustine seems to think that the core of the ancient Roman Republic/Empire was corruption and injustice. In Book II, Augustine writes:

True justice, however, exists only in the republic whose founder and ruler is Christ — if indeed we want to call this too a republic, since we cannot deny that it is the common good of a people. But if this use of the term, which is ordinarily employed in other contexts with other meanings, is too remote from our usual way of speaking, true justice certainly exists in the city of which Holy Scripture says, Glorious things are spoken of you, O city of God (Ps 87:3)

This point is paid off in Book IV when Augustine writes:

4. Remove justice, then, and what are kingdoms but large gangs of robbers? And what are gangs of robbers but small kingdoms? The gang, too, is a group of men ruled by a leader’s command. It is bound together by a pact of association, and its loot is divided according to an agreed law. If, by constantly adding desperate men, this scourge grows to such an extent that it acquires territory, establishes a home base, occupies cities, and subjugates peoples, it more openly assumes the name of kingdom, a name now publicly conferred on it due not to any reduction in greed but rather to the addition of impunity. For it was a witty and true response that a certain captured pirate made to the famous Alexander the Great. When the king asked the man what he meant by infesting the sea, he defiantly replied, “Just what you mean when you infest the whole world! But because I do it with one tiny ship, I am called a robber; and because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.” [10]

In sum, true justice can exist only in the City of God. The City of God is founded and ruled by Christ. We cannot expect to reside in the City of God before the return of Christ. Thus, we reside in a world that lacks true justice. Therefore, justice being absent, what are kingdoms but large gangs of robbers?

We don’t live in utopia. In this life, we are never going to live in utopia. In this life, we will always live in a fundamentally unjust world. We might hope to stave off the worst forms of injustice, but Christian prudence suggests that we ought not be unreasonable in our expectations. It is always a matter of choosing the “not as bad” rather than the “more bad.”

Book IV begins a full-frontal assault on Roman religion. Augustine focuses on what his contemporaries are most proud of, namely, the Roman Empire, and asks which God aided Rome's expansion. He points out that this is not easily answered because of the wild profusion of Roman gods who are given minute and granular jurisdictions:

8. Next let us ask, if you like, which god or which gods, from the whole throng that the Romans worshiped, they believe did the most to extend and preserve their empire.[21] For they obviously do not dare to ascribe any part in a work of such grandeur and so replete with nobility to Cloacina, or to Volupia, who gets her name from pleasure, or to Lubentina, whose name comes from lust, or to Vaticanus, who presides over the wails of infants, or to Cunina, who looks after their cradles.[22] But how can I possibly list the names of all their gods and goddesses in just one passage of this book? They themselves were hardly able to include them all in the huge volumes in which they marked out the specific responsibilities and individual areas of all their divinities. They did not think that responsibility for the land should be entrusted to just one god. Rather they assigned rural areas to the goddess Rusina and mountain ridges to the god Jugatinus, and they put the goddess Collatina in charge of hills and Vallonia in charge of valleys.[23]

But it gets worse!

I do not mention them all, for the whole business bores me, despite the fact that it does not make the Romans ashamed. The very few instances I have listed, however, should make it clear that they certainly do not venture to claim that these were the divinities that established, increased, and preserved the Roman empire. Each of these deities was so involved with his particular duties that nothing was assigned as a whole to any one of them. How, then, could Segetia care for the empire? She was not even allowed to take care of corn and trees at the same time. How could Cunina think about weaponry? Her oversight of infants was not permitted to go beyond their cradles. How could Nodutus help in war? He was not even concerned with the follicle of the ear, but only with the node of the stalk. Everyone appoints a single doorkeeper for his house, and, because the doorkeeper is a man, that is quite enough. But the Romans appointed three gods for the task: Forculus for the doors, Cardea for the hinges, and Limentinus for the threshold.[27] Forculus, no doubt, was simply incapable of guarding the hinges and threshold at the same time as the door!

What is true of these minor gods is true of the Olympian gods. Each had its own jurisdiction. If Jupiter was the beneficiary of Roman imperial success, did he intrude on the jurisdiction of Mars, Juno, or Poseidon? Since the gods could disagree, as shown in Homer, what if they worked at cross-purposes concerning Rome?

Eliminating jurisdictional issues by making all the gods avatars of Jupiter begged the question: why not worship the True God?

What about pantheism? God is the soul of the world; the world is the body of God. Augustine asks:

13. But if their argument is that only rational animals, such as human beings, are parts of God, I simply do not see how, if the whole world is God, they can fail to include the beasts among his parts. There is no need, however, to argue the point. Confining ourselves to rational animals alone, that is, to human beings, what could be more misguided than to believe that, when a child is spanked, a part of God is spanked? Could anyone in his right mind bear to believe that parts of God become lustful, wicked, irreligious, and wholly worthy of condemnation? And finally, why is God angry with people who do not worship him when it is his own parts that are not worshiping him?

The only possibility left open to them, therefore, is to say that all the gods have their own lives, that each one lives for himself, that no one of them is a part of any other, and that all the gods who can be known and worshiped ought to be worshiped (although there are so many that not all can be known). And because Jupiter presides over all these gods as king, I presume that they consider him to be the one who established and expanded the Roman empire. For, if Jupiter himself did not do this, what other god do they believe could have undertaken such a massive task? All the others, after all, would be occupied with their own specific tasks and responsibilities, and none of them would invade the sphere of any other. It is only by the king of the gods, therefore, that a human kingdom could be made to grow and expand.

Marcus Terentius Varro is introduced in Book IV for his twenty books that carefully delineate the jurisdictional boundaries of the gods. Augustine points out the utility of this book for Romans who did not want to waste a sacrifice on Cardea, goddess of hinges, when they were actually concerned with the door itself.

Book V seems to be a bit of a digression. Augustine argues that Roman fortune was not the result of chance or fate. For Augustine, “fate” means “the power of the stars.” This sets Augustine off on the project of disproving astrology by pointing out that twins born under the same stars can have wildly different lives.

Presumably, Augustine’s point is the Christian point that EVERYTHING happens as a result of God’s providence. NOTHING is outside of God’s control. Unlike the Roman gods, the True God does not have jurisdictional restrictions.[4]

However, this raises the problem: Is God responsible for the injustice and cruelty that he has just spent the last four books describing?

Augustine’s answer is to argue that God’s foreknowledge does not restrict human freedom. God knows what people will do. God causes the circumstances under which people will do certain things. However, the choice to do the evil (or good) thing is up to the person making the decision. Human choice might have reasons, but it does not have causes.

This is difficult stuff. It may not be ultimately convincing, but it should not be dismissed without a great deal of charitable consideration.

My glib statement that “Human choice…does not have causes” is technically wrong. All human choices have a final cause, a telos toward which they are intended. If you drink a beer, you drink it to (a) quench your thirst, (b) get drunk, (c) satisfy some other desire, or (d) some combination of those end goals. No human action is done without a final cause.

Humans get a choice of final causes. The same action of drinking a beer might be for the goal of quenching thirst or getting drunk (or both). The telos might or might not affect the observable action, but the telos is real if you believe that people are real, rather than automatons.

Augustine adds to this the qualification that it is the choice of telos – the final cause – that distinguishes between the residents of the City of God and the residents of the City of Man. Christians have their final cause focused on God. What they do, they do to arrive at the City of God. Everyone else has their final cause in something other than God, which ultimately means in finite lesser things, whether it be money, glory, demonic influence, or narcissism.

Hence, while God may have providentially ordered events to the creation of the Roman Empire, this does not mean that He was endorsing the citizens of Rome, who were not ordered to Him but to their own selfish ends, such as glory or wealth. Even the most noble acts, such as that of Marcus Regulus:

In order not to break the oath he had sworn to his ruthless enemies, Marcus Regulus returned to them from Rome. He did so because, as he is reported to have told the Romans when they urged him to stay, he could no longer have the standing of an honorable citizen after being a slave to the Africans. And, because he had spoken out against them in the senate, the Carthaginians put him to death with the most horrible tortures.[69] And if Regulus could do this, are there any tortures that should not be despised for the sake of keeping faith with the homeland to whose blessedness faith itself leads?

After spending four books proving the contrary, in Book V, Ch. 17, Augustine gives a litany of Roman exemplars of Roman virtue. His point is to shame Christians by asking why, if pagans could do this for their finite goods, Christians cannot measure up externally despite their goal, promise, and hope of infinite good. Christians should not disdain pagans; they should strive to be better than pagans.

Again, the theme is that the good and bad are intermingled in this life. Even behavior cannot be used to separate them. The only thing that separates the two are their telos.

Book V closes with an homage to Emperor Theodosius, who seems to explain what God may have had in mind in inspiring the Roman Empire to greatness:

Theodosius took more joy in being a member of the Church than in ruling the world. He ordered the destruction of pagan statues everywhere, for he knew full well that even earthly rewards do not lie in the power of demons but rather in the power of the true God. And what was more admirable than his devout humility when he punished the people of Thessalonica for their terrible crime? At the intercession of the bishops, he had at first promised that he would be lenient, but the uproar of certain persons close to him forced him to take vengeance on the people. But then, corrected by the discipline of the Church, he did penance with such deep humility that the people, as they prayed for him, felt more grief at seeing the imperial majesty lying prostrate than they felt fear of the imperial wrath against sin.

This is something that needs to be contemplated. The most powerful man in the entire world did something that no ruler had ever done before—and few, if any, have done since: Theodosius did public penance for exercising his prerogatives as a ruler. This speaks to Augustine’s point about telos. Arguably, Theodosius allowed himself to be humiliated for the sake of his final destiny, which implies that everything that Theodosius did was ordered to God. This was the source of Theodosius’s humility, something which few rulers can be accused of.

So, rather than being a diversion, Book V turns out to be the hinge of the first ten books.[5]

In Book VI, Varro returns. Varro (116–27 B.C.) was a Roman scholar whose lost work considered the sociology of Roman religion. Varro posited three kinds of religion: the “theology of the poets,” the “theology of the cities,” and the theology of the philosophers. The first was popular folklore, which found its way into poems and plays. Neither Varro nor Augustine had much time for this sort of religion, viewing the stories as scandalous.

The theology of the cities was more elevated. Varro proposed that the gods had originally been human beings who were honored by cities for heroic acts or virtuous lives and had somehow come to be regarded as divine.[6] Varro presumably found civil religion useful in giving cities a way to order themselves around common virtues.

The recurrent theme of Augustine in the rest of The City of God is the question, “Do they offer eternal life?” Clearly, the gods of the poets didn’t; they didn’t even pretend to make such an offer. The theology of the cities likewise made no such offer; jumped-up human beings were hardly in a position to make an offer of the infinite. As such, in Books VI and VII, the traditional Roman gods are discounted as valueless.

This would seem to leave open the question of what the Roman gods were. Varro said that they were human beings given exalted status by men. Augustine endorses this idea. For Augustine, the Roman gods were not God. They either didn’t exist or they were the masks appropriated by demons to defraud humans into giving them service and worship. Thus, the Roman gods may have been gods in a sense, in the same way that angels could be called god, and, eventually, the saved could be called gods, but they were, at best, demons.

In Book VIII, Augustine turns to philosophy. He initially discusses the development of philosophy up to Plato. Platonic philosophy becomes the model of comparison with Christianity for Augustine because Platonism came closest to Christianity in its understanding of God's nature and the eternity of the soul. Yet even Platonism falls short because, like pagan religions, it does not purport to offer eternal life with God.

Earlier, I had made the point that Augustine distinguished between the City of God and the Earthly City based on the telos of individual human beings. Why should this be determinative? Many today would argue that it should not be determinative because it does not seem fair or democratic. Augustine gestures at the anthropological basis for this view in the following passage from Book X:

And because he had implanted in us by nature the desire for blessedness and immortality, he, remaining blessed while he assumed mortality in order to grant us what we love, taught us by his suffering to despise what we fear.

God has implanted in natural man a natural desire for a supernatural end, which is God himself, who we know from Boethius, writing one hundred years later, is Blessedness, Happiness, and Felicity itself. Humans can achieve blessedness and immortality only in and through God, because God is blessedness and life. In Book V, Ch. 11, Augustine had written:

It is by participation in him that all are happy who are happy in truth and not in empty illusion.

In Book VIII, Ch. 1, he had lauded the Platonists:

They acknowledge, too, that it is this God who makes the rational and intellectual soul — and the human soul is of this kind — blessed by participation in his immutable and incorporeal light. Anyone with even the slightest grasp of these matters knows that these philosophers are called Platonists, a term derived from the name of their teacher Plato.[7]

But how is finite man supposed to “participate” in infinite God? The answer is, “by way of an intermediary who in Himself contains both the finite and the infinite.” Augustine explains in Book IX, Ch. 15:

It is not because he is the Word, however, that he is the mediator. For the Word, of course, is supremely immortal and supremely blessed and so is far removed from miserable mortals. He is the mediator, rather, due to the fact that he is man.[39] And by this very fact, he shows us that, in order to attain the good which is not only blessed in itself but also makes us blessed, we have no need to look for other mediators by whose aid, we might think, we must strive to reach it step by step. It is God who is blessed in himself and also makes us blessed, and, because he became a participant in our humanity, he provided a shortcut to participation in his divinity. For, in delivering us from mortality and misery, he does not lead us to the immortal and blessed angels in order that, by participating in them, we too may become immortal and blessed. Rather, he leads us directly to the Trinity, by participation in whom the angels themselves are blessed. That is why, when he willed to be lower than the angels,[40] in the form of a servant,[41] in order to be the mediator, he still remained higher than the angels in the form of God.[42] At one and the same time he was both the way of life here below and life itself in heaven above.[43]

How do we participate in Christ? By the sacraments. Augustine had written in Book I, Ch. 35:

By the same token, so long as it is on pilgrimage in this world, the city of God has with it, joined to it by participation in the sacraments,[95] some from the number of its enemies who will not be with it in the eternal destiny of the saints.

The Church was the Body of Christ, and humans were joined to the Church by the sacraments, although meeting this necessary condition was not sufficient for eternal salvation.

Augustine also describes the Incarnation as “the Sacrament”:

Christ: the True Mediator and the True Principle of Our Purification

But because Porphyry was in subjection to invidious powers — he was ashamed of them but too much in fear of them to speak openly against them — he was not willing to recognize that the Lord Christ is the principle by whose incarnation we are cleansed. In fact, he despised him on account of the flesh he assumed in order to become the sacrifice of our cleansing. It was due to his pride, then, that Porphyry did not recognize this great sacrament[113] — the very pride that the true and gracious mediator overthrew by his humility.

(Book IX, Ch. 24.)

And in Book X, Ch. 25:

Psalm 73 and the True Good

25. It was by faith in this sacrament[117] that the righteous of ancient times were able to be cleansed by living devoutly. This was true not only before the law was given to the Hebrew people — for even then they did not lack for a teacher, since they had both God and the angels — but also during the time of the law itself, despite the fact that in prefiguring spiritual things the law seemed to hold out carnal promises, which is why it is called the Old Testament. For at that time there were also prophets, by whom, as by angels, the same promise was proclaimed, and included in their number was the one whose great and divine saying about the supreme human good I cited a while ago, But for me the good is to cling to God (Ps 73:28).[118]

In both cases, the “sacrament” is the Incarnation; like other sacraments, the Incarnation is a visible, tangible reality that points to—or brings into physical contact with embodied men—an invisible, intangible grace.

So, we started with the sack of a symbolically important city and ended with the One True Thing. Perhaps the Gothic sack of Rome was a sacrament – it was a visible human event that pointed to a divine mystery.

Footnotes

[1] Admittedly, a “backwater” with 800,000 inhabitants.

[2] Augustine offers his rigorist teaching on suicide in Book One, i.e., suicide is not permitted. He condemns the pagan example. This is consistent with Augustine’s basic teaching that a Christian should have hope in eternal life, which relativizes the suffering of this world to something temporary and secondary.

[3] A critic might ask if the Bible doesn’t say similar things about the great men of the Jews, such as David and Jacob. Augustine’s response might have been two-fold: First, the sins of David were condemned as sins, and examples to repent; and Second, the advent of Christ changed everything; Christians were not Jews and Jewish history was not exactly Christian history tout court.

[4] Book V, Ch. 11:

From him come the seeds of forms, the forms of seeds, and the motion of both seeds and forms. He gave also to flesh its origin, its beauty, its health, its fruitfulness in propagation, the disposition of its limbs, and their apt and harmonious arrangement. He also gave memory, sensation, and appetite to the irrational soul; and to the rational soul, in addition, he gave mind, intelligence, and will. Neither heaven nor earth, neither angel nor human being, not even the inner organs of the smallest and lowliest animal, not even a bird’s feather or a tiny flower in the grass or a leaf on a tree, has he left without a harmony and, as it were, a kind of peace in the disposition of its parts.[30] And it is utterly beyond belief that he would have wished the kingdoms of men, their dominions and their enslavements, to fall outside the laws of his providence.

[5] Apologies to Cardea.

[6] This may be what Augustine had in mind when he mentioned the festival of the geese.

[7] “Participation” in the forms was a Platonic thing.

[8] The Literature and History podcast describes this strategy as an extended case of “whataboutism.” I recommend this podcast. It has some really great insights on The City of God. However, it is highly critical of Augustine and is frequently uncharitable. For example, the rhetorical strategy of pagan apologists was to hold up the “good old days” as the model to impeach the bad, new, Christian days. This made the pagans’ potted “national myth” fair game and extremely relevant to the discussion. As an analogy, if you are going to say your father could beat up my father, it is not “whataboutism” when I point out that your father got his ass whipped by an eighty-year-old grandmother in a mobility scooter last week.

People overuse the “whataboutism” trope.

Here is the script from the Literature and History podcast.

Robert Louis Wilken passed away on June 6, 2026 at the age of eighty-nine.

Wilken was one of my favorite historians. He had an elegant prose style and a gift for aphorism. I regularly plagiarize an observation he made to help me understand history, namely:

"Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy."

There is also this observation, which rights the ship of criticism against early Christianity:

"THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral ("be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a "reason for the hope that is in you," in the words of I Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history. For Christians, thinking is part of believing. Augustine wrote, "No one believes anything unless one first thought it believable.... Everything that is believed is believed after being preceded by thought.... Not everyone who thinks believes, since many think in order not to believe; but everyone who believes thinks, thinks in believing and believes in thinking."' From the beginning the church has nurtured a lively intellectual life.

Robert Louis Wilken. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Kindle Locations 23-28).

Wilken's "The Christians as the Romans Saw Them" is a slim and erudite book that introduces readers to the side of Christianity that is often overlooked (and should serve as a corrective to critics who think they invented their arguments).

Wilken showed how powerful reading and reflecting can be.

There is a popular myth that appeals to modern people. The myth is that up until quite recently, Christians were naïve, trusting, and unconcerned about the provenance of their religious doctrines. This myth fuels the regular announcement that the gospels were “anonymous” and that various letters of Paul were “forged.” These claims are announced as facts and are presented as the latest discovery from the world of scholarship.

Modern people like recent discoveries. We love thinking that we know things that no one else knows. The excitement of recent discoveries attracts viewers to videos like this one:

C.J. Cornthwaite describes himself in this way:

Clearly, Cornthwaite is a fundamentally confused person. He self-describes as a former Evangelical who is now an agnostic, but considers himself a Christian because his feelings and desire to remain in the Christian community trump the evidence that he rejects the core Christian claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

He lost his faith in the typical way, i.e., by exposure to 19^th-century German Liberal Theology (which he confuses with “scholarship”). He doesn’t seem to be aware that he has replaced his Christian beliefs with a belief system invented by German universities in the 19^th century.

He lost his faith in the usual way. He was let in on the secret that his sacred sola scriptura had not descended from Heaven as a pristine product of pure divine inspiration but had been subjected to the Sturm and Drang of historical circumstances. Because he lacked a theology of the church, he was unable to recognize the church as an agent of history, leaving his faith without an anchor.

Now he shares the things he learned in school with everyone who will listen. In this video, Cornthwaite explains that the Pastoral letters (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) are not reflected in any writing until the second century. The implication is that they are not Pauline, that they were forged, and, therefore, that Christianity is based on a lie.

Cornthwaite presents this as cutting-edge information, fresh from his Ph.D. program, that is being withheld from the people in the pulpits, except on his YouTube channel (and a few like it).

The problem is that it isn’t cutting-edge at all. The myth is false. Christians have been interested in the authenticity of Christian texts from the very beginning. This isn’t surprising, since the educated class in the ancient world knew that forgeries were common and sought to distinguish authentic material from false. Christians inherited the techniques used to sort out forgeries from the authentic writings of Homer and Hippocrates and turned them against the forgeries of heretics to determine what counted as authentic Christian writings.

1. Executive Summary

Robert McQueen Grant (November 25, 1917 – June 10, 2014) has been described as “one of the most influential historians of early Christianity in the 20th century.” Grant taught from 1944 to 1988, including at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He wrote over thirty books and many articles. He was remembered by colleagues as combining a range of interests, clarity of prose, and precision in historical facts.

The characteristics of range and clarity are demonstrated in this book. Grant takes the reader through the first centuries of Christian history, from Homer to Marcion to Galen to Origin. Grant’s thesis is that the ancient world knew that there were many forgeries pretending to be the writings of great poets and philosophers. The educated class developed techniques to sort out the forgeries. Upon the advent of Christianity, heretics initially used these techniques to attack Christian writers. After suffering this attack, Christians began using the same technique to prove that the heretical texts were forgeries and that Christian texts weren’t.

This is a fascinating book. I’ve read it twice, and the overturning of the conventional trope that early Christians were naïve stuck with me. Grant’s prose is clear, and his knowledge is encyclopedic. His casual observations are memorable. The topic and writing are scholarly, but these days, when Bart Ehrman’s “Forgery” is a best seller, there should be an interest in the other side.

2. Authenticity and Heresy in Early Christianity

Grant begins by observing that the Christian tradition began with the Gospel, i.e., the reports of Jesus' words and deeds. This made the struggle over the contents of such reports ground zero for Christianity. After Christians began putting these reports in writing, heretics began producing their own writings to support their preferred understanding of the Gospel. These writings were often attributed to the early leaders of the Christian movement.

The authenticity of the texts ascribed to Christian figures became “a matter of practical concern before the first century was over.” (p. 4) Canonical Christian texts repeatedly warn against forgeries.

Literary heresies particularly flourished in Rome in the second century. Rome was the home to Gnostics, like Valentinus, and other heretics, such as Marcion. These heretics were adept at altering Christian texts to suit their mythologies. They also forged completely new texts to the same end. Gnostics “employed current methods of literary criticism in their venture” (p. 7). “They raised questions about the text, the authorship, and the meaning of biblical books because they wanted to get rid of unattractive doctrines.”[1]

The questions raised by the heretics forced the Catholic Church to compile lists of accepted books and to share the traditions associated with them.[2] Grant discusses Papias of Hierapolis in Phrygia, who, in the late first century or early in the second century, wrote a “widely read” book entitled Exegesis of the Dominical Oracles that described his memories about the traditions on the writing of the gospels. Papias explained that the Gospel of Mark had been written by a disciple of Peter,[3] while Matthew had been written in Hebrew before Mark.[4]

Papias’ description of Mark was corroborated by Justin Martyr in the mid-second century. Also in the second century, Dionysius of Corinth, around 160 A.D., condemned interpolations of his own letters during his lifetime.

3. Literary Criticism in Early Christian Times

In his second chapter, Grant discusses the practice of literary criticism in antiquity. Literary criticism was a weaponized art in an environment where forgery was common. By the first century, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were supplemented by dozens of other works ascribed to Homer. There were also debates about whether Hesiod or Homer came first, which books had been written by Pythagoras, which books of Aristotle were authentic, and which books of Hippocrates were written by Hippocrates.

In this environment, the ancients developed a “critical method” based on the “methods of refutation and confirmation taught in the schools of rhetoric.” (p. 30.) Refutation involved showing that a text was unconvincing, contradictory, unsuitable, impossible, or inconsistent. (p. 31.) In essence, this approach involved critically reading the text to determine whether it was fiction, accurate, anachronous, etc.

Grant ends the chapter with the question of whether there was a pagan canon. His answer is negative. Pagans did not compile lists of authentic texts the way Christians did. The Christian canon was formal and authoritative. Grant closes by making a key observation:

The question of authenticity (“apostolicity”) was involved, but the primary basis for acceptance or rejection was conformity with Christian doctrine, not authenticity.

In other words, texts were accepted as canonical because they fit the tradition. This is something that modern critics do not understand because (a) they don’t think there is a tradition (insofar as they reject the tradition) and (b) their formative position was sola scriptura as if the scriptures preceded the tradition.

4. Marcion’s Criticism of Gospel and Apostle

In Grant’s narrative, the second-century Roman heretic, Marcion of Sinope, plays a seminal role. Grant follows Harnack’s analysis of Marcion’s theology. Grant indicates that Marcion came from a long-established church–the church in Pontus had been addressed by 1 Peter – and that Marcion was presumably “led to separate the gospel from the Jewish Bible” because of the “violent struggle between Roman troops and Jewish nationalists” in 132 AD. (p. 34.)

Grant’s presentation of Marcion’s theology accepts the premise that Marcion altered Luke’s gospel, although he argues that Marcion would not have known Luke as “Luke”; he would have known it as “To Theophilus I and II, although Marcion had no use for Acts. (p. 34.) Marcion’s writing was influenced by contemporary Roman scholarship by which scholars were “zealously deconstructing the philosophies that supposedly underlay Greek poetry” to demythologize the poems and show that all gods were originally human. (p. 34-35.)[5]

Grant does a far better job of showing, from Tertullian, the way Marcion interpolated Luke than David Litwa did. Nonetheless, after demonstrating the reconstruction, Grant notes that there was a “remarkable variety” within Marcionite texts which resulted in a “high level of uncertainty about what Marcion wrote.” (p. 62.)

Grant discusses whether Marcion had a version of “proto-Luke.” He was skeptical:

But whereas one can imagine how he moved from his own Paul to his own Gospel, it is much harder to see how could have gone from primitive Luke as his source to his ideal Paul. There is hardly anything in this Gospel that could start his theological quest, unless the words “Christ Jesus a saving spirit” really comes from the beginning of the book and are not a theological interpretation of 1 Corinthian 115:45. (P. 44.)[6]

Concerning the issue of whether Marcion interpolated Luke, Grant concludes:

It has become conventional for modern scholars to reject the unanimous consensus of early patristic writers that Marcion edited the Gospel of Luke. One wonders how such certainty could have arisen. Both the Fathers and Marcion himself lived in the world of Greco-Roman literary scholarship, and there is nothing irrational about either the editorial process or the patristic claim.” (p. 46.)

Grant wrote this book in 1993. There have been no advances in either the available documents or the “science” of literary criticism that justify this change in scholarly opinion. The only thing that has changed is the culture, which has cultivated a taste for deconstructing anything orthodox.

5. The Hidden Agenda of Ptolemaeus

Ptolemaeus was the disciple of the second-century Gnostic Valentinus. Valentinus wrote “The Letter to Flora,” which is a specimen of Gnostic theology. Grant suggests that “sister Flora” may have been the whole Roman church, rather than a person.

Gnostics operated at the extreme edge of allegorization rather than the critical method. Gnostics would give orthodox texts meanings unrelated to their literal meaning.[7]

Apart from how they presented their theologies, Gnostics and Marcionites inhabited much of the same doctrinal space. Ptolemaeus proposed that the Jewish law came from the Jewish Creator God, aka the Demiurge. Both Gnostics and Marcion argued that references to the Mosaic law had been interpolated into Paul’s letters and the gospels. (p. 51.)

Grant concludes this chapter by observing that by the middle of the first century, “literary criticism among Christians had reached a stalemate.” (p. 58.) Marcion had failed to convince Catholic leaders that he could prove that Jewish elements had been added to Christian texts, and the Gnostics’ “exegesis was correlated with his ingenious theology.” (Id.) What they did was to force Christians to pay attention to the smallest details of their texts.

6. Galen’s Literary and Logical Criticism

Galen is famous as an ancient medical doctor, but he was also a literary critic. The two were related, since Galen’s avocation was to separate the many spurious books ascribed to Hippocrates from his genuine works. Galen was active in the second half of the second century, which made him roughly contemporaneous with Irenaeus. Galen “moved in high society” but knew Christians. Galen served Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was protecting Christians of senatorial rank.

That deserves a moment of reflection - In about one hundred years, the obscure Jewish sect had penetrated the top levels of Roman society.

Grant writes that Galen and his critical method “exercised strong influence on the Jewish Christian heretics who were concerned with logic, biblical criticism, and theology.” (p. 60.) These heretics were Adoptionists (i.e., Christians who believed that Jesus was only a human being until he was “adopted” by the JCG as his “son.”)

Galen influenced Adoptionist heretics with his use of logical proofs. The logical proofs involved phrasing claims as “conditional propositions (i.e., if, then) or disjunctions (either/or). (p. 67.) Adoptionists would use these logical techniques to criticize the orthodox position. They would then correct manuscripts that contained the illogical claims. Then, like Marcion, they would claim that their corrected texts reflected the original text that had been corrupted by the Catholics.[8]

7. The Syllogistic Exegesis of Appelles

Appelles was a disciple of Marcion. In the last half of the second century, Appelles departed from Rome and Marcionism, although he kept many of Marcion’s doctrines.

Appelles’ approach was to take Galen’s logical criticism and apply it to Christian scriptures in his “Syllogisms.”[9] Among other things, Appelles showed that Moses was inconsistent and self-contradictory, which is a form of “refutation.” (p. 79.) Origen responded to Appelles in the third century, which suggests that Appelles’ arguments were still bothering Christians for decades after he died.

Appelles’ arguments provoked sustained debates on a variety of quotidian biblical controversies, such as the size of Noah’s Ark. This brought discussions about the Trojan Horse into play. Clement of Alexandria opined that the Trojan Horse was a metaphor: “mankind embraces in one body an army of different spirits.” (p. 86.)

We don’t often think of Christian bishops debating Homer, but why wouldn’t they? They were part of Roman culture, and this was the coin of public discourse.

8. The Orthodox Counterattack

According to Grant, from the second century onward, canon, authorship, and exegesis were topics of discussion for heretics and orthodox alike. By 181 A.D., Christians, such as Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, were using their opponents' critical weapons. Various techniques were used to defend orthodox doctrines. These techniques included allegorization of problematic passages and demonstrating that Christian texts were consistent with Christian doctrine.

The “Orthodox Counterattack” included figures like Irenaeus, Origen, and Jerome. These figures were prompted by Marcion and the Gnostics to engage in an intensive study of scripture. (p. 93.)

Ultimately, heretical doctrines were far more exposed to refutation. Heretical doctrines could be shown to be inconsistent and illogical. They could also be shown to be later than orthodox texts.[10]

9. Conclusion

By the fourth century, the tools of literary criticism were being used by Christian bishops. Grant observes:

Christians were no longer willing to accept documents uncritically just because they were said to be ancient or even orthodox. Indeed, such a period of simple acceptance, if it really existed did not last long.

I haven’t answered Cornthwaite’s concerns about the authenticity of the Pastoral letters except on a meta level. The answer is that orthodox Christians have been listening to and responding to literary criticism of their texts from the beginning. The Pastoral Letters were part of this process. Cornthwaite may know the arguments against the Pauline provenance of those letters, but I doubt that he knows the Christian response. Based on history, I am sure that there is such a response. Until that response is known, conclusive judgment is not possible.

I admit that the Christian response may not prove persuasive for anyone trained in 19^th-century German liberal textual criticism, which starts with the presumption against the supernatural. As a matter of history, we might find the Christian arguments to be weak. However, the Christian argument involves a supernatural dimension. As a Catholic, I believe that the supernatural dimension involves the Body of Christ and the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the Pastoral letters are not authentically Pauline. If so, so what? If the Holy Spirit communicates that Pastoral letters are inspired, then that is determinative.

Whether that is the case is not something that a college degree can qualify someone as an expert.

Footnotes:

[1] This objective seems not to have changed. 21^st-century critics are also motivated by a desire to change doctrines. See, for example, David Litwa’s Marcion.

[2] This seems to be a recurrent theme in Christian history, namely, heretics would challenge something that had become accepted sotto voce as a tradition. Only after the challenge would the Catholic Church be roused to make an explicit definition of something that had previously been implicit.

[3] Grant suggests that perhaps Papias’s source knew 1 Peter 5:13 (“13 She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, sends you her greetings, and so does my son Mark”), which, if true, would authenticate 1 Peter as an early source. Also, I wonder why more hasn’t been made of the statement that Mark is Peter’s “son.”

[4] The accuracy of Papias’s recollections is questioned. Matthew contains Mark, which implies that Mark came first, and there are reasons to believe that Matthew was written in Greek. Nonetheless, Papias is an early witness to the existence of gospels bearing the names of Mark and Matthew

[5] This sounds modern, but it shows how long this approach has been around. Augustine’s City of God interacts with Varro, who had the same idea.

[6] Litwa’s reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel corroborates this insight. Litwa’s reconstruction ends up with a Marcionite church that looks like one that a Woke Christian might belong to. It is hard to see from Marcion’s anodyne and essentially watered-down Gospel how anyone would jump to a hidden God behind God.

[7] For example, the thirty Aeon’s are to be found in the first thirty years of Jesus’s life and raising of the 12-year-old Tabitha by Jesus is really an account of the 12^th Aeon.

[8] This approach is also used by Muslims and Mormons with respect to the Christian Bible.

[9] Eusebius gives an account of a Christian named Rhodo’s conversation with Appelles about Appelles’ inability to explain how his mystery God could be the one, uncreated God. Rhodo was a disciple of Tatian, who was a disciple of Justin Martyr. Grant points out that Tatian, the author of the Diatessaron (the compilation f a single gospel from the four gospels) became a heretic.

[10] Tertullian bases one of his arguments against Marcion on the priority of the Gospel of Luke to that of Marcion’s unnamed Gospel.

David Litwa’s aim in this book is to rehabilitate the image of the second-century heretic, Marcion of Sinope. He thinks that Marcion’s true theological insights have been misunderstood, particularly by the famous early twentieth-century historian Adolph von Harnack. The subtitle of his book is an homage to Harnack. Thus, while Harnack’s subtitle was “The Gospel of an Alien God,” Litwa’s is “The Gospel of a Wholly Good God.” For Harnack, this “Good God” was absolutely “other”; for Litwa, Marcion’s deity was entirely good, particularly compared to the deity worshipped by the Jews.[1]

1. Harnack’s Absolutely Alien God

For Harnack, “alien” meant that Marcion’s deity, the “Good God” (“GG”), had absolutely no connection to the created world. The GG had not created anything in the world, including human beings, and therefore owed nothing to human beings. Nonetheless, because of its radical goodness, the GG had condescended to send Jesus as a full-grown adult to exercise radical grace in offering salvation to human beings to whom it owed absolutely nothing. The essential alienness of the GG meant that nothing in the Jewish bible applied to the GG. The prophecies and promises had nothing to do with the GG, which meant that the Jewish scriptures were jetsam that could be tossed off the Christian ship.

In contrast, for Harnack, the Jewish Creator God (“JCG”) was mercurial, vengeful, vain, a creator of evil, and without mercy.

2. Litwa’s Not So Alien God

For Litwa, Marcion’s GG is not entirely alien. The GG is the real god of all creation with all the properties of divinity. The JCG is not God. The JCG is a lesser divine being who was given the power to create by the GG, much as certain strands of Judaism theorized that their god had given angels the task of creation. In exercising this function, the JCG was unwittingly acting as a subordinate agent of the GG. Thus, for Litwa, the GG was the ultimate creator of the material world. As a result, although created through a “cut-out,” Creation was not entirely alien from the GG.

Also, for Litwa, Marcion was not anti-Jewish. His goal was to leave Jewish texts to the Jews. Marcion was against “cultural appropriation” before it was cool.

Litwa’s Marcion did not compel his followers to be celibate or vegetarian. If they sought to be baptized, then they had to give up sexual relations, but the unbaptized could remain in church during Marcionite Eucharistic rites. Women were involved in rites, including baptism, which made the Marcionite church less hierarchical than the Catholic church. Marcionites were “more ethically rigorous than their catholic counterparts.” (p. 220) Litwa denies that Marcion’s Jesus was “docetic.” i.e., a kind of hologram, rather than a flesh-and-blood human being. Litwa also rejects the claims that Marcion despised the JCG or the Jewish scriptures altogether.

In sum, for Litwa, Marcion's theology was more humane, less rigorous, and more reasonable than earlier historians would allow.

3. The Fiduciary Relationship between Author and Reader

Of course, characterizations like “reasonable” are relative to culture. Harnack spent fifty years reading Marcion and discovered a proto-Reformer who anticipated Luther. Litwa studies Marcion and uncovers a figure who might be a proto-liberal Protestant, and who had ideas that would enrich Christianity if adopted today.

How should we assess these claims? Ultimately, we have to trust Litwa.

Can we?

There’s the rub. Litwa’s analysis might be absolutely correct. The second century is a black box. We don’t have anything written by Marcion. We have writings by his opponents. Although Justin Martyr was a contemporary of Marcion and might have met him, most of these writings are not contemporaneous with Marcion. For example, Tertullian wrote his “Against Marcion” (“AM”) around forty to fifty years after Marcion. Similarly, Irenaeus’s writings on Marcion were about twenty to thirty years after Marcion established his church. Justin Martyr and Irenaeus lived in Rome, but Tertullian lived in Carthage. Thus, the connections with Marcion are not close as a matter of journalism, but they are surprisingly close as historical records. For Tertullian and Irenaeus, Marcion’s Roman period was the equivalent of the Reagan-Clinton era for us in the late 2020s. Nonetheless, these men were opponents of Marcion for a reason, and their information is second-hand.

Can they be trusted?

Litwa is a trained scholar. He has a Ph. D in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a Th. M. from Duke. He has written many books on early Christianity. His work focuses on early Christian heresies. His opinions carry prima facie authority.

But what do I care about credentials? I am a trial attorney. I regularly cross-examine expert witnesses with credentials. In civil litigation, both sides hire people with doctorates and other scholarly credentials to offer opinions in their subject areas. I know that the opinions of witnesses are no better than the facts and logic that support them. No expert opinion is beyond questioning. All expert opinions must be tested by the adversarial process.

The first question we should ask is whether Litwa is a disinterested scholar or whether he has a bias that affects the objectivity of his opinion. Obviously, everyone has biases. For example, every expert I’ve cross-examined is being paid, and all experts have a sense of ownership and pride about their opinions. In themselves, these quotidian biases are no reason to discount an expert’s opinion. Frankly, no jury has ever disregarded an expert’s opinion for those reasons alone.

However, experts who are in the tank for one side are awful witnesses. I regularly destroy such witnesses for two related reasons. First, the opinions of such witnesses are usually given without regard to the facts of the case. This means they cherry-pick facts that support partisan positions. Consequently, they can be easily impeached by facts their analysis disregarded. Second, because they are forcing an opinion on recalcitrant facts, their reasoning can break down as they engage in special pleading or depart from the laws of logic. When juries see this, they often conclude that the opinion can’t be trusted.

4. The poison in the tail: Litwa’s Theological Reform Agenda.

So, how does Litwa do?

Not well.

We should first start with the end of Litwa’s book. In his conclusion, Litwa tells the reader that Harnack got something right, namely, the idea of redacting the problematic portions of the Old Testament from the Christian canon. Litwa writes:

Having refused to defend scripturalized violence, one must find a better way to approach it. Harnack found such a way, and he is often quoted—not without a faint gasp of horror and contempt:

To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the Church rightly repudiated; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation could not yet avoid; but to continue to keep it in Protestantism as a canonical document after the nineteenth century is the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis.48

Harnack clarified that it is not about rejecting the “Old” Testament plain and simple, but about removing it from the Christian canon. The “Old” Testament, he said, “will only be appreciated and valued everywhere for its distinctiveness and importance (the prophets), first when canonical authority, which does not belong to it, is removed.”

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (pp. 245-246).

Why should Christians do this now? Litwa’s answer: Because Old Testament texts encourage violence:[2]

It’s high time to stop defending biblical “texts of terror.”46 This includes the strategy of deeming violent Scriptures useful because they “raise awareness.” Violent biblical texts do not usually invite violent people to reevaluate their violent behavior.47 Violent people read Scripture like all other people—with their cognitive biases. They do not stop to peruse a scholarly handbook on how to read nonviolently. Rather, they underscore the violence because it reinforces their authoritarian predisposition. Violence is valorized in Scripture. The towering authority of the Bible means that, practically speaking, most of its main audience (devout Christians) will not read it with the tools of ideological criticism.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 245).

Litwa offers a recent example of what he is talking about. He writes:

Christians have used the Bible to justify colonialism, the crusades, slavery, the displacement and murder of first peoples in Australia and America—the list goes on. In late 2023, “destroy Amalek” has been used in a war with horrific collateral damage inflicted on civilians in Gaza.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 246).

Let’s pause a moment. Amalek? 2023? Gaza?

Who is he talking about?

Why, it’s the Jews, the followers of the JCG, and readers of the Jewish canon.

Incredibly, Litwa argues that Christians should alter their canon because Jews are citing their scriptures in ways that Litwa considers improper. How is that supposed to work? Why is the rhetoric used by some Jews after the rape and murder of civilians by Gazans evidence that supports a reformation of the Christian canon?

Of course, it does not. This is what I meant by “reasoning breaks down.”

But Litwa is not limiting redaction to the Old Testament. He writes:

Decanonization need not be done with an axe, but with a scalpel. Not everything needs to go, because not everything is theologically unredeemable. Entire books need not be omitted, only passages and verses from both Testaments. To agree on what to remove, Christians of all denominations (and none) would have to come together to do very hard, soul-searching work. And of course, they would not agree, and different Bibles would be produced. But different Bibles are already being produced and have been for centuries.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 248).

Litwa justifies this as follows:

When it comes to revising the canon, there is the problem of inertia, but also lack of courage. It should be remembered, however, that God spoke Scripture, not canon. God never said: “this book is in the canon, and this one isn’t.” Canon lists are entirely human products, representing an ancient—but never complete—consensus about what churches took to be scriptural. Accordingly, the canon can always be revised. If a purge was done in the sixteenth century, it can be done today. Most publishers are not afraid to add things to the Bible, such as introductions, blurbs, pastoral admonitions, and study tools. During the 2024 presidential campaign, former President Trump sold a Bible that adds the US Constitution and the words to the song, “God Bless the USA.” If parts can be added, they can also be removed.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (pp. 248-249).

But notice that in the prior paragraph, he was talking about taking a “scalpel” to “texts and verses” of the New Testament. So, aren’t those scriptures that “God spoke.” And what is this deal about “former President Trump”? Are we supposed to think that this is support for a theological position, or is it, perhaps, a gratuitous political swipe like the bit about Israeli’s saying “Death to Amalek”? [3]

To summarize, we have Litwa telling us that (a) Harnack was wrong about Marcion but was right about redacting scripure; (b) the Christian canon should be redacted to protect Christians from misusing their scripture because of its putative misuse by non-Christians; (c) canon is malleable, scriptures are “God spoke,” but both should be edited to promote a theological position; and (d) Marcion had nothing against the Jews but Jews subscribe to a violent theology.

In a nutshell, these positions are inconsistent. The only consistent “through-line” is that Christianity needs to “reform” by redacting its canon. [4]

5. Broken Trust

There is a fiduciary relationship between author and reader. The reader grants the author a provisional space of trust, relying on the author as an authority to fill the reader’s mind with credible information. No reader wants this trust to be abused, which tangibly means being defrauded of time, money, and mental space.

The author’s credibility is the foundation of the author-reader relationship. Like an expert witness, if the author ruins his credibility by making silly or incredible arguments in one place, a critical reader may reasonably conclude that the author cannot be trusted at all.

I have been discussing Litwa’s conclusions. By the time a reader gets to the conclusion, the author should have demonstrated his bona fides such that he can sell the conclusion. If the sales pitch has been shaky, the conclusion may be “no sale.” Alternatively, if the buildup is followed by a weak conclusion, the reader might rethink the sales pitch from the start.

I am afraid that Litwa did not make the sale to me long before the conclusion. I am an inveterate checker of footnotes. I recently read Tertullian’s Against Marcion. I kept track of Litwa’s inconsistent positions. Because I saw him engaging in various intellectual sleights of hand, I was skeptical before I reached his reform proposal. [11]

6. Questionable Starting Point

Litwa basis his portrait of Marcion as a prototype of a liberal Protestant on one key axiom. He writes:

These six d’s are demolished by one single rule—a rule as simple as it is underused—that Marcion’s beliefs are defined by the touchstone of his Scriptures.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (pp. 4-5) (Emphais added.)

In short, if Litwa can find some position written in Marcion’s canonical text, i.e. his variant and unknown version of Luke, ten of Paul’s letters, and the antithesis, then Litwa will conclude that those words state Marcion’s theology. Another way of stating this idea is that Litwa’s axiom is that Marcion’s theology is identical to the text of Marcion’s canonical books.

Is this a realistic assumption? Is it what we see people do? Do we ever see people have text that is superfluous to or contradicts their theology?

For example, all Protestants have a bible that includes the Gospel of John. John 20:22-23 says:

22 And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

Guided by Litwa’s Axiom, we should conclude that Protestant theology includes the doctrine of sacramental confession to a priest.

Unfortunately, if you are Catholic, this is nonsense. I have pointed out the language of “not forgiven” (or “retained”) to a lot of Protestants, and not one of them has agreed to accept the doctrine of sacramental confession to a priest.

Likewise, John 6 says:

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

Litwa’s Axiom instructs us to conclude that Protestants believe in transubstantiation.

Of course, virtually all do not, and they are quite happy to explain why not.

People are quite capable of subordinating texts to theology through a variety of techniques, ranging from adopting variant interpretations of the language of the Scriptures to simply ignoring “difficult scriptures.” In general, the words of a text tell us nothing. We need to know how the words were used.[5] For Marcion, the best evidence of how the words were used by Marcion and Marcionites is found in Tertullian, but Litwa adamantly and explicitly discounts what Tertullian tells us about how Marcion used the words of scripture by referring to putative “words” of Marcion’s canon, which means, of course, Litwa is substituting his interpretation of those words for what Tertullian explains Marcionites meant by those words.

Did Marcion use interpretative techniques to give the words of Luke and Paul a Marcionite spin? We know that Gnostics used such techniques to give the words of catholic texts a Gnostic meaning. Litwa cites Robert M. Grant’s “Heresy and Criticism.” On the first page of the preface of that book, Grant writes, “Others took Christian texts more or less as they stood and drastically reinterpreted them in the light of their own theologies” (p. ix). Grant points out that the letter of Second Peter complained about heretics “twisting” Paul’s words. (Id. at 4).

Are we supposed to assume that Marcion didn’t do this?

Why?

Litwa doesn’t explain.

In fact, Tertullian gives an example of such Marcionite reinterpretation of catholic texts:

The remarks I have advanced on this case will be also of use to me in illustrating the subsequent parable of the rich man tormented in hell, and the poor man resting in Abraham’s bosom. For this passage, so far as its letter goes, comes before us abruptly; but if we regard its sense and purport, it naturally fits in with the mention of John wickedly slain, and of Herod, who had been condemned by him for his impious marriage. It sets forth in bold outline the end of both of them, the “torments” of Herod and the “comfort” of John, that even now Herod might hear that warning: “They have there Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.” Marcion, however, violently turns the passage to another end, and decides that both the torment and the comfort are retributions of the Creator reserved in the next life for those who have obeyed the law and the prophets; whilst he defines the heavenly bosom and harbour to belong to Christ and his own god. Our answer to this is, that the Scripture itself which dazzles his sight expressly distinguishes between Abraham’s bosom, where the poor man dwells, and the infernal place of torment.

Tertullian, Quintus. Against Marcion

In another passage, Tertullian points out the techniques used by Marcionites with respect to the issue of whether Jesus was born:

We now come to the most strenuously-plied argument of all those who call in question the Lord’s nativity. They say that He testifies Himself to His not having been born, when He asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren?” In this manner heretics either wrest plain and simple words to any sense they choose by their conjectures, or else they violently resolve by a literal interpretation words which imply a conditional sense and are incapable of a simple solution, as in this passage.

Tertullian, Quintus. Against Marcion.

The Litwa Axiom demands that we conclude that Marcion accepted that Jesus was born, based on passages in two of the Pauline epistles accepted by Litwa that imply as much. [6] However, Tertullian says that Marcionites used Luke's words to support a radically different theology. Gnostics did the same thing. Are we supposed to believe that Marcion was better than the Gnostics when it came to interpreting scriptures?

Further, Tertullian is pointing to something he knows outside of the words of the text in Marcion’s canon. Tertullian explains how Marcionites interpreted the text. An interpretation of a text is not identical to a text. Texts can be susceptible to different understandings, and we don’t learn what understanding a particular person has until they tell us. This requires communication outside the disputed text. Tertullian is implying that he had such communications. Maybe he spoke to Marcionites in North Africa or got a letter from someone about Marcionite beliefs. Whatever the source is, are we to dismiss Tertullian’s evidence because it is not explicitly stated in the words of Marcion’s “Scriptures”? Obviously not, since that is what the debate is about.

Based on his axiom, Litwa a priori rejects Tertullian’s testimony simply because of two alleged verses of Marcion’s alleged scriptures.

7. Sola Scriptura or Tradition?

In a certain way, Marcion was a proto-Protestant with respect to using his canon as a way of outflanking tradition. During Marcion’s time, the Christian tradition held that the leadership of the Catholic Church was a succession from the apostles and that the traditions handed down from the apostles through their successors were normative. There is a trope that, at this point in Christian history, doctrines were not defined. This argument overstates the extent of the free market of ideas in early Christianity. After all, doctrines were sufficiently well defined to kick Marcion out of the Church, a fact that no one denies.

Marcion’s counterstrategy was to use Paul against apostolic succession. Paul could be used as a model of opposition to the apostles. Unlike the apostles who had been with Jesus during His lifetime, notably Peter, who had connections with Antioch, Rome, and Alexandria, Paul had received a separate revelation from Christ. Paul’s charisma had a different source from that of the other apostles. If the apostolic succession that the Catholic Church touted as the basis of its authority could be separated from Paul's, then Marcion might be able to claim a different, superior source of authority for his message.

Marcion’s formation of his canon may have had the same goal. The written canon de-emphasized non-written tradition, arguably, the same kind of tradition that had resulted in Marcion’s removal from the Church. Likewise, as Luther would discover 1500 years later, it is easier to control text than tradition. Marcion could remove texts that disagreed with his theology in the same way and for the same reason that Luther removed the Deuterocanon (which precedent, in turn, subsequently became an inspiration for Harnack and Litwa’s view of how Christianity could be “reformed.” )

Harnack recognized that Marcion was engaged in a kind of sola scriptura theology. For his part, Litwa’s approach is explicitly that of sola scriptura. After affirming his axiom, Litwa writes:

Of course the testimony of Marcion’s enemies remains data, but it is secondary. It has always been secondary. The heresiologists don’t have the final say, and when they contradict Marcion’s Scriptures, the Scriptures prevail. The goal here is to stop representing heresiological rhetoric and speculation about Marcion as the truth of history.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 5).

So, “heresiologists” – meaning historical sources like Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Origen – don’t get the “final say.” This is a red-herring since no one has ever suggested that historical sources be slavishly followed when the balance of evidence contradicts them.

More importantly, Litwa states a further axiom, namely, when the testimony of the people who were there contradicts Marcion’s Scripture, the Scriptures prevail.”

Notice the capital “S” for “the Scripture”?

It is harder to get a clearer formulation of sola scriptura than that.

Litwa’s Marcion is supposed to be a book of history, not theology. A historical analysis involves weighing all of the evidence about what people actually did as a clue to what they were actually thinking. The premise that “Scripture” (with a capital “S”) prevails over Tradition is a theological doctrine, and one that we don’t know that Marcion adhered to with the same full-throated zeal of 16^th-century Protestants.

This sola scriptura presupposition explains both Litwa’s axiom that Marcion’s believed what Litwa can find in the text and Litwa’s decision to ignore Tertullian’s testimony about what Marcionites believed. Under a sola scriptura framework, the written text always trumps mere tradition and oral evidence.

Whether this is arguable theology is an open question. However, it is fundamentally bad history. Tertullian lived at a time when there were real Marcionites. He lived within 20 to 50 years of Marcion’s establishment of his church. Presumably, the beliefs of Marcion’s church at such a close date reflect Marcion’s teachings. Writing Tertullian’s testimony off as “inferences and leaps of logic” (See Litwa, Marcion’s Bible) is illogical.

8. Cantilevered Speculation

The next problem with the Litwa Axiom is that it requires that we have the text of Marcion’s canon, and we don’t. Litwa admits that there are no surviving copies of any Marcionite text.[7]

His workaround is to rely on a text reconstituted from the writings of Marcion’s opponents, chiefly, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and Adiamantus. Litwa tells us that Adiamantus cannot be trusted, although he is useful in confirming things we learn from the other two. Tertullian provides the most comprehensive and detailed account of Marcion’s texts.

I’ve read Tertullian, and while it may be possible to extract a reasonable amount of Marcion from Against Marcion, it is clear that such a project would require a lot of guesswork since Tertullian is silent on a substantial portion of Marcion’s text. Although Tertullian frequently tells his readers when Marcion has omitted a section, he was not trying to be comprehensive.

Nonetheless, Litwa confidently assures us that the text of Marcion’s canon has been reconstituted using procedures such as omitting texts when doubtful, avoiding mind-reading, and not allowing theology to override the reconstruction.

You can read Litwa’s reconstruction in his version, “Marcion’s Bible,” to see how he does. Here is the first page:

Litwa explains that “underlining indicates what is unattested but needed to complete the narrative.” Footnote 130 says, “This paragraph is not printed by BeDuhn, but it is needed to complete the story.”

So, in order to complete the text – to make it comprehensible – Litwa’s reconstruction contains substantial unattested material, and he departs from the reconstruction of one of the scholars he relies on. [8]

Previously, Litwa had told his readers:

The goal of scholarly reconstruction is not to fill in all possible gaps in Marcion’s scriptures, but to produce a reconstruction out of actually attested material. Aesthetically, of course, people would like to read a text of Marcion’s scriptures without gaps. It is natural to prefer a continuous narrative with complete sentences and paragraph divisions. But that is simply not possible in all cases, given the nature of our sources. Accordingly, in careful scholarship, reliability trumps aesthetics, and the only reliable text is one attested in a patristic source.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 88).

Litwa likens the scholarly approach to eating Swiss cheese rather than a solid chunk of moldy Gouda. Litwa clearly jettisons this principle in practice. On the whole, Litwa’s approach appears to add speculation to speculation until the cantilevered structure is declared solid and trustworthy.

9. Mind Reading

Litwa tells us that scholarship should not involve mind-reading. (Marcion, p. 87. (“Scholars are not mind readers, and heresiologists are often misleading.”)) But when the chips are down, Litwa reads minds like a fortune teller at the fair. As mentioned, Litwas assumes that Marcion meant whatever was in the gospel he presented as “the Scripture.” Litwa also tells us:

The heresiological strategy, was to undermine Marcion’s asceticism by poisoning its motives. Marcionite self-discipline was smeared as world-hatred.5 The inference seems to have been this: Marcion hated the creator; therefore he must have hated the creation.6 This inference quickly led to some absurd conclusions: If Marcion hated the creation, then his followers must have tried to abstain from created elements—like bread and water—despite the fact that they needed these elements to survive.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 205).

Could it have been that Marcionite ascetics actually engaged in such ascetic practices, as Christian and Albigensian ascetics did? Maybe these reports had nothing to do with “poisoning the well.” Maybe the Marcionites, known to Tertullian and Irenaeus, explained their motives to them.

Litwa is doing a lot of scholarly mind-reading about early church fathers (aka “heresiologists”). He is also “poisoning the well” against them by asserting that they had invidious motives.

10. Distorting Tertullian

Litwa spends an inordinate amount of time on an issue that nobody challenged: namely, whether the GG was, in any sense, a “creator.” After investing considerable effort, Litwa proves conclusively that the GG was acknowledged to have created his own heaven and thus, to that extent, was a creator.

Everything else was created by the JCG (unwittingly acting as an agent of the GG)

Litwa manages to ignore the gist of Tertullian’s argument, which is surprising because Tertullian is very clear about his point. Both Tertullian and Marcion agree that the GG did not create anything “visible,” which, according to Tertullian, meant that there was absolutely no evidence to believe in the existence of the GG. Tertullian explains:

It is now sufficient to observe, that no one is proved to exist to whom nothing is proved to belong. For as the Creator is shown to be God, God without any doubt, from the fact that all things are His, and nothing is strange to Him; so the rival god is seen to be no god, from the circumstance that nothing is his, and all things are therefore strange to him. Since, then, the universe belongs to the Creator, I see no room for any other god. All things are full of their Author, and occupied by Him.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books).

Tertullian went on to argue:

This, therefore, I insist upon, from the character of the Creator, that God must have been known from the works of some world peculiarly His own, both in its human constituents, and the rest of its organic life; when even the error of the world has presumed to call gods those men whom it sometimes acknowledges, on the ground that in every such case something is seen which provides for the uses and advantages of life. Accordingly, this also was believed from the character of God to be a divine function; namely, to teach or point out what is convenient and needful in human concerns. So completely has the authority which has given influence to a false divinity been borrowed from that source, whence it had previously flowed forth to the true one. One stray vegetable at least Marcion’s god ought to have produced as his own; so might he be preached up as a new Triptolemus.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books).

In other words, the existence of a deity is proven by visible evidence because evidence, by definition, is necessarily external to the deity and perceptible to human beings.

Anyone familiar with Aquinas’s “Five Ways” knows what Tertullian is talking about, namely, we infer from the visible effect to the invisible cause.

Marcion’s GG, not having made anything visible, not even a stray vegetable, cannot be proven to exist.

So, for Tertullian (and subsequent philosophers), the creation of an invisible heaven means nothing when it comes to proving the existence of the invisible GG.

In other words, the argument about “creation” involves the “creation” of this world, not some hypothetical heaven. Litwa’s argument does not “clash” with what Tertullian was discussing. Litwa does not seem to understand how deep and philosophically grounded Tertullian’s argument was.[9]

11. The Jewish Conundrum

It clearly matters to Litwa that Marcion not be an antisemite. Thus, he argues that Marcion had no animosity toward individual Jews, albeit he had substantial issues with their deity. [10] Litwa candidly admits that Marcion viewed the character of the JCG as “evil”:

Marcion disagreed with all Platonists by asserting that the character of the lower creator was evil. By contrast, every Platonist agreed with the clear statement of Plato in Timaeus: the demiurge was good, and out of his goodness, he created the best of all possible worlds.11 Marcion bucked this view because his reading of the biblical witness overrode what Platonic philosophers understood as theologically appropriate. Marcion believed in an evil creator because he believed that this is what the Jewish scriptures revealed.12

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 159).

Moreover, the Jews were actually engaging in idolatry since the JCG was not a god:

Of course, the Judean lord did many good things as well, at least for Judeans. Platonists had a name for a superhuman being who shows favoritism and does a mix of good and evil. Such a being was not a pure god, but a semi-divine being called a “daimon.” Among Christians of the second century, however, the term “daimon” was already beginning to take on the negative nuances of its English transliteration—“demon” (e.g., 1 Cor 10:20).

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 160).

Thus, in Marcion’s view, the JCG was an evil demon.

Nonetheless, according to Litwa, Marcion had no issue with Jews qua Jews, notwithstanding the fact that they were the worshippers of an evil demon.

Really? Why? It is not unfair to wonder what the problem with Marcion was. Shouldn’t any reasonable person be opposed to evil demon worshippers?

The Jews barely held on in Europe during a time when Saxon Tree Worshippers were exterminated because Christians did not view Jews as evil demon-worshippers. At worst, Jews had rejected and killed Christ, but their scriptures were Christian scriptures, their history was held up as something to be emulated, their messiah was the Christian messiah, and one of their people was the Incarnation of the Christian God. Because of this, Jews were given a protected status by the Catholic Church. St. Augustine argued for protecting the Jewish population because they were a living witness to the roots of Christianity. Jewish texts are read in Catholic Masses. Pope Pius XII could tell the Nazis that Christians are “spiritual semites.”

Can we imagine how European history would have turned out if Jews had been viewed as a cult of evil demon worshipper with no relation to Christianity?

It would have been worse than actual history.

Nonetheless, Litwa concludes:

If Marcionite Christianity had triumphed, Christian history might well have been considerably less violent against Jews. There’s something called “the narcissism of small differences”: religious people who quarrel the most are the ones most like each other.42 If Christians had given up the idea of appropriating the Jewish religious heritage (embodied in the Jewish scriptures), they would have probably felt less threatened by Jews themselves and the continuing practice of Judaism in Europe and elsewhere. In the end, one will never know how history might have been, even if it is useful to imagine it.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 128).

Yes, one wonders how a people who worshipped an alien evil demon would have been treated in Europe.

12. Conclusion

History is complicated. Litwa could be absolutely correct in everything he says. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

However, we have to make judgments about what to think. We can’t simply defer to credentials. We have to critically examine texts, compare the text with other texts, and assess the reasoning.

This book falls short. I do not trust Litwa to be selling me the “straight goods.” I don’t trust Litwa’s reasoning to lead me to reasonable conclusions. I question whether he is telling me the entire story or being selective because he has a vision of Christian reform he would like people to adopt.

Post-script:

Here is Michael Bird’s YouTube review of this book.

Here is David Litwa’s response to Bird’s review.

Footnotes:

[1] “A series of six d’s summarizes the default Harnackian (which is now the encyclopedia) portrait of the Pontian: Marcion the ditheist, the docetist, the detester of Jews, the denier of the world, the deleter of Scripture, and the demiurgist.” Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 4).

[2] To be fair, Litwa also claims that keeping texts inconsistent with the Good God paradigm also creates cognitive dissonance and ignorance among Christians: “For example, there is a book on the market today telling people how (not) to read the Bible so that they can make sense of the antiwoman, antiscience, proviolence, proslavery, and other “crazy-sounding parts of scripture.” Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (pp. 240-241). So with all that craziness, can we really blame Litwa for wanting to redline the Bible?

[3] This argument combines two fallacies, namely, guilt by association and poisoning the well. The implication of the Trump reference is that no rational person would want to be associated with such a grotesque and commercialized understanding of Christianity. He may have a point about Trump’s bible, but his argument is fallacious.

[4] Interestingly, Litwa reveals a bias that is both prevalent but barely discernible. Namely, who says that “Canon lists are entirely human products, representing an ancient—but never complete—consensus about what churches took to be scriptural”? Not my church, which is the largest, oldest Christian Church. As a Catholic, I recognize that history is contingent, but, as a theological matter, my church teaches that the Holy Spirit leads the Church into all truth. Litwa can argue that this is a deluded and unhistorical perspective, but I would ask what mountain he was on when this was revealed to him. This is a theological and faith issue for which his scholarly degrees give him no authority. Yet, in making this fatuous argument, Litwa summarily ruled out the Catholic position, implying it is not worth addressing. Whatever that is, it is not scholarship, much less intellectually honest.

[5] This may be another “tell” of an essentially Evangelical perspective. Evangelicals are fond of saying “I’m just reading the words” when, in fact, they are reading the words through a tradition that is so comfortable for them that they don’t notice what they are doing. Litwa may believe that he is “just reading the words” of Marcion’s scriptures, but if he is, he would be the first.

[6] “According to surviving evidence, Marcion never denied Jesus’s birth, and never questioned Jesus’s humanity. He believed in a Scripture that spoke of Christ coming in the likeness of sinful flesh and appearing in human form (Rom 8:3; Phil 2:6–8)” Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 3)

[7] “To be sure, Marcion’s Scriptures must be reconstructed, but reliable reconstructions are available, and readers will learn here how reliable reconstructions are made (chapter 5).” Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 5).

[8] This was not the impression I was left when I read Litwa’s “Marcion.” In that book, we are told that the reconstruction is certain, but we are also told that there are editorial judgments, but these editorial judgments are scientifically controlled by scholarly principles. “Marcion” does not say a word about the unattested text being a majority of the reconstruction. To the contrary, the impression is left that there is either no unattested text or that such text is de minimis.

[9] This is not the language that the Scholastics would use later, but it gestures toward the “Five Ways,” which were founded on different kinds of “causes”:

But even if we were able to allow that he exists, we should yet be bound to argue that he is without a cause. For he who had nothing (to show for himself as proof of his existence), would be without a cause, since (such) proof is the whole cause that there exists some person to whom the proof belongs. Now, in as far as nothing ought to be without a cause, that is, without a proof (because if it be without a cause, it is all one as if it be not, not having the very proof which is the cause of a thing), in so far shall I more worthily believe that God does not exist, than that He exists without a cause.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books): Cross-Linked to the Bible . Amazon.com. Kindle Edition.

If there is no “cause,” by which Tertullian means “effect” as in “causing an effect,” then there is no proof of the cause of the effect.

[10] In showing Marcion’s reasonable disposition, Litwa argues:

Marcion did not reject Jewish scripture as such.9 He rejected it as Christian scripture. As it stood, however, the Jewish Bible had much to reveal about the Judean lord, the history of Israel, and, to a certain extent, the history of humankind. Far from showing a “lack of interest in the Jewish Scriptures,”10 Marcion made full use of them as historical and theological documents. Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (p. 122). Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Kindle Edition.

And so did Josef Goebbels and Jules Streicher. Like Marcion, they were fond of quoting Jewish scriptures in order to show that Jews were not like us.

[11] The saddest example of “broken trust” was this paragraph:

Marcion had to explain why the Good acted after thousands of years of human history.4 But that was a problem faced by all Christians. In the long view of history, Jesus seemed to be tardy, allowing too many righteous people to descend and wither in Hades. The fact that Christ was prophesied, according to early catholic doctrine, did little to mitigate his late arrival. The question kept arising: What was God doing all that time when people were dying? Augustine reported the joke that he was creating hell for people who asked that question.5 Such an answer would not have satisfied Marcion, for whom the cruelty of the creator was no joke.

Litwa, M. David. Marcion: The Gospel of a Wholly Good God (pp. 193-194) (Emphasis added.)

But that isn’t the “joke.”

The alleged joke was, “Question: ‘What was God doing before he created the world?’ Answer: ‘Creating Hell for people who ask that question.’”

The gist of the joke concerns the paradox of God “doing” anything when there was no time to “do” anything.

The serious theological point that the joke alludes to is that God was not waiting around for things to happen in Eternity since there is no time.

Litwa’s version butchers the point. He changes the joke to a point “in time” so that instead of having paradoxical irony, it is a sad commentary on God’s indifference.

And, frankly, that’s why Litwa changed the “joke.”

Either Litwa did this deliberately or he is remarkably obtuse and doesn’t do basic homework. Litwa cites Augustine, Conf. 11.12.14. (Litwa, p. 202). You can look at that section and not find the joke. However, if you know the Confessions, you know that Book 11 involves Augustine’s discussion of “time,” and the nature of time and eternity. So we wouldn’t expect a discussion about time prior to the advent of Christ in that section.

So, when we go to Book 11, Chapter 12, we read this:

12. Isn’t it a sign of being completely out of date*41 that people say to us, “What was God doing before he made the sky and the earth? If he wasn’t doing anything,” they go on, “if he wasn’t busy, then why didn’t he stay off work from then on and forever, just as he always did before? If any new impulse, any new will arose in God, so that he undertook the creation, which he’d never undertaken before, how can there be ‘true eternity,’ given that a will arises that didn’t exist before?

“God’s will isn’t a created thing; instead, it precedes creation, because nothing could be created unless the will of the Creator came before it. Logically, then, God’s will belongs to God’s actual substance. But if something arose within God’s substance that didn’t exist before, it can’t be truly called that eternal substance you were talking about. If, on the other hand, God’s will was eternal, and out of that eternal will he willed creation, why isn’t creation also eternal?”

Augustine. Confessions (Modern Library) (p. 356).

Not a thing about Hell. Not a thing about people dying.

WTF, Litwa? Litwa made up the whole thing to present Augustine, the Catholic tradition, and the Catholic God in the worst possible light.

Also, Augustine didn’t tell the joke; he objected to the joke. This is from Confessions, Book 11, Ch. 14:

14. So here’s how I answer someone saying, “What was God doing before he made the sky and the earth?” I don’t answer the way a certain person is reported to have done, by dodging this aggressive question with a joke: “He was preparing hell for deep probers like you.”

A potshot is what insight is not. That’s why I don’t give that answer, but would prefer this one: “I don’t know what I don’t know.” That’s better than saying what results in laughter at somebody asking a deep question, and praise of somebody giving an answer that isn’t true.

Augustine. Confessions (Modern Library) (pp. 357-358).

We know people in the little things. Litwa’s willingness to butcher this joke for a polemical purpose shows that he is willing to dupe people to sell his agenda. If we can’t trust him in something that we can verify, why should we trust him concerning things we can’t verify?

Readers have limited time and mental space. We don’t need those finite assets to be filled with misinformation.

This is a book for inside-baseball apologists. The book provides a detailed explanation of the state of the art in textual criticism. The book is aimed at apologists. The book consists of fifteen essays by different scholars writing on various issues in textual criticism. These scholars basically ask that Christian apologists stop making arguments that make their ears bleed.

The gist of the scholar’s arguments is that apologists should not gild the lily. The most extreme apologetic arguments are easy to shoot down, which obscures the fact that less extreme arguments are strong.

The best example concerns the number of texts available for determining the original language of the New Testament scriptures. Apologists have typically claimed that Christians possess more than 24,000 New Testament manuscripts. This is impressive and wrong. In fact, scholars have identified around 5,500 Greek New Testament manuscripts dating to before the year 1001 AD. This does not mean that we have 5,500 copies of the New Testament. Most of these manuscripts are fragments, sometimes no more than a few lines. In addition, the dates of these manuscripts skew in favor of later centuries. There are six second-century gospels, 30 third-century gospels, twenty-seven fourth-century gospels, and approximately 730 tenth-century gospels.

This is not bad compared to what Classical scholars have for their texts, but even there, Christian apologists need to avoid “egging the pudding.” The writers explain:

Regarding the number of manuscripts themselves, a few examples will suffice. For Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Jones counts not ten (so Bruce) but 251 manuscripts.10 Again, it is far less than the manuscript attestation for the Gospels, so the comparison’s basic points remain, but 251 is a far cry from ten! Likewise, Orr-Ewing (and others) cite Plato as attested by only seven manuscripts, when there are again over two hundred.11

Hixson, Elijah; Gurry, Peter; Wallace, Daniel B.. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (p. 75). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

In additions:

Likewise, Thucydides is given eight manuscripts, with dates beginning AD 900, by Bruce, Orr-Ewing, and Porter and Pitts, and given twenty manuscripts by Blomberg.21 However, even by 1913 (before Bruce), a whole book was filled with papyri of Thucydides.22 The 1938 Oxford edition of Thucydides speaks of some thirty papyri and parchments in evidence.23 Such figures, of course, would require updating in later decades, and recently papyri of Thucydides have been found dating even back to the third or mid-second century BC (long before 900).

Hixson, Elijah; Gurry, Peter; Wallace, Daniel B.. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (p. 77). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

So, it is fair to say the New Testament is better attested by manuscripts than comparable classical texts, but apologists should not run up the numbers. Likewise, critics who apply different standards for the New Testament classical literature are using a double standard.

Because there are more manuscripts, there are more manuscript “variances,” which is to say variations in the texts. Most of these are meaningless. In an inflected language like Greek, variations in word order do not change the meaning of a sentence. Likewise, spelling errors are inevitable and obvious.

There are some significant variations. In Mark, Jesus explains in some versions that some demons can only be exorcized by prayer and fasting, and some that only say prayer. This could be a big difference for Protestants who have no tradition of fasting.

There may be half a million variations. Half are meaningless. A tiny fraction is discussed by commenters, and a few of those are given footnotes in modern translations. A few dozen affect the meaning of a text, and a handful are theologically important, such as Mark 1:1, Luke 23:34, and John 1:18. So, (a) don’t let skeptics buffalo you into thinking the text is up for grabs, but (b) recognize that there are some that are worth discussing, and (c) none of them change core Christian doctrines.

Another interesting chapter dealt with the claim that the New Testament can be reconstituted from quotations by the Church Fathers. This is based on a canard that has no merit. When the canard is dismissed, it seems that Church Fathers mention nowhere near the entire New Testament. (On the other hand, Origen wrote commentaries on various texts of the New Testament, including John and Romans.) So, again, this is an argument that apologists would do well to forget.

The book talks about “myths,” but many chapters don’t involve myths at all. There is a discussion about canon that notes the idea of canon was not binary. There were books that were “canonical,” books that were “spurious,” and books that were useful for edification and instruction:

Generally, they did not describe books in a binary way: canonical and noncanonical. Rather, they employed a tri-fold description of religious literature: canonical scripture, useful/intermediate scripture, and apocryphal. In Festal Letters 39.20-21, for example, Athanasius describes this literature as follows:

But for the sake of greater accuracy, I add this, writing from necessity. There are other books, outside of the preceding, which have not been canonized (κανονιζόμενα, kanonizomena), but have been prescribed by the ancestors to be read (άναγινώσκεσθαι, anaginōskesthai) to catechumens wanting to be instructed in the word of piety. . . . Nevertheless, beloved, the former books are canonized (κανονιζομένων, kanonizomenōn); the latter are (only) read (άναγινωσκομένων, anaginōskomenōn); and there is no mention of the apocryphal books (άποκρύϕων, apokryphōn).15

In accordance with the ancestors, Athanasius lists the canonical books of Old and New Testament, several books that are to be read (e.g., Tobit, the Shepherd, the Didache), and the category of apocryphal books but does not list them. Other early Christian fathers who presented a similar tri-fold description include Amphilochius (Epistula Iambica ad Seleucum 251-260), Epiphanius (De mensuris 4), Jerome (Preface to the Books of Solomon), and Rufinus (Commentarius in symbolum apostolorum 36).16 For example, in the context of a canon list, Jerome says the Shepherd is “not in the canon” (Prologus Galeatus), but in another context, he calls it “useful” and says many ancient writers quoted it authoritatively (Vir. ill. 10). Therefore, early Christians had an intermediate category of books—books considered somewhere between canonical and apocryphal; specifically, these books were considered useful for instruction in piety but not for establishing ecclesiastical doctrine.

Would early Christians refer to these books that were useful but not canonical as “Scripture” or as “inspired”? Would they cite them as Scripture alongside canonical texts? They did. For example, Irenaeus calls the Shepherd ἡ γράφη (hē graphē), usually translated “Scripture” (Haer. 4.20.2).17 Clement of Alexandria believed the Shepherd to be a genuine revelation, thus making Hermas “technically a prophet.”18

Hixson, Elijah; Gurry, Peter; Wallace, Daniel B.. Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (p. 258-259). InterVarsity Press.

Another takeaway from the book involves the dating of texts. The summary is that anyone who claims to know exactly when any manuscript was written is just making things up. Any dating based on writing style involves an estimated date range. The “key takeaways” include “It is always unwise to assign a date range of fewer than fifty years on the basis of paleography; a range of seventy-five to one hundred is typically more preferable.”

This book also provides an in-depth discussion of how books were copied, corrected, and transmitted. I will keep this text to consult when necessary.

This is not a book for everyone. The authors are attempting to write at a popular level, but there are a lot of technical details that will go over the head of the lay reader. The authors try to make up for this by offering a summary at the end of each chapter.

Perhaps the summary of the summary is that if it sounds too good to be true, it is, and try to generalize, rather than pretend to a precision that does not exist.

Gregory Martin’s (1542 – 1582) A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics was published posthumously in 1583.[1] Martin was a friend of Edmond Campion. He also translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into the English Douay-Rheims bible. As a Catholic Englishman, he lived most of his life in exile. He died at the age of approximately 40, one year after Campion was martyred.

Luther and Calvin hated both relics and pilgrimages, as well as the miracles associated with them. Their doctrine was that (a) miracles were performed in the early church to motivate conversion, (b) after the early church, miracles were no longer necessary, and (c) Catholic miracles were really wrought by Satan or demons.

The Protestant argument was based on the claim that the Catholic Church of their day had departed from the practices and beliefs of the “primitive Catholic Church.” This departure occurred surprisingly late for those inclined to argue that things went wrong with Constantine in 325 AD. For example, Calvin argued that the Catholic Church failed in its teachings around the year 500. (Institutes I.11.13, 1:113.)[2] Translator Christian D. Washburn notes that in 1559:

John Jewel, leader of the English Calvinists, had the boldness, while at St. Paul’s Cross in London,[48] to challenge Catholics to prove that the Fathers of the first six centuries had all thought the same way as Catholics do now. If this could be proven, then he would convert.[49]

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (p. 13).

Martin took up the challenge. Martin began by noting that “pilgrimage” comes from “peregrinatio,” meaning “strangers.” The implication is that journeying involves leaving the familiar and existing among near strangers. The Bible attests to pilgrimages without condemnation, such as the Magi's pilgrimage to Bethlehem and the Ethiopian Eunuch's journey to Jerusalem. St. Paul went to Jerusalem to “honor Peter as greater than himself.” Martin observes that the purpose of pilgrimage is to honor God. He quoted extensively from St. John Chrysostom, who colorfully described the tangible reality of Paul’s chains, connecting them to the ongoing work of conversion and evangelism.[3] Further, the Bible is replete with examples of honoring prophets as a way of honoring God, e.g., the wealthy woman of Sund receives Elisha as a “holy man of God.” (4 Kings 4:9-10.) This motivates the pilgrim’s desire to honor all that belongs to God, including what belongs to God’s holy ones.[4]

Martin also relies on Augustine, who frequently described miracles associated with the sites, bodies, and relics of martyrs. Thus, “St. Augustine records seven or eight great miracles by St. Stephen,” which occurred in North Africa.

The Protestant rejection of traditional Christian belief ironically places them in the camp of the pagans (and, more recently, atheists):

At this, I marvel that Protestants are not ashamed to plead the pagans’ cause, pretending the name and profession of Christians against the authority of the whole primitive church. Pagans, as St. Augustine notes, attempted to discredit the miracles of Christ and His Apostles by objecting thus, “Why is it, people ask, that the miracles [by the Apostles] which you say happened then do not still happen now”?[105] Protestants claim that later miracles are no longer necessary. At the beginning they were necessary until the faith was planted; afterward they were not to be looked for.

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (pp. 39-40).

Martin responded:

To answer them fully, it always pleased God from time to time to nourish faith and devotion by miracles; these holy Fathers of the Church affirm miracles wrought at saints’ tombs by their relics. The pagans were at a point to believe neither the one nor the other. What does Luther believe? What Calvin? The former miracles, Protestants are content to admit, lest otherwise they should not be Christians. The latter miracles they will not grant, lest they should be good Catholics. But St. Augustine says of both sorts thus,

Those who do not believe her account will be those who also do not believe that the Lord Jesus was born leaving His mother’s virginity intact or that He entered through closed doors to be with His disciples.[106]

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (p. 40).

This seems to be the dilemma faced by many faithful Protestants and atheists. Today, we often see a similar thing as the pursuit of “rational religion” leads denominations to eventually deny core Christian doctrines. This evolution had not reached that point in the 16^th century, but the germ was there. Martin notes: “Protestants tell me that whatever Scripture reports, the authority thereof forces them to believe it, although reason contradicts it.” Lower the authority of Scripture through critical analysis, and even the Resurrection may be up for grabs.

Martin acknowledges the grounds for Protestant skepticism, which he states are a lack of faith and a want of devotion. The Protestant objection is based on the same ground as St. Thomas’s assertion that he would not believe in the Resurrection without his personal confirmation of tangible proof. Martin’s response emphasizes the virtues of those who want to “touch the memory of Christ’s wounds and of His saints.” Martin points out the examples of Jerome’s friend, Paula, who traveled to Bethlehem where the Lord had lived, and of Hilarion, who, after the death of St. Anthony, visited his cell.

The human motivation to be close to things associated with beloved holy ones is biblical:

Mark, I say, how such devotion exceedingly pleases God, because He confirmed it so long ago by miracles. And it is no wonder, for Christ is the same good Lord still, who immediately perceived the fervent faith of the poor woman who thought it sufficient, with great fear and reverence, to touch but the hem of His garment (Mark 5:27–29). It is Christ who, by St. Peter’s shadow (Acts 5:12–16) and St. Paul’s handkerchiefs (Acts 19:12) healed the sick and cured the lame, must now also accept all devotion done toward Him and His saints for His sake. “He continues faithful, He cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim 2:13).

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (pp. 45-46).

Likewise,

Such were they who “laughed at Christ Himself”, (Mark 5:40), says the Evangelist, when He said of Jairus’s daughter, “Puella non est mortua, sed dormit,” “The maid is not dead but sleeps” (Matt 9:24). And undoubtedly the Protestant jesters of our time would merely laugh at St. Peter’s shadow (Acts 5:15–16), St. James’s oil (James 5:14), Christ’s spittle (John 9:6–7), Raphael’s fish (Tobit 6:9), Daniel’s dragon (Dan 14:23–30), Samson’s jawbone (Judges 15:16), and Elias’ cloak (4 Kings 2:13–15), if neither shame of the world nor fear of hell would stop them.

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (p. 51).

Martin offers repeated examples of relic devotion in the early church, e.g., St. Anthony kept the tunic of Paul the Hermit; Theodosius wore the sackcloth of a holy bishop on feast days; Hilarion went on pilgrimage to St. Anthony’s hermitage.

Martin offers an example of the embarrassing default atheism that arises from the Protestant assumption against the supernatural:

Do you wonder why I will say this, and tell me that I ought not to judge? I say this because it is evident that Protestants can neither abide ceremonies, nor believe miracles—it is their profession. For example, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) in a disputation held at Oxford was asked about the Blessed Sacrament with this example: that Christ entered into the place where His disciples were, the doors being shut. Vermigli said that Christ first opened the door and so entered.[140] What a wonderful miracle that Christ entered when the door stood open! He might as well say that Christ could not have risen again unless the angel had first removed the stone from the sepulcher, nor be born of His mother without breach of her virginity, which infidelity St. Augustine objected to the pagans, as I have before mentioned.[

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (pp. 51-52).

And:

Vermigli in his wisdom made fun of it, until he understood it was just plain Scripture, and then you may easily guess what plight he was in, for in his own play he was so flatly foiled.

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (p. 52).

Martin acknowledges abuses in the practice of pilgrimage and the veneration of relics. Martin responds

“The fault of a few,” says St. Jerome, “forms no argument against religion in general.”[148] “The treachery of Judas did not annul the loyalty of the Apostles.”[149] And again he says, “in every rank and condition of life the bad are mingled with the good.”[150] These are considerations of former times which by all reason should be more pure since they are nearer to Christ. And our Savior said, “Necesse est ut veniant scandala,” “It is necessary that offences do come” (Matt 18:7), which seems to me a very goodly instruction for the weak who quickly condemn a good thing when they see it abused. The weak, because of one superstitious woman, judge all as idolators, or see one false relic then think none are true, or because of one feigned miracle will not believe in any.[151] The learned and holy martyr of our country, St. Thomas More, has most wisely and pithily, as was his custom, disputed this issue in his English volumes, sufficiently to satisfy any reasonable and grave wit.

Martin, Gregory; Washburn, Christian. A Defense of Pilgrimages and Relics (pp. 54-55). (More’s argument can be found at A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, §6.1.)

Abuses do not need to be tolerated, but Jesus recognized that “Necesse est ut veniant scandala” (“It is necessary that offenses to come.”) (Matt 18:7) (“⁷ Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!”) [5]

This is a short text. Washburn supplements Martin’s text with the excerpts that Martin refers to in his argument. Washburn has done a good job in making it accessible to modern English speakers. The arguments are sound. There are tidbits of information that can add to the treasury of the reader’s knowledge.

Footnotes:

[1] The translation was done by Christian D. Washburn. Mr. Washburn has done yeoman work in translating a number of obscure works of Catholic apologetics from the early Reformation.

[2]

13. But, without reference to the above distinction, let us here consider, whether it is expedient that churches should contain representations of any kind, whether of events or human forms. First, then, if we attach any weight to the authority of the ancient Church, let us remember, that for five hundred years, during which religion was in a more prosperous condition, and a purer doctrine flourished, Christian churches were completely free from visible representations (see Preface, and Book 4, c. 9 s. 9).

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion (p. 53). Kindle Edition.

[3] I was surprised to learn that Origen’s father was a Catholic saint, St. Leonides. Martin uses the example of St. Leonida kissing the breast of Origin “as the dwelling or temple of the Holy Spirit.”

[4] Martin recommends reading the entire eighth chapter of the twenty-second book of The City of God.

[5] This is the kind of thing I meant by “adding to the treasury of knowledge.” I’ve read Matthew 18 many times. It is the text about what awaits those who “cause the little ones to stumble.” I don’t think I’ve ever noticed, or had it pointed out to me, that Jesus is fatalistic about perfection in this world, i.e., it will happen; someone will do it; just don’t be that guy who does that thing.

The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books): Cross-Linked to the Bible by Tertullian (Author), Philip Schaff (Translator)

This is a continuation of my previous review of Tertullian’s “Against Marcion.” In the prior section, we saw that Marcion separated law from gospel as part of separating Christianity from Judaism. As part of his project, Marcion posited that there was a completely alien “Good God” (GG) that had no involvement with the created universe until year 15 of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when the fully grown Jesus descended from the GG’s heaven to give a sermon in a synagogue in Capernaum. (Luke 4:16.) It was the GG who offered salvation out of pure gratuitous love to humans who had been created entirely by the Jewish Creator God (the JCG). The JCG’s creation was imperfect and corrupt. It contained suffering, and things degraded, all of which was a bad fruit that necessarily came from a bad tree.

In a nutshell, Marcion’s theology is nutty. One thing we know is that Jesus was Jewish. His mission makes no sense outside of the Jewish context. The texts that attest to Jesus explain him in Jewish terms. His first followers were Jewish. So, in what sense could Marcion have thought that he could disconnect Christianity from its Jewish context?[1]

As nineteenth-century German scholars demonstrate, it is possible. It seems that it would be easier in the second century when the Jews would have been known as a rebellious people with strange customs. None of the books I’ve been reading on Marcion mention any effect the Bar Kochba Revolt had on the reception of his theology. According to Harnack, Marcion began working on his new theology when he arrived in Rome in 139 AD; the Bar Kochba Revolt lasted from 132 to 135 AD. The conclusion of the revolt was devastating to Jews and Judaism:

The Romans plowed Jerusalem with a yoke of oxen. Jews were sold into slavery and many were transported to Egypt. Judean settlements were not rebuilt. Jerusalem was turned into a pagan city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there. They were permitted to enter only on the 9th of Av to mourn their losses in the revolt. Hadrian changed the country’s name from Judea to Syria Palestina.

In the years following the revolt, Hadrian discriminated against all Judeo-Christian sects, but the worst persecution was directed against religious Jews. He made anti-religious decrees forbidding Torah study, Sabbath observance, circumcision, Jewish courts, meeting in synagogues and other ritual practices. Many Jews assimilated and many sages and prominent men were martyred including Rabbi Akiva and the rest of the Asara Harugei Malchut (ten martyrs). This age of persecution lasted throughout the remainder of Hadrian’s reign, until 138 C.E.//

It is not unreasonable to think that there could have been no better moment to rethink the Jewish contribution to Christianity than the period from 136 AD to 144 AD.

Imagine the typical pagan in the latter part of the second century. He wouldn’t have known Jewish prophecies or scriptures. He wouldn’t have heard of Jesus’s claim to be a Jewish Messiah. The connection with the Jewish people would not have been a selling point. For all he knew, this strange man representing this strange god might as well have parachuted in from the unknown to represent a completely alien god. From his perspective, Marcion’s God was as much an alien as the Jewish Creator God, but lacked the suspicious Jewish connection.

Looked at that way, Marcionism might have some sales appeal to “low information” religious consumers.

The problem with such an approach is obviously that it unravels with a little information. In the next books, Tertullian supplies that information.

I. Book 2 – the Jewish Creator God (JCG) is the true and good God

Tertullian’s first book contains little argument based on scripture. The scriptural discussion begins in Book II and demonstrates that Tertullian is well acquainted with the Bible and its interpretation.

Tertullian’s first move is to affirm that God is not hidden. While God has revealed Himself to man, God’s nature and plans are beyond human knowledge. (Bk 2, Ch. 2; Cf. Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 3, Ch. 59 (9).) Adam’s fault lay in questioning God’s wisdom, which made him a heretic, but he had the good grace not to blame God for his failure. (Id.) Because God is known through His works, His first goodness was His creation, through which He could be known. (Bk. II, Ch. 3) Tertullian writes:

For what, indeed, is so good as the knowledge and fruition of God? Now, although it did not transpire that this was good, because as yet there existed nothing to which it could transpire, yet God foreknew what good would eventually transpire, and therefore He set Himself about developing His own perfect goodness, for the accomplishment of the good which was to transpire. (Bk 2, Ch. 3.)

These points anticipate the ideas of subsequent Christian writers. For example, Boethius opined that true blessedness, felicity, and human perfection involved participating in the life of God because God was Blessedness, Felicity, and Perfection.[2] Likewise, the good shares itself because it is a feature of Goodness to be self-diffusive, like a fountain sharing its water.

God’s goodness then expressed itself in the creation of man and the human soul. (Bk.2, Ch. 4):

Goodness spoke the word; Goodness formed man of the dust of the ground into so great a substance of the flesh, built up out of one material with so many qualities; Goodness breathed into him a soul, not dead but living. Goodness gave him dominion over all things, which he was to enjoy and rule over, and even give names to. In addition to this, Goodness annexed pleasures to man so that, while master of the whole world, he might tarry among higher delights, being translated into paradise, out of the world into the Church.//

God also acted with goodness by warning Adam and Eve of the results of transgression.

Man was given freedom by God so that man could share in God’s image and likeness. (Bk. 2, ch. 5.) The law confirms human freedom because a law would not have been imposed on someone who could not be obedient. (Id.) Freedom of will and self-command are “reckoned as the image and likeness of God in him.” (Bk. 2, Ch. 6.)

Adam and Eve fell because they were seduced by an angel, but they were free and masters of themselves as “bring the image and likeness of God.” (Bk. 2, Ch. 9.) This is not the end of the story:

And thus it comes to pass, that even now also, the same human being, the same substance of his soul, the same condition as Adam’s, is made conqueror over the same devil by the self-same liberty and power of his will, when it moves in obedience to the laws of God.// (Bk. 2, Ch. 8.)[3]

Tertullian absolves the JCG from the charge of causing man to sin by pointing to the liberty of the will. (Bk. 2, Ch. 9). Likewise, the Devil was acting from his own will. (Bk. 2, Ch. 10.) The Devil was fashioned good, and, in fact, was the wisest of creatures. Tertullian points out that the Prince of Tyre in Ezekiel refers to the devil.

Marcion’s indicted that the JCG was a judge and handed out punishments as a way of denying the quality of true goodness to Him. But if justice is not good, then it is an evil, and if justice is evil, then injustice is a good. (Bk 2, Ch. 11.) This is absurd “since there is nothing hostile to evil which is not good, and no enemy of good which is not evil.” (Id.) Therefore, Goodness and Justice should not be separated; “Where the just is, there also exists the good.”. (Bk 2, Ch. 12.) When evil broke out after the Fall, the goodness of God had an adversary to content against and God’s justice acquired another function, namely directing men toward the good. (Bk. 2, Ch. 13.) God’s justice reveals him as perfect father and master and justice and punishment are a way of inducing humans to obedience. (Id.) Punishment is remedial. (Bk. 2, Ch. 15.)

At times, Tertullian seems to be ascribing human emotions to God, but he is clear that it is “palpably absurd of you to be placing human characteristics in God rather than divine ones in man, and clothing God in the likeness of man, instead of man in the image of God. (Bk. 2, Ch. 16.)[4]

In Chapter 17, we get a glimpse of Marcion’s theological corruption of scripture:

These considerations show that the entire order of God as Judge is an operative one, and (that I may express myself in worthier words) protective of His Catholic and supreme goodness, which, removed as it is from judiciary emotions, and pure in its own condition, the Marcionites refuse to acknowledge to be in one and the same Deity, raining on the just and on the unjust, and making His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, — a bounty which no other god at all exercises. It is true that Marcion has been bold enough to erase from the gospel this testimony of Christ to the Creator; but yet the world itself is inscribed with the goodness of its Maker , and the inscription is read by each man’s conscience.//

Tertullian’s statement that Marcion made an erasure from the gospel is problematic. The verse about raining on the just and unjust is from Matthew 5:45. Marcion revised the Gospel of Luke, not Matthew. Tertullian might be saying that the erasure was accomplished by excluding Matthew from his canon. Alternatively, we might speculate that Tertullian had a copy of Luke that had this language, but I have never heard that theory.

Tertullian defended the Lex Talionis as a way of discouraging endless cycles of retaliation. (Bk. 2, Ch. 18.)

In Chapter 10, Tertullian responds to Marcion’s charge that the JCG had commanded the Jews to commit fraud and theft by asking for a loan of their neighbours’ gold. (See Exodus.) Tertullian provides a neat finesse of this argument by pointing out (a) the Jews were entitled to reparations for their labor as slaves and (b) the Egyptians obviously knew this because they were receptive to the request.

In a similar manner, Tertullian unravels various charges against the putative injustice of the JCG involving working on the sabbath by carrying the Ark around Jericho for eight days, the charge of idolatry with respect to the brazen serpent and the cherubim decorations in the Tent of Meeting, and other fine points of the Bible. This makes for interesting reading.

II. Book 3 – Jesus is the Son of the JCG

Book 3 consists of Tertullian’s arguments proving that Jesus Christ was the Christ of the JCG, and not that of the GG. This argument is supported by Marcion’s canon, which still contains many references to Judaism and the Jewish God, notwithstanding Marcion’s efforts at redaction.

Prophecies play an important role in Tertullian’s apologetics in this book. The logic of prophecies was to serve as a warranty of credibility. If Jesus had simply appeared as the emissary of an alien and unknown God, his claims would have lacked evidence to corroborate them. In contrast, the claims of the true Jesus were corroborated by centuries of prophecies.

Tertullian discusses two features of prophecy in Chapter 5. First, “future events are sometimes announced as if they were already passed.” Second, “many events are figuratively predicted by means of enigmas and allegories and parables, and that they must be understood in a sense different from the literal description.” Obviously, these features require more than wooden literalism to grasp the text's meaning. The Marcionites have to accept this because St. Paul, whom they accept as their apostle, spoke figuratively.

Tertullian had an extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. He quotes extensively from the prophets, particularly Isaiah, as well as Joel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. He effectively deploys his knowledge to match prophecies with stories in the gospels.

Tertullian attacks Marcion’s Docetism: “he alleges Christ to be a phantom.” (Bk. 3, Ch. 8.) Tertullian turns the charge of fraud against the GG. Christ did not die and was not buried. Christ was not resurrected. Christ’s resurrection was nullified, which meant that “ours also is destroyed.” (Id.) Tertullian also uses Paul against Marcion by pointing out that on the Marcionite position, “our faith is vain, and vain also is the preaching of the apostles. Moreover, they even show themselves to be false witnesses of God, because they testified that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise.” (Id.)

Tertullian rebuts Marcion’s effort to argue for a docetic Jesus on the grounds that the angels who met with Abraham were also phantoms. To the contrary, argued Tertullian, these angels were fully flesh, but they were not born. (Bk. 3, Ch. 9.) Christ became flesh so that he could redeem our flesh. (Id.) [5] Further, incarnation is more worthy than “Marcion’s fantastic flesh.” Tertullian observes that the GG despised flesh as “earthly, and (as you express it) full of dung.” (Bk. 3, Ch. 10.) But displaying Christ in “effigy of an unworthy, and indeed an alien, thing” is less worthy than clothing Christ with flesh “without untruth.” (Id.)

Marcion’s student Apelles was persuaded by the “notorious Philumena” to opine that Christ had a body of flesh “borrowed from the elements” rather than born. Marcion cites Luke 11:27 concerning the praise of the “womb that bare you” in response. (Bk. 3, Ch. 11.) Tertullian concludes, “Since He was the truth, He was flesh; since He was flesh, He was born.” This seems simpler than the alternatives.

The next series of chapters addresses biblical issues, e.g., Isaiah 7:14’s prophecy that the Messiah would be called Emmanuel (God with Us) was fulfilled because Jesus was God and with man. (Bk. 3, Ch. 12.) Isaiah 8:4 actually meant a virgin would conceive because prophecies have to be about something surprising. There is nothing surprising in a young woman giving birth. (Bk. 3, Ch. 13.) Tertullian was aware of the difference between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint text:

And indeed very properly; for he has paved the way for the incredible thing being believed, by giving a reason for its occurrence, in that it was to be for a sign. Therefore, says he, the Lord himself shall give you a sign ; behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son. [ Isaiah 7:14 ] Now a sign from God would not have been a sign, unless it had been some novel and prodigious thing. Then, again, Jewish cavillers, in order to disconcert us, boldly pretend that Scripture does not hold that a virgin, but only a young woman, is to conceive and bring forth. They are, however, refuted by this consideration, that nothing of the nature of a sign can possibly come out of what is a daily occurrence, the pregnancy and child-bearing of a young woman. A virgin mother is justly deemed to be proposed by God as a sign , but a warlike infant has no like claim to the distinction; for even in such a case there does not occur the character of a sign. But after the sign of the strange and novel birth has been asserted, there is immediately afterwards declared as a sign the subsequent course of the Infant, who was to eat butter and honey.//

Those who repeat that the Septuagint is a “mistranslation” act like no one knew this issue until modern scholarship, but Tertullian knew the difference in 200 AD. [6]

The rest of the chapter is a fascinating journey through a series of biblical interpretive issues. It is worth reading for that purpose alone. It is useful to see how different texts of the Bible were interpreted in the early church. This portion of the text is also useful in reminding us of many prophecies we no longer recall or deem as unimportant.

There is one odd passage that calls out for more:

But we do confess that a kingdom is promised to us upon the earth, although before heaven, only in another state of existence; inasmuch as it will be after the resurrection for a thousand years in the divinely-built city of Jerusalem, let down from heaven, [ Revelation 21:2 ] which the apostle also calls our mother from above; [ Galatians 4:26 ] and, while declaring that our [πολίτευμα], or citizenship, is in heaven, he predicates of it that it is really a city in heaven. This both Ezekiel had knowledge of [ Ezekiel 48:30-35 ] and the Apostle John beheld. [ Revelation 21:10-23 ] And the word of the new prophecy which is a part of our belief, attests how it foretold that there would be for a sign a picture of this very city exhibited to view previous to its manifestation. This prophecy, indeed, has been very lately fulfilled in an expedition to the East. For it is evident from the testimony of even heathen witnesses, that in Judæa there was suspended in the sky a city early every morning for forty days. As the day advanced, the entire figure of its walls would wane gradually, and sometimes it would vanish instantly. We say that this city has been provided by God for receiving the saints on their resurrection, and refreshing them with the abundance of all really spiritual blessings, as a recompense for those which in the world we have either despised or lost; since it is both just and God-worthy that His servants should have their joy in the place where they have also suffered affliction for His name’s sake.// (Bk III, Ch. 25.)

A floating city? I would love to see the source of information for that claim.

III. Book IV – Luke’s Gospel

In this book, Tertullian does a chapter-by-chapter walk-through of Marcion’s gospel. Tertullian refers to redactions (or “mutilations” in Tertullian’s terminology) contained in Marcion’s version of Luke. It is said that this section is the chief source of information for recreating Marcion’s Gospel. This might be the case, but one should be careful on this point. Tertullian’s statements about redaction are vague, and I suspect that any reconstruction is going to be equally vague. We are still waiting for a preserved copy of one of Marcion’s gospels. Marcion’s gospel has never been found - not even a fragment. Does this allow us to infer that Marcion’s church was not as large as claimed?

Marcion did not ascribe an author to his gospel. (Bk III, Ch. 2.) It is not clear what Tertullian meant by this, but it seems that the Marcionite gospel was not entitled “the Gospel of (X)” because Marcion wanted to claim that the gospel was handed to Paul by Christ on the road to Damascus, according to Harnack.[7] Tertullian identifies it as a mutilated version of Luke.

Since both sides claimed that their gospel was the true text, Tertullian proposed that time would be the deciding principle in determining who was right. The more ancient text would be the true text because “truth precedes error.” (Bk. IV, Ch. 4.) Tertullian points out that the Catholic Church had the Gospel of Luke long before Marcion had his gospel. In fact, Marcion attempted to join the Catholic Church, which meant that he had once believed it:

With regard, then, to the pending question, of Luke’s Gospel (so far as its being the common property of ourselves and Marcion enables it to be decisive of the truth, ) that portion of it which we alone receive is so much older than Marcion, that Marcion himself once believed it, when in the first warmth of faith he contributed money to the Catholic church, which along with himself was afterwards rejected, when he fell away from our truth into his own heresy. What if the Marcionites have denied that he held the primitive faith among ourselves, in the face even of his own letter? What, if they do not acknowledge the letter?// (Bk IV, Ch. 4.)

This is a good point, but I am not clear what this letter is. Did Tertullian possess a copy of a letter Marcion wrote when he came to Rome professing his acceptance of Catholicism?

In Chapter 4, Tertullian defends the Gospel of Luke on historical grounds. Tertullian contends that the church founded by the apostles has kept their teachings as a “sacred deposit.” Tertullian suggests that the faith tradition of the churches founded by Paul be examined, along with the “utterance also the Romans give, so very near (to the apostles), to whom Peter and Paul conjointly bequeathed the gospel even sealed with their blood.” [8] Tertullian also points to “St. John’s foster churches,” concerning which “the order of bishops (thereof), when traced up to their origin, will yet rest on John as their author.” In other words, Tertullian is relying on apostolic succession, as evidenced by the bishop lists.

In all of these churches, “the Gospel of Luke has stood from its very first publication, whereas Marcion’s Gospel is not known to most people, and to none whatever is it known without being at the same time condemned.” (Bk. IV, Ch. 5.) In other words, (a) the Gospel of Luke was known to predate Marcion’s unnamed gospel, (b) the Gospel of Luke was far better known than Marcion’s gospel, and (c) Marcion’s gospel had never been accepted by any of the apostolic Churches.

Game, set, and match.[9]

In Chapter 6, Tertullian lays out the theological positions that inform Marcion’s “unorthodox corruption of scriptures.”[10] Tertullian writes:

But we now advance a step further on, and challenge (as we promised to do) the very Gospel of Marcion, with the intention of thus proving that it has been adulterated. For it is certain that the whole aim at which he has strenuously laboured even in the drawing up of his Antitheses , centres in this, that he may establish a diversity between the Old and the New Testaments, so that his own Christ may be separate from the Creator, as belonging to this rival god, and as alien from the law and the prophets. It is certain, also, that with this view he has erased everything that was contrary to his own opinion and made for the Creator, as if it had been interpolated by His advocates, while everything which agreed with his own opinion he has retained. The latter statements we shall strictly examine; and if they shall turn out rather for our side, and shatter the assumption of Marcion, we shall embrace them. It will then become evident, that in retaining them he has shown no less of the defect of blindness, which characterizes heresy, than he displayed when he erased all the former class of subjects. Such, then, is to be the drift and form of my little treatise; subject, of course, to whatever condition may have become requisite on both sides of the question. Marcion has laid down the position, that Christ who in the days of Tiberius was, by a previously unknown god, revealed for the salvation of all nations, is a different being from Him who was ordained by God the Creator for the restoration of the Jewish state, and who is yet to come.//

Last night, I finished “Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Criticism.” Tertullian’s method is identical to the method applied to textual analysis in the 21^st century, i.e., identify the underlying agenda, then identify the changes in the text that fit the agenda. Textual criticism may have become more sophisticated over the two thousand years, but not by all that much.[11]

The gist of Marcion’s argument is that the God of the New Testament is so much more loving and merciful than the God of the Old Testament. This approach has enduring appeal. I have been in numerous reading groups where Marcion’s point is offered up by people who don’t know the source. The proper response is, " What parts of the text are you talking about?” There are numerous verses in the Old Testament that affirm a loving and merciful God, such as in Isaiah. Likewise, it is not always peaches and cream in the New Testament, where Jesus often promises retribution for sinners in the life to come.

Tertullian expertly marshals these variant texts. After a certain point, Tertullian gives the reader the feeling that he is setting up bowling pins just to bowl a strike.

IV. Book V – Paul’s Letters

Book V is a death march through Marcion’s use of Paul’s letters. This is another point in “Against Marcion” where Tertullian notes the redactions of the letters. There are purported versions of the Marcionite canon published by the Marcionite Church, which I assume is a recent innovation. The soi-disant Marcionite Church claims that these texts reflect a reconstruction from the writings of Christian apologists.

Color me skeptical. Tertullian’s references are pretty vague. I think it is possible to get a general sense of what the Marcionite canon looked like, and where Tertullian is explicit, we have a justification to believe that a reconstruction of that language may be accurate.[12] But a precise reconstruction of the entire Marcionite work from “Against Marcion” seems dubious.

Tertullian points out that Marcion’s redactions were necessarily incomplete. I like this one:

Fie on Marcion’s sponge! But indeed it is superfluous to dwell on what he has erased, when he may be more effectually confuted from that which he has retained. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son [ Galatians 4:4 ] — the God, of course, who is the Lord of that very succession of times which constitutes an age ; who also ordained, as signs of time, suns and moons and constellations and stars; who furthermore both predetermined and predicted that the revelation of His Son should be postponed to the end of the times. It shall come to pass in the last days , that the mountain (of the house) of the Lord shall be manifested ; and in the last days I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh as Joel says. (Bk V, Ch. 4.)

“Fie on Marcion’s sponge” should be better known.

Obviously, cutting texts is an inferior way of forging textual support. Sometimes the text needs a complete rewrite. However, if Tertullian had done that, he would have completely forfeited any claim that his unnamed gospel was the actual, original gospel. After all, the key to passing off a forgery is to make it look as much like the original as possible.

Because it came at the end, this section became tedious for me, but there were interesting historical asides. For example, in Chapter 10, Tertullian mentions the mysterious practice of “baptism for the dead”:

What, asks he, shall they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not? [ 1 Corinthians 15:29 ] Now, never mind that practice, (whatever it may have been.) The Februarian lustrations will perhaps answer him (quite as well), by praying for the dead. Do not then suppose that the apostle here indicates some new god as the author and advocate of this (baptism for the dead. His only aim in alluding to it was) that he might all the more firmly insist upon the resurrection of the body, in proportion as they who were vainly baptized for the dead resorted to the practice from their belief of such a resurrection. We have the apostle in another passage defining but one baptism. [ Ephesians 4:5 ] To be baptized for the dead therefore means, in fact, to be baptized for the body; for, as we have shown, it is the body which becomes dead . What, then, shall they do who are baptized for the body, [ Ephesians 4:5 ] if the body rises not again?

So, by the year 200, there was no one who knew what Paul meant about “baptism for the dead.” Tertullian interpreted the phrase as “praying for the dead,” an interpretation later adopted by other writers. In any event, the point is that there was one baptism OF THE BODY in the hopes of the resurrection OF THE BODY.

Take that, Marcion.

A reader can learn a lot about Paul’s writing from this section.

V. Conclusion

Tensions exist in Christianity. One such tension is between the Old and New Testaments. By and large, this tension is overstated by those with a superficial knowledge of the texts or who are unwilling or uncomfortable with balancing the texts, which usually means navigating between the ideas that create the tension.

People want things to be simple. Heresy usually appeals to that desire. Marcion supplied the consumer with a religious product that met that need. He also was fortunate to choose a time when the value of Jewish stock was at a record low, which gave his theology greater sales appeal.

The tension that Marcion capitalized on has not gone away. It is a perennial heresy. It reappeared in 1933 when the Deutsche Christians proposed removing the Old Testament from the Christian canon. It reappears whenever someone remarks that God is so much nicer in the New Testament.

Footnotes:

[1] The same issue surfaced again in Germany in 1933. By the time of the Nazi Machtgreifung (takeover) in March of 1933, the Nazi “German Christians” (DC) had fully assimilated liberal biblical criticism taught by German university scholars, such as Adolf von Harnack. One of these points was that the Jewish Old Testament should be taken out of the Christian canon in order to “purify” spiritual Christian beliefs from “materialistic” Jewish beliefs. Harnack was a fan of Marcion and had spent the fifty years of his scholarly career constantly updating his essay on Marcion. The DC proposed this “reform” in November 1933, and the proposal split the German Lutheran church. The more “conservative” Lutheran pastors – many of whom were hardcore Nazis, such as Pastor Neimoller – found this proposal to be a “bridge too far.” They formed the Pastor’s Emergency League to oppose the DC. Hitler thus found himself facing domestic opposition over something he considered an unnecessary distraction.

[2] “God alone is truly happy, by reason of His property of incorruptibility.” (Bk. 2, Ch. 16.)

[3] In my recent review of Perelandra, I asked why Lewis chose to have Weston possessed by the Bent Oyarsa, and, further, why Ransom had to brutally kill Weston. This is the answer to both questions. In Chapter 10, Tertullian writes: For He afforded room for a conflict, wherein man might crush his enemy with the same freedom of his will as had made him succumb to him (proving that the fault was all his own, not God’s), and so worthily recover his salvation by a victory; wherein also the devil might receive a more bitter punishment, through being vanquished by him whom he had previously injured; and wherein God might be discovered to be so much the more good, as waiting for man to return from his present life to a more glorious paradise, with a right to pluck of the tree of life.”

[4] This tendency runs rampant through progressive bible scholarship.

[5] Cf. That which was not assumed was not redeemed.

[6] In this chapter, Tertullian discloses the coding of geographic terms: “So likewise by Egypt is sometimes understood, in His sense, the whole world as being marked out by superstition and a curse. By a similar usage Babylon also in our (St.) John is a figure of the city of Rome, as being like (Babylon) great and proud in royal power, and warring down the saints of God. Now it was in accordance with this style that He called the magi by the name of Samaritans, because (as we have said) they had practised idolatry as did the Samaritans. Moreover, by the phrase before or against the king of Assyria, understand against Herod; against whom the magi then opposed themselves, when they refrained from carrying him back word concerning Christ, whom he was seeking to destroy.”

[7] This ought to give those who repeat the canard that the four Christian gospels were “anonymous” a reason to pause. The Marcion gospel actually was anonymous. It was clearly a reworking of Luke, but it didn’t officially have a name. This was so unusual that Tertullian remarks on it, implying that the Christian gospels were different in that they didn’t circulate anonymously at any time.

[8] Sit with that a moment. In 200 AD, Tertullian identifies Rome as the city in which Peter and Paul died. At this point in history, this claim is not a “tradition,” it is recent history.

[9] It’s also worth noting Tertullian’s empirical/historical claim in Book V, Ch. 19:

I am accustomed in my prescription against all heresies, to fix my compendious criterion (of truth) in the testimony of time ; claiming priority therein as our rule, and alleging lateness to be the characteristic of every heresy. This shall now be proved even by the apostle, when he says: For the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel; which has come unto you, as it is unto all the world. [ Colossians 1:5-6 ] For if, even at that time, the tradition of the gospel had spread everywhere, how much more now! Now, if it is our gospel which has spread everywhere, rather than any heretical gospel, much less Marcion’s, which only dates from the reign of Antoninus, then ours will be the gospel of the apostles. But should Marcion’s gospel succeed in filling the whole world, it would not even in that case be entitled to the character of apostolic. For this quality, it will be evident, can only belong to that gospel which was the first to fill the world;

[10] Bart Ehrman made his bones with a book entitled “The Orthodox Corruption of Scriptures,” which argued that the gospels were not trustworthy because they had been changed to reflect orthodox theology. Strangely, I have never found anyone making the opposite point.

[11] Admittedly, it is not likely that modern textual critics will share stories about floating cities in the East.

[12] For example, Tertullian writes about the beginning of Marcion’s unnamed gospel: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (for such is Marcion’s proposition) he came down to the Galilean city of Capernaum, of course meaning from the heaven of the Creator, to which he had previously descended from his own.” (Bk IV, Ch. 7.)

The Complete Works of Tertullian (33 Books): Cross-Linked to the Bible by Tertullian (Author), Philip Schaff (Translator)

I haven’t read the complete works of Tertullian yet. So far, I’ve only read Tertullian’s “Against Marcion” in all five of its books. That’s not a small portion of Tertullian’s corpus. This volume contains twenty-three works by Tertullian, and “Against Marcion” accounts for almost 25% of the total. So, we might infer that refuting Marcion was one of Tertullian’s major life projects, which might lead to the further inference that Marcion was a major threat to Christianity.

“Against Marcion” is a tour de force. I found it to be logical, well-written, and insightful. The last two books are a chapter-by-chapter review of the Gospel of Luke (“GLuke”) and Paul’s letters. In these sections, Tertullian shows himself to be a master of eisegesis, using typology and both figurative and literal readings to answer Marcion’s claims that Christ was sent by an alien God rather than the Creator God of the Jews. These sections offer deep and surprising insights into these texts. They are worth reading for insights into the meaning of the Bible as much as for their historical content.

Tertullian was Septimius Tertullianus. He was born in approximately 155 AD and died approximately 220 AD. He was born a pagan and converted at some point in his adulthood. He was a resident of Carthage. He notes in “Against Marcion” (“AM”) that he had been Christian for only a short time. He lapsed into the heresy of Montanism at some point midway through his Christian life, but it is debated whether this meant that he stopped being – or belonging to – the Catholic Church. Marcion appears to be associated with Montanism at the time he wrote AM – he mentions the “New Prophecy” as something he identifies with – but his Montanism does not seem to affect his thoroughly orthodox approach to ecclesiology, Christology, or God’s nature. [1]

Marcion was born in Sinope, Pontus, around 100 AD. After possibly being excommunicated for heresy by his father, Marcion went to Rome in 129 AD, where he made a huge donation of 200,000 sesterces. After spending five years working out his theological program, in the summer of 144, when there was an interregnum in the succession of bishops, Marcion called for a church council to present his ideas. His ideas were rejected, his donation was returned, and he was excommunicated. Marcion then used his wealth to establish a rival church organized along the lines of the Catholic Church.[2]

Marcion’s theology was almost Gnostic. He believed that the Jewish Creator God (JCG) was a malicious divinity, albeit an actual divinity, responsible for human suffering. The JCG was a god of justice, but not of love. The Old Testament disclosed the limitations and ugliness of the JCG.

There was also a Good God (GG) who was totally unknown and alien to the world. The GG did not make the world or anything in it. Unlike the Gnostics, Marcion did not teach that human beings had a divine spark that came from a god superior to the JCG. Whatever soul that humans had was created by the JCG. The GG did not owe humanity anything since it had not created humanity or been involved with humanity. All the writings of the Old Testament were revelations about the JCG alone.

The GG revealed himself in the 15^th year of the reign of Tiberius, when Jesus descended from the GG's heaven as a fully formed man. Marcion’s Jesus was not born, did not have a mother, and was definitely not Jewish. For Marcion, Jesus’s first appearance was in a synagogue.[3] Like the Gnostics, Jesus had an immaterial, spiritual body, but unlike the Gnostics, Jesus did suffer with humanity in the Crucifixion, albeit not in substance.

Most of this sketch comes from the Summary of Harnack’s Marcion. Unfortunately, Tertullian does not offer a direct and clear statement of Marcion’s theology. Marcion’s theology can be inferred from Tertullian’s polemical attacks on Marcion. These attacks are our prime source of information about what Marcion taught. Marcion’s writings have not survived. A lot of what I learned from the Summary, I saw in Tertullian; however, I assumed that Tertullian was exaggerating or speaking hyperbolically. It turns out that modern scholars don’t believe that to be the case.

Marcion never wrote a systematic statement of his beliefs. He redacted the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul’s letters. These two sources – the gospel and the apostolic letters – formed the Marcionite canon. He also wrote something called the Antithesis, a series of statements taken from the Old and New Testaments that show a contradiction between them. None of these works has survived.

Tertullian seems too well-informed about Marcion’s theology to have been limited to the antithesis and Marcion’s canon. It is clear that Tertullian had copies of both, since he quotes them, but it isn’t clear to me how the idea of an “alien god” could have come from these sources alone. Cutting out passages of Luke doesn’t seem to explicitly communicate that a different god is being proposed. That kind of insight needed a separate avenue of communication, such as discussions with a Marcionite or a letter explaining Marcion’s belief.[4]

Tertullian does not mention either source, and that’s interesting. The Marcionite Church is supposed to have rivaled the Catholic Church in size, but although Tertullian condemns the heresy of Marcion, he does not mention whether there is a Marcionite congregation in Carthage. Had Marcionism gotten that far by 200 AD? Tertullian’s silence on the subject suggests it hadn’t, but the question of how Tertullian knew Marcion’s theology is puzzling. It may have simply involved information coming in by word of mouth via commerce and sailors.

A book I am currently reading gives a nice organizational overview of AM:

In the five books of Against Marcion, which appeared in at least three ever-expanding editions over the course of a number of years and which incorporated material from the earlier Against the Jews, Tertullian argued for the unity of God (book one), defended the Old Testament god as God (book two), identified Jesus as the messiah promised in the Old Testament (book three), even on the basis of Luke’s Gospel, the only gospel Marcion accepted as canonical (book four), and Paul’s letters (book five).

Dunn, Geoffrey D.. Tertullian (The Early Church Fathers) (p. 30).

I. Book One

Tertullian begins with a tirade against Marcion, beginning with his birthplace. His take-down is a classic:

The Euxine Sea, as it is called, is self-contradictory in its nature, and deceptive in its name. As you would not account it hospitable from its situation, so is it severed from our more civilised waters by a certain stigma which attaches to its barbarous character. The fiercest nations inhabit it, if indeed it can be called habitation , when life is passed in waggons. They have no fixed abode; their life has no germ of civilization; they indulge their libidinous desires without restraint, and for the most part naked. Moreover, when they gratify secret lust, they hang up their quivers on their car-yokes, to warn off the curious and rash observer. Thus without a blush do they prostitute their weapons of war. The dead bodies of their parents they cut up with their sheep, and devour at their feasts. They who have not died so as to become food for others, are thought to have died an accursed death. Their women are not by their sex softened to modesty. They uncover the breast, from which they suspend their battle-axes, and prefer warfare to marriage. In their climate, too, there is the same rude nature. The day-time is never clear, the sun never cheerful; the sky is uniformly cloudy; the whole year is wintry; the only wind that blows is the angry North. Waters melt only by fires; their rivers flow not by reason of the ice; their mountains are covered with heaps of snow. All things are torpid, all stiff with cold. Nothing there has the glow of life, but that ferocity which has given to scenic plays their stories of the sacrifices of the Taurians, and the loves of the Colchians, and the torments of the Caucasus. Nothing, however, in Pontus is so barbarous and sad as the fact that Marcion was born there….

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian’s first book includes a metaphysical analysis of divinity. Tertullian argues against Marcion’s “Two God theology”[5] on the grounds that God must be one, simple, and indivisible. Tertullian’s definition of God is “the great Supreme existing in eternity, unbegotten, unmade without beginning, without end.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 3.) With that definition, God must be unique and not have an equal. Thus, all of the capacities of divinity must be found in a single being. “God is not if He is not one.” (Id.)

One is an important number. “After unity, number commences.” (Bk. 1, Ch. 5). If Marcion can posit two gods, then three or more gods can equally be posited, leading to the thirty Eons of the Gnostics.

Tertullian also attacks the novelty of Marcion’s god. According to Marcion’s theology, the GG had no involvement with the world until the 15th year of Tiberius's reign (“Year 15”). The problem is not that the GG was unknown. Men have had “unknown” gods before; the JCG was an unknown god prior to Moses. The problem was that the GG was completely alienated from the world, which raised the question of what the GG was doing before Year 15. This late appearance is inconsistent with eternity. The newness of the GG indicates a beginning, which contradicts the definition of God.

The GG is also impotent. The JCG has miracles and creation to prove His existence. “One stray vegetable at least Marcion’s god ought to have produced on his own; so might he be preached up as a new Triptolemus.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, ch. 11.) (Triptolemus spread knowledge of agriculture around the world at the behest of Demeter.) The GG is either unwilling to create or else unable, and there is no other reason. (id.) Tertullian questions the claim that the GG is “unwilling” inasmuch as the GG has engaged in the world by coming down from heaven, preaching, suffering, and rising from the dead, all of which indicate that the GG wants to be acknowledged.[6] (Id.)

Tertullian points out that there is no evidence for the existence of the GG. (CWOT, Bk. 1, ch. 12.) The GG has not created anything that might show his existence. Tertullian points out that there is a connection between “cause” and “proof.” A proof points from a cause to a conclusion. Insofar as the GG is totally alienated from existence, there is no effect caused by the GG that would point to the GG.

In Chapter 12, Tertullian plays on an interesting point of agreement between Marcionism and Christianity. Like the Christians (and Jews), and unlike the pagans, the Marcionites agree that the JCG created the world ex nihilo, but they say that since the world is corrupt, this proves that the JCG is not the Good God, since we know a tree by its fruits. Tertullian then makes a point about the pagan view of the eternality of the world:

The majority of the philosophers hesitated to assign a beginning and an end to the said world, lest its constituent elements, great as they undoubtedly are, should fail to be regarded as divine, which are objects of worship with the Persian magi, the Egyptian hierophants, and the Indian gymnosophists. The very superstition of the crowd, inspired by the common idolatry, when ashamed of the names and fables of their ancient dead borne by their idols, has recourse to the interpretation of natural objects, and so with much ingenuity cloaks its own disgrace, figuratively reducing Jupiter to a heated substance, and Juno to an aërial one (according to the literal sense of the Greek words); Vesta, in like manner, to fire, and the Muses to waters, and the Great Mother to the earth, mowed as to its crops, ploughed up with lusty arms, and watered with baths. Thus Osiris also, whenever he is buried, and looked for to come to life again, and with joy recovered, is an emblem of the regularity wherewith the fruits of the ground return, and the elements recover life, and the year comes round; as also the lions of Mithras are philosophical sacraments of arid and scorched nature. It is, indeed, enough for me that natural elements, foremost in site and state, should have been more readily regarded as divine than as unworthy of God. I will, however, come down to humbler objects. A single floweret from the hedgerow, I say not from the meadows; a single little shellfish from any sea, I say not from the Red Sea; a single stray wing of a moorfowl, I say nothing of the peacock,— will, I presume, prove to you that the Creator was but a sorry artificer!

CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 12.

This is an intriguing passage. Moderns tend to think that we were the first to understand that religious stories can be “naturalized,” e.g., that stories of dying and rising gods were about planting and harvesting, but here we have Tertullian appealing to the same logic to rebut the pagans’ attempt to divinize nature. Because pagans divinized nature, pagan myths were intended to reveal the divine in nature. Christians did not do that. Christ died and rose because that happened, not because it was intended as a parable of the seasonality of divinized nature.

Having dealt with the pagan claim on one wing, Tertullian turns to face Marcion’s charge that the JCG is incompetent: a single flower speaks to God’s greatness.

So, interestingly, Christianity stands between Paganism and Marcionism: nature was not divine as the pagans would have it, but it was very awesome as a work of the Creator.[7]

Since the GG is not a creator, what can the Marcionites point to as evidence of the GG’s existence. The one “proof” that Marcionites make for the existence of the GG is that the GG “delivered man by his supreme and most excellent goodness.” (CWOT, Bk. 1, Ch. 17.) Tertullian argues that this begs the question:

Now without doubt the first thing you have to do is to prove that he exists, after the same manner that the existence of God must ordinarily be proved— by his works; and only after that by his good deeds. For the first question is, Whether he exists? And then, What is his character? The former is to be tested by his works, the other by the beneficence of them. It does not simply follow that he exists, because he is said to have wrought deliverance for man; but only after it shall have been settled that he exists, will there be room for saying that he has affected this liberation. And even this point also must have its own evidence, because it may be quite possible both that he has existence, and yet has not wrought the alleged deliverance.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian’s point is that Marcionites cannot claim that the GG is a savior without showing that the GG exists and has the capacities they claim for the GG.

In Chapter 19, Tertullian points out that while Marcion claims that Jesus disclosed the existence of the GG in Year 15, it was not until the reign of Antoninus Pius, “about 115 years and 6-1/2 months” later, that Marcion made the claim that Jesus was an agent of the GG rather than the JCS as everyone thought up to that point. Tertullian writes:

Now, from Tiberius to Antoninus Pius, there are about 115 years and 6-1/2 months. Just such an interval do they place between Christ and Marcion. Inasmuch, then, as Marcion, as we have shown, first introduced this god to notice in the time of Antoninus, the matter becomes at once clear, if you are a shrewd observer. The dates already decide the case, that he who came to light for the first time in the reign of Antoninus, did not appear in that of Tiberius; in other words, that the God of the Antonine period was not the God of the Tiberian; and consequently, that he whom Marcion has plainly preached for the first time, was not revealed by Christ (who announced His revelation as early as the reign of Tiberius).

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

In Chapter 20, Tertullian addresses Marcion’s “separation of law and gospel.” (CWOT, Bk, 1, Ch. 20.) Like the Protestant Reformers, Marcion emphasized Paul’s rebuke of Peter for being insufficiently rigorous concerning Jewish dietary practices. Tertullian points out that Paul recognized the authority of Peter, and that the rebuke was directed to conduct, not principles.

As Catholics would do 1,500 years later, Tertullian called out Marcion’s teachings as innovative and contrary to apostolic teachings:

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation. You will, however, find no church of apostolic origin but such as reposes its Christian faith in the Creator. But if the churches shall prove to have been corrupt from the beginning, where shall the pure ones be found? Will it be among the adversaries of the Creator? Show us, then, one of your churches, tracing its descent from an apostle, and you will have gained the day.

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian.

Tertullian points to the concepts of the apostolic deposit of faith, the preservation of that faith in the apostolic churches, and apostolic succession, all of which are well-established by 200 AD.[8]

Tertullian challenges the goodness of the GG on the grounds that the GG did not intervene in the world until Year 15. If the GG were omniscient, then the GG’s goodness seems to have been on hold for a lengthy period. This implies that Goodness is not part of the essence of the GG, but merely an accident, which would disprove the GG’s divinity – God does not have accidents.

Further, goodness must be rationally good. Tertullian argues that rational goodness is an ordered goodness, and the ordering of love is first to the neighbor and then to the stranger. But the GG is an alien god, a complete stranger. By what reason does such a stranger bestow love on the stranger? Tertullian argues:

Such a deliverer, I had almost said kidnapper, would even meet with condemnation in the world. Now, no other than this is the character of Marcion’s god, swooping upon an alien world, snatching away man from his God, the son from his father, the pupil from his tutor, the servant from his master— to make him impious to his God, undutiful to his father, ungrateful to his tutor, worthless to his master. If, now, the rational benevolence makes man such, what sort of being prithee would the irrational make of him? None I should think more shameless than him who is baptized to his god in water which belongs to another, who stretches out his hands to his god towards a heaven which is another’s, who kneels to his god on ground which is another’s, offers his thanksgivings to his god over bread which belongs to another, and distributes by way of alms and charity, for the sake of his god, gifts which belong to another God. Who, then, is that so good a god of theirs, that man through him becomes evil; so propitious, too, as to incense against man that other God who is, indeed, his own proper Lord?

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (Bk 1, Ch. 23.)

In essence, according to Tertullian, Marcionites are ungrateful rebels, and the GG is a thief.

Marcion’s doctrine of non-bodily resurrection is also criticized on the grounds that the body deserves resurrection since it did nothing wrong. It was the servant of the soul. A salvation that does not include the body is imperfect. (Bk 1, Ch. 24.)

II. Conclusion of First Part

Tertullian’s metaphysics seems rudimentary. Readers of later Christian theologians will see that Tertullian lacks the concepts and language to give his arguments the precision they will acquire later. Nonetheless, the principles that define the Christian approach to divinity, the Trinity, and Christology are present.

While people acquainted with later theology will notice the rudimentary nature of Tertullian’s arguments, the general reader may be surprised at how sophisticated Tertullian’s arguments are. Moderns probably like to think they invented the idea that religious principles evolved from the forms of nature, such as planting and harvest, as expressed in the dying and rising of Osiris. This is a chronological prejudice. Tertullian was aware of that comparison and applied it to paganism. This was not malicious because pagans divinized nature in a way that Christians didn’t. This suggests that facile attempts to impose The Golden Bough on Christianity lack merit because the cultural seedbed was not there. Christians were not interested in a religion that made nature more divine; they sought a religion that elevated their understanding of a God uniquely beyond time and comprehension.

Footnotes:

[1] This is the passage I am thinking of:

Or was it on the principle which we maintain in the cause of the new prophecy, that to grace ecstasy or rapture is incident. For when a man is rapt in the Spirit, especially when he beholds the glory of God, or when God speaks through him, he necessarily loses his sensation, because he is overshadowed with the power of God—a point concerning which there is a question between us and the carnally-minded. Now, it is no difficult matter to prove the rapture of Peter. For how could he have known Moses and Elias, except (by being) in the Spirit?

Tertullian. The Complete Works of Tertullian (“CWOT”)

It seems that Tertullian might be describing something like Pentecostalism.

Another passage also mentions “the new prophecies,” but it may be that he’s talking about Christian prophecies, such as the Book of Revelation:

According indeed to our view, he is Antichrist; as it is taught us in both the ancient and the new prophecies, and especially by the Apostle John, who says that already many false prophets are gone out into the world, the fore-runners of Antichrist, who deny that Christ has come in the flesh, [ 1 John 4:1-3 ] and do not acknowledge Jesus (to be the Christ), meaning in God the Creator.

Tertullian. CWOT.

Given that this book was written around 200 AD, it seems that Revelation was known to Tertullian by 200 AD and accepted by him and, presumably, his community as canonical by that time.

[2] It is interesting that liberal bible scholars will point out that Catholics copied Marcion’s idea of a canon, but they don’t mention that Marcion copied Catholic institutional structure. Typically, such scholars argue that there was no pope in Rome at the time and that Catholic institutional structures developed later.

Sometimes it is important to note the silences.

[3] Since Luke 3:1 provides the reference to the 15^th year of Tiberius, followed by his baptism by John, the temptation in the desert, and a long biography of Jesus’s lineage, while the first reference to Jesus preaching in a synagogue is Luke 4:16, it seems that Marcion “purified” all the “corruption” that linked Jesus with the JCG by redacting everything between Luke 3:1 and Luke 4:16.

[4] For example, Tertullian is aware that Cerdon was a mentor of Marcion. (CWOT, Bk.1, ch.2.) This information has to come from a source outside of Marcion’s canon.

[5] Tertullian seems clear that Marcion’s theology posits two “principles”, i.e., the GG and the JCG. In the 300s, Ephanius would write that the Marcionites of his time posited three powers: the GG, the JCG, and Satan.

[6] In Book 1, Chapter 11, Tertullian also attacks Marcion’s Docetism, pointing out that it was “all the more shameful” if Christ only “pretended the assumption of a bodily substance” during the crucifixion.

[7] This is yet another position where Christianity exists at a point of tension between those who would place Nature over Man and those who would reject nature as evil.

[8] Tertullian writes: “This most patent conclusion requires to be defended by us against the clamours of the opposite side. For they allege that Marcion did not so much innovate on the rule (of faith) by his separation of the law and the gospel, as restore it after it had been previously adulterated.” (Bk. 1, Ch. 21.)

In 1921, Adolf von Harnack published a book entitled “Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott” or, in English, “The Gospel of the alien God.” Harnack is a major figure in historical-critical biblical scholarship. His ideas and insights still inform the thinking of 21^st-century university historical-critical biblical scholars. In turn, Marcion was a major figure for Harnack. His first academic recognition came in 1871, when he wrote an essay on Marcion. After a lifetime of adding to that essay, fifty years later, Harnack released a text that praised Marcion as a fulcrum of Christian history.

We are now one hundred years removed from Harnack, nearly as long a period as Marcion was from the life of Christ. Today, we can look at Harnack’s text on two levels. On the one hand, it reveals the ideas that permeated the time of Marcion, i.e., Rome in the mid-second century. On the other hand, the book also reveals the ideas that permeated Harnack’s world, the Protestant/Academic world of Germany on the eve of the Nazi regime. This latter perspective may be more important for us than the former because Harnack’s book premiered and made respectable ideas that would become political issues under the Nazis, such as the idea of eliminating the Old Testament from the Christian canon.

The Study Guide is a summary of Marcion’s work on the “Gospel of an Alien God.” The study guide provides an overview of Harnack’s work on Marcion, followed by a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the text. The chapters are short, but the summaries seem to get a grip on the key points that Harnack intends in his book, while also offering excerpts from Harnack’s work. In fine, the study guide should orient the reader to Harnack’s text.

I. The Alien

The study guide introduces Harnack’s view of Marcion's ideas. The title’s reference to an “alien god” was meant to capture Marcion’s key notion that the god of Christ was not the god of the Jews. The god of the Jews was the creator of the world and spoken about in the Jewish scriptures, which Marcion labeled the “Old Testament.” Christ’s God was the Good God (GG), who was nothing but love and never exercised judgment or punished. The Jewish God (JG) was the Creator of the world and was a god of justice, who punished and caused evil.[1] The GG did not create the world, including the souls of human beings, and was most definitely not spoken about in the Old Testament. The GG was first disclosed to the world in the 15^th year of Tiberius when Christ descended to a synagogue in Capernaum as revealed by the one true gospel that Marcion included in his canon.

Marcion’s god (GG) is totally alien to humanity. GG did not create man or put man in the box of a fallen nature. GG owes nothing to man. GG simply interlopes into the world and, as an act of the purest grace, sends his Christ to Earth to die and therefore provide a basis for offering salvation to humanity. Why and how this works is not clear. It may be that the Passion and death of GG’s Christ is a kind of payment to the JG to buy the right to redeem humans.[2]

The Study Guide explains that Marcion came from Sinope in the Pontic region of northern Asia Minor on the Black Sea. His father was a Catholic priest in Sinope. Marcion left Sinope after allegedly seducing a virgin, which may be a metaphor for attempting to teach heresy. He came to Rome around 139 AD and made a donation of 200,000 sesterces to the Catholic Church of Rome. In July 144, AD, at a time when there was an interregnum in the office of the bishops of Rome,[3] he demanded that the Church of Rome accept his “two gods” theology. The Roman Church rejected the demand and returned his donation. Marcion then embarked on his career as a heresiarch.

II. Dealing with Complexity

Harnack’s explanation for Marcion’s “two gods” theology (also known as “two principles”) was that from its inception Christianity was Complexio Oppositorum, a religion that embraced a variety of contradictory extreme positions:

Harnack catalogues these polarities with characteristic comprehensiveness: Christianity preached a previously unknown God and simultaneously the Lord of heaven and earth; it proclaimed a new Savior recently crucified and asserted that he had participated in creation since the patriarchs; it emphasized pure spirit and yet produced “a harsh and obscure literalism as well as sacraments that addressed religious sensuousness”; it announced the resurrection of the flesh and simultaneously treated the flesh as “the worst of enemies”; it sensitized the conscience through the wrathful God of judgment and proclaimed the same God as the source of all mercy and love (pp. 5-6). This complexio oppositorum was not a corruption of Jesus’ original message; it was the unavoidable consequence of transmitting the Old Testament and the entire religious capital of late Judaism alongside the new proclamation. “This ‘catholicism’ was not in the spirit of the founder” (p. 6), Harnack observes — Jesus had always “had in view only practical religion itself at its decisive main points” — but the material transmitted with his message demanded systematic ordering once it reached Greek soil, where “a religion became a philosophy of religion” (p. 7).

Andersen, Gabriel. A Study Guide to Harnack - Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (pp. 8-9).

Harnack argued that this complexity, even contradictions, required an institutional matrix[4] to preserve the varied ideological commitments that existed in its foundation:

This complexity required an institutional bearer. No individual, “however profound and capable of development might be his spirit,” could internalize the entire antithetical complex; he could “always choose only parts.” The church thus emerged as “intrinsically indispensable” — the entity strong enough to maintain the whole and defend it against both abridgments and expansions. “The visible catholic church is therefore no ‘accidental phenomenon’” (p. 8), but the necessary guarantor of Christianity’s syncretistic universality. Against this stood those Harnack calls “heretics” — those “who sought to make themselves at home in the religion by means of excision, accentuation, and coherent organization of the material” (p. 8).

Andersen, (p. 9).

III. The Canon

Marcion is famous for offering the “first Christian canon.” Like many things, I think we need to be cautious about making any didactic statement like this. We simply don’t have enough information to confidently state that anything is a fact. Marcion seems to have offered the first collection of books that distinguished divine revelation from (or about) his god (the GG) from divine revelation about the other god (the JG). While presented as an innovation that Catholics[5] readily adopted, the Marcionite canon was necessitated by Marcion’s bright line distinction between GG and JG. In contrast, even after Marcion, the Christian canon was always more porous. There were books, such as the Shepherd of Hermes, that were considered edifying although not canonical in the sense of a book read in church. Similarly, the deuterocanonical books were always recognized as both canonical and, yet, somehow in another canon.

Marcion’s canon consisted of a version of the Gospel of Luke and ten Pauline letters. No copy of Marcion’s Gospel has survived. It has been recreated by references and quotes in Tertullian and Epiphanius. Luke was adopted because Marcion viewed Paul as the only reliable disciple of Jesus. This may have been because Paul condemned Judaizing, and he was also outside the institutional disciples, who corrupted Jesus’ message.[6] In addition, Marcion taught that Paul received the Gospel bearing Luke’s name directly from Jesus (and, hence, the ascription of the gospel to Luke is incorrect). He also taught that Mark and Matthew were “forgeries.”

There is a debate about the form in which Marcion received Luke. Harnack seems to accept the idea that Marcion emended Luke by “purifying” it through “philological means.” In other words, he cut out the parts that did not conform to his theology. Nonetheless, Harnack insists that Marcion was “provisionally honest” – he acknowledged what he had done, and his motive was to purify the text.[7]

He did the same thing to the Pauline epistles that were allowed into his canon.

Harnack’s assessment of Marcion’s “emendations” is as follows:

Harnack identifies four categories of correction: (1) exchanges of similar-sounding words, (2) changes of active/passive voice, (3) rearrangements of sentence order, and (4) direct alteration of ideas and sentences. Behind these operations stood twelve “self-contained motives”: (1) Creator-God may not appear as Father of Jesus Christ; (2) the Old Testament cannot have prophesied anything fulfilled in Christ; (3) the good God must have been hidden until his appearing; (4) the good God is not the director of the world; (5) the good God may not appear as judge — he is exclusively merciful; (6) redemption relates exclusively to eternal life; (7) Christ is understood modalistically; (8) Christ had no earthly nature — no flesh, no physical body, not born; (9) Christ abolished the law; (10) he demanded total separation from the world; (11) he raised up only one genuine apostle (Paul); (12) he will not appear again as judge but will announce the great separation (pp. 46-47).

Andersen (p. 26).

IV. The Antithesis

Marcion also wrote a text called the Antithesis, which played the game of putting seemingly contradictory quotes from the Old Testament and excerpts of his “emended” “New Testament.” The gist of the Antithesis is well-known to readers who note that the God of the Old Testament seems so different than the God of the New Testament.

Marcion adhered to a “nuanced Docetism.” Christ was not born. He did not have a childhood. He appeared “suddenly and unexpectedly in the fifteenth year of Tiberius by descending into a Galilean synagogue at Capernaum. Christ did not have a material body, and yet, he actually suffered in and with the human form into which he had entered. (p. 82.)

Marcion was also a Modalist. The Son was the Father in a different mode.

V. The Marcion Church

The Study Guide describes the Marcionite Church, which allegedly was larger than the Catholic Church in the late second century. According to Harnack, Marcion’s four contributions[8] were:

Harnack summarizes Marcion’s organizational achievement in four points: (1) he created the Christian Holy Scripture — eleven writings comprising Gospel and ten Pauline epistles; (2) he produced the Antitheses as critical companion; (3) he insisted on biblical theology rather than philosophical dogmatics; (4) he bound believers through the alien God, aversion to the Creator, the new Scripture, and strict conduct of life. The result was “a unified church which spanned the empire. The church of the bishops required several generations to get that far” (p. 97).

Andersen (pp. 49-50).

A fatal flaw in Marcion’s system may have been its requirement that adherents renounce marriage and children. The motivation included an enmity to the JG:

The dual motivation for this rigorous asceticism was distinctive: liberation from sinful flesh, certainly, but also deliberate spite against the Creator — “one should offend this evil god, irritate him, spite him, and thereby show him that one no longer is in his service” (p. 96). Fasting was the strictest in Christendom: meat and wine were forbidden (fish was allowed), and fasting on the Sabbath was practiced specifically “to spite the lawgiver” (p. 96).

Andersen (p. 49).

VI. Marcion’s Legacy

Harnack summarized Marcion’s legacy as follows:

Harnack catalogues seven affirmations that, taken individually, would each “have been enough to secure for him a unique and eminent place in church history” (p. 138): (1) literal Scripture, ban on allegorism; (2) the gospel standing on its own without external authorities; (3) Christianity understood through the Paul vs. Judaizers struggle; (4) the need for a canonical New Testament in two parts; (5) church unity based on principles of faith and life rather than philosophical dogmatics; (6) rejection of all syncretism, fanaticism, mysticism, and pneumatic enthusiasms; (7) the Old Testament as the book of a “less-worthy Jewish God.”

Andersen (pp. 65-66).

And:

Harnack catalogues seven affirmations that, taken individually, would each “have been enough to secure for him a unique and eminent place in church history” (p. 138): (1) literal Scripture, ban on allegorism; (2) the gospel standing on its own without external authorities; (3) Christianity understood through the Paul vs. Judaizers struggle; (4) the need for a canonical New Testament in two parts; (5) church unity based on principles of faith and life rather than philosophical dogmatics; (6) rejection of all syncretism, fanaticism, mysticism, and pneumatic enthusiasms; (7) the Old Testament as the book of a “less-worthy Jewish God.”

Andersen (pp. 65-66).

VII. Marcion and Weimar Germany

We can now move to the reception of Marcion after the second century, namely the era before the 1933 Nazi “seizure of power” (machtergreifung). Harnack’s catalog of Marcion’s “affirmations” is noticeably Lutheran. For example, Marcion’s development of a canon had definite implications for a “sola scriptura” approach to authority:

Harnack’s culminating thesis is that Marcion was not merely a textual critic but “a creator of a church, who with gifted vision recognized the necessity of giving to his church… a new littera scripta as the basic document of its faith” (p. 52). “He reworked the Gospel of Luke and the epistles of Paul in order to combine them and to put this corpus in place of the Old Testament. The idea of combining them in the sense of a unified canon as well as the idea of displacing the Old Testament with a new collection is his work” (p. 51).

Andersen (pp. 27-28).

Likewise, Marcion’s key inspiration involved putting “law” and “grace” in opposition to each other:

“The point of departure for Marcion’s criticism of the tradition cannot be mistaken. It was provided in the Pauline contrast of law and gospel” (p. 22). Marcion had “immersed himself in the basic ideas of Galatians and Romans” and found in them the definitive illumination of the Christian religion. The discovery was threefold: “that Christ represented and proclaimed an entirely new God; further, that religion is simply nothing other than devout belief in this redeemer-God who transforms man; and finally, that the totality of world events down to the present time is the evil and contradictory drama of a deity who possesses no higher value than does the obtuse and loathesome world itself” (p. 22).

Andersen (pp. 17-18).

Thus, Harnack idealized Marcion as a great thinker who anticipated Martin Luther by separating Law and Grace. Harnack compared Luther and Marcion:

But Marcion went further: “the Christian religion is simply nothing but faith (in the sense of fides historica and fiducia) in God’s revelation in Christ” (p. 138). The comparison with Luther is explicit: “Luther’s concept of faith actually is the one that stands nearest to the Marcionite concept, as Neander has already seen” (p. 138).

Andersen (p. 66).

For Harnack, the comparison of Marcion with Luther often had Luther coming out on the losing side:

Only one figure in the entire subsequent tradition approaches Marcion’s achievement: “Only Luther with his justification-faith manages to rival Marcion here; but since he holds fast to the identity of the Creator-God and the Redeemer-God, he is able to combine with this faith the whole wealth of salvation history” (p. 63). The critical difference is that Luther’s maintenance of the one God permitted him to affirm the full range of biblical material while still insisting on the primacy of grace; Marcion’s separation of the two Gods required the elimination of everything that did not serve the exclusive principle of redemption.

Andersen (p. 34).

Likewise:

Luther “once again gave a central position to the Pauline-Marcionite recognition of the distinction between law and gospel” (p. 134). His thesis that “the law is unable to show us the true God” approached Marcion; the law was “the Jews’ ‘Sachsenspiegel’” — a carnal code Christians no longer needed (p. 134). Agricola “assessed the law as a failed attempt on God’s part to lead mankind by means of threats” — but Luther recoiled from the full implication, believing “the law was indispensable for the awakening of the conscience” (p. 135). Harnack muses: “What an unburdening of Christianity… if Luther had taken this step!” (p. 135). The Calvinist and Anabaptist churches went in the opposite direction, placing the Old Testament on “fully equal footing” with the New — producing in some groups “an Islamic zeal” and in others “a new kind of Judaism” (p. 135). “If Marcion had reappeared in the time of the Huguenots and Cromwell, he would once again have encountered the warlike God of Israel whom he abhorred, right in the very middle of Christendom” (p. 135).

Andersen (pp. 64-65).

Harnack proposed that the time was right – in 1921 – to enact Marcion’s project of eliminating the Jewish Old Testament from the Christian canon:

The thesis that is to be argued in the following may be stated thus: the rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church rightly avoided; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a fate from which the Reformation was not yet able to escape; but still to preserve it in Protestantism as a canonical document since the nineteenth century is the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling.

Harnack, Adolf, Marcion: The Gospel of an Alien God (The Labyrinth Press)t ranslated by John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierm (1924)

In Holy Reich, Richard Steigman-Gall points out how Harnack belief that Luther had not gone far enough influenced the Nazis:

Harnack sadly acknowledged that Luther did not expunge the Old Testament from Protestantism –“What an unburdening of Christianity and its doctrine it would have been if Luther had taken this step!”–but nonetheless, his emphasis on gospel over law meant that “Luther’s concept of faith actually is the one that stands nearest to the Marcionite concept.”136 Nowhere in his book Marcion did Harnack engage in a political antisemitism aimed directly against contemporary Jewry. In fact, like many other liberal theologians, he would later take exception to the “rabble-rousing”of the Nazis. However, the work influenced the growing pro-Nazi thrust of Kulturprotestantismus after 1918; more importantly, it predated and overlapped completely with Nazi attitudes toward the Old Testament.137 So long as departures such as Harnack’s existed within the parameters of legitimate Protestant theology, the Nazi rejection of the Old Testament cannot be used to demonstrate an antithesis to Christianity.

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (p. 41). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.[9]

The idea of redacting the Old Testament was in the air before Harnack published his book on Marcion. Steigman-Gall notes:

Other sources of Hitler’s religious views in this period confirm a Christian element. As early as 1919 Hitler sketched out his basic worldview in an unpublished manuscript. The first section was on the Bible, under which heading Hitler noted: “Monumental History of Mankind–Idealism–Materialism: Nothing without a cause – history makes men . . . the children of God and men.”64 He concluded from these ruminations the first result: “Purification of the Bible – that which is consistent with our spirit. Second result: critical examination of the remainder.”65 This “purification” is almost certainly an allusion to the Old Testament, which both Eckart and Dinter claimed had to be removed from the Christian canon owing to its origins in Judaism. Although such a position brings into question the theological soundness of Hitler’s religious views, the idea of expunging the Old Testament from Christianity was not simply a nazification of Christianity. No one less than Adolf von Harnack, one of the leading Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, had conceived such an idea when the Nazi movement was still to be born (see subsequent discussion).

Steigmann-Gall, Richard. The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (p. 27). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Harnack was a friend of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the author of “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” which inspired Nazi ideology. (Steigman-Gall, supra, p. 40.) Chamberlain used Harnack’s polemics against Judaism for his Foundations. (Id.)[10] In turn, Chamberlain was the source for the Nazi’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg to write his “The Myth of the Twentieth Century.”

The connections between liberal Protestantism and Nazi ideology is incestuous and convoluted:

As Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, Chamberlain served as a living link between the Wagner legacy and the Nazis, living just long enough to see the movement become a political force and endorsing it as Germany’s only hope. That Chamberlain was also associated with liberal Protestant theologians like Harnack is more than coincidence. Perhaps most revealing, however, is that in the Third Reich it was not only Nazis who revered Chamberlain. Members of the Confessing Church, a group often cast as the “true” anti-Nazi wing of Protestantism, believed he was their intellectual property as much as Rosenberg’s or the DC’s. In a 1936 article in the Confessing Church journal Junge Kirche, Chamberlain was described as “outstanding among the confessors of Jesus Christ at the turn of the century.”91

Steigmann-Gall (pp. 100-101).

In short, liberal German Protestant bible scholars, like Harnack, prepared the ground for the Nazi rise to power. After the “machtgreifung,” in November 1933, the German Christians ( Deutsche Christians (DC)) attempted to enact Harnack’s proposal to remove the Old Testament from the Christian canon:

The following November came the national DC conference in the Berlin Sports Palace. The rift in German Protestantism was widened even more when one of the Berlin DC leaders, Reinhold Krause, formally called for the removal of the Old Testament.47 The outrage that ensued led Martin Niemöller to found the Pastors’ Emergency League (Pfarrernotbund, or PNB), the direct institutional forerunner of the BK, as a counterpoint to the DC and their scriptural position. Such outrage was not confined to PNB members, however; even within the ranks of the DC there was indignation. Many left the DC, and the Bavarian section went so far as to voluntarily disbanded itself in protest.

Steigmann-Gall (p. 164).

Although this proposal was defeated, the DC was able to enact a variety of antisemitic rules.

You can hear biblical scholars on YouTube today sighing about how things would have been “in some respects better” if Marcion had prevailed. (See Video at 1 minute.) These scholars don’t mention the ban on reproduction or the virulent antisemitism.

We had a glimpse of “better.”

It was not pretty.

Footnotes:

[1] Marcion’s understanding of the Jewish God is ambivalent. The JG is called the god of justice and is not identified as evil, but he is called malicious: “Harnack enumerates seven attributes of the Creator’s malice: creating weak and mortal man, dispensing disproportionate punishments, cruelty and warlike rage, punishing children for fathers’ sins, hardening hearts, jealousy regarding the tree of life, and partiality toward his worshippers even when wicked (p. 67). Yet Marcion’s contempt was directed not only at the Creator but at his creation: “flesh stuffed with dung,” the “lewd transaction” of procreation, the “factory of filth” (Tertullian, pp. 70-71).Andersen (p. 39).

[2] Marcionite theology can be distinguished from Gnostic theology in that, for Gnostics, the “divine spark” belonged to the gods, higher than the demiurge. “The creation of man was “a grievous tragedy” — God imparted his own imperfect substance through the soul but mixed it with evil matter through the flesh. Crucially, the good God “has no part at all in man, not even in his spirit or his soul” (p. 72) — distinguishing Marcion sharply from the Gnostics, who maintained a divine spark in humanity” Andersen, (p. 39)..

[3] The accuracy of these dates is suspicious. The dating of births, deaths, and publications during this period is usually inferred and approximate. The dating of the four gospels is heavily debated and runs from 60 AD to 160 AD.

[4] There is an interesting sociological insight here. Christian heresies usually involve a move toward simplification. Embracing the “and” required by many Christian doctrines is psychologically difficult, e.g., Is Christ human or divine? Catholic Answer: He is human AND divine. Likewise, is God a god of love and forgiveness, or a god that can drown most of humanity? Catholic Answer: Both.

[5] I am not going to refer to the Christians of the Great Church as “proto-orthodox” or “orthodox Christians” because such Christians called themselves “Catholic.” Terms like “proto-orthodox” are intended to suggest a discontinuity between those Christians and Christians of today. There was no discontinuity; Catholic Christians didn’t disappear for centuries, only to be revived centuries later, like the Marcionite Church of today. People who want to talk about “proto-orthodox” should be prepared to show when the transition from “proto-orthodox” to “orthodox” clearly happened.

[6] Marcion can be numbered among the many who claim such a corruption, also known as a “great apostasy,” e.g., Mohammad and John Smith. Even Protestants assert something similar but perhaps occurring later during the “Dark Ages.”

[7] Harnack also posits an unknown text that contained Marcion’s edits, i.e., the W-text or I-text.

[8] Also:

Marcion supplied what was missing through four innovations. First: the production of a littera scripta — a written text establishing a new covenant. “He, and no one else, did it!” (p. 129). Second: the combination of Gospel and Pauline epistles into a two-part canon. “He, and no one else conceived of this!” (p. 129). Third: ending the chaotic syncretism of prophetic, allegorical, and philosophical approaches by means of “a clear and unequivocal biblical theology” in the Antitheses (p. 129). Fourth: the creation of actual church unity through organized missionary activity that spread “throughout the whole human race” (Justin).

Andersen, (pp. 59-60).

[9] By “Christianity” in the phrase “antithesis to Christianity,” Steigman-Gall meant Lutheranism.

[10] Steigman- Gall writes:

This development is illustrated in the liberal Protestant reception of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and in particular Chamberlain’s relationship with the theologian von Harnack. According to his biographer, Chamberlain both influenced and was influenced by liberal Protestantism.127 Harnack’s polemics against Judaism were used by Chamberlain in his own Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), a Christian–racialist tract widely regarded as one of the most important antecedents of Nazi ideology. According to a review in Christliche Welt, “this book . . . carries in it an apologetic strength for which our ‘Christian world’ will have much to thank.” The highly charged attacks on Catholicism and scientific materialism in Foundations also ensured a warm reception among liberal Protestants. While confessional Lutherans firmly rejected Chamberlain’s critique of organized religion,128 liberal Protestants found their own views echoed in Chamberlain’s call for a nationalist Kulturreligion.

Steigmann-Gall (p. 39).

I was amazed at the scholarly depth and insight of author Paula Fredriksen’s “Augustine and the Jews.” I gave her more recent “Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle” top marks in my Amazon review. However, this book left me unimpressed in terms of its insights and scholarship.

As an initial observation, I purchased the book thinking that it would describe the shadowy period when Jews who adhered to the Christian movement - the “Assembly” in Fredriksen’s terminology - were still part of Jewish synagogues, specifically, the period from approximately the crucifixion to around the early years of the second century. I thought we might get some insights from Fredriksen about how Jews and Christians cohabited and eventually went in their different directions.

What this book turned out to be was mostly a reimagining of Christian history during the time encompassed by the Gospels and Acts, with some references to what Fredriksen believes must have happened after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, which turns out mostly to involve a retrojection of that historical event back into the life of Jesus. We really don’t get much in the way of the cohabitation of the Assembly and Jews or of the events that drove the two kinds of Jews apart. So, insofar as this book did not actually address that period of time - when Christians were Jews - this book was a kind of lost opportunity.

I also had problems with Fredriksen’s approach to history. Her primary texts are the Gospels, Acts, some letters of Paul and the writings of Josephus. However, she gives herself permission to simply excise passages from New Testament texts where they are inconvenient to her thesis. For example, Fredriksen argues that the trials before Pilate and the Sanhedrin make no sense in her narrative, so she simply rules them out of existence. Fredriksen could be correct in this, of course, but shouldn’t a historian be more protective of historical material?

Likewise, Fredriksen offers the reader the notion that Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances lasted for “years” until finally coming to an end for no particular reason. The standard model is that Jesus’s post resurrection appearances lasted from the Resurrection until the Ascension with a final one sometime later to Paul. If Paul’s experience was “years” later, then it might be technically correct to say that the appearances occurred over a period of “years,” but Fredriksen is implying something different; she is implying that the appearances went on for years, rather than in an intense initial period of around a month. She writes:

“The period of the resurrection appearances, in other words, was exactly that: an extended period of time, years in fact, though we cannot from our disparate sources say exactly how long.”

This is not an incidental matter; Fredriksen’s theory is that the failure of Christ to appear put Christ’s disciples into a state of cognitive dissonance, which resulted in them inventing their mission to bring the gospel to the world. Fredriksen writes:

“This combination of the decreasing frequency and, finally, the cessation of Jesus’ posthumous appearances, together with the persistent nonarrival of the Kingdom, might have ended the movement then and there.”

Again, maybe it could have happened this way, but where is the evidence for “decreasing frequency”? The gospels describe a short period of intense appearances, a definite end, and one appearance to Paul as a sui generis event. Certainly, one can speculate about a years-long process with fewer and fewer appearances as the fad wears off, but this approach remains speculative. Once we toss out the documentary evidence, there is about as much evidence for Fredriksen’s narrative as there is for a narrative that argues that the whole story was made up after the fact.

Fredriksen’s basic thesis is that Jesus was a fairly conventional apocalyptic prophet. Jesus preached the coming of God’s kingdom for an unspecified number of years. He was well-known to the authorities in Jerusalem. Jesus’s preaching of the coming of the Kingdom put the urban mobs in a state of high expectation during Jesus’s last visit to Jerusalem. In order to “calm down’ the mobs, Pilate had his guard arrest Jesus. Pilate then had Jesus crucified to send a message to the crowds that Jesus was most definitely not their expected king. Thereafter, in their state of high expectation, and suffering cognitive dissonance that Jesus would not be re-establishing the Kingdom, Jesus’s followers experienced appearances of Jesus that gradually declined over a period of “years.” During this time, they reinterpreted Jesus’s message to include the destruction of the Temple and attributed Davidic ancestry to Jesus. Paul “divinized” Jesus as a lesser divine being, but did not radically divinize Jesus as one with the Father. The disciples waited around Jerusalem, and while they were waiting, they decided it was better to do something, so they began their outreach to the Gentiles. There was no Jewish persecution of Christians, which is to say, Jews of the Assembly. There was, at most, a voluntarily accepted Jewish correction of divergent members of the community who attracted attention.

And the rest is history.

Concerning the issue of Jesus’s divinity, Fredriksen writes:

“Paul, importantly, never claims that Jesus is a god. The closest he comes is to say that Jesus was “in the form of [a] god” before he appeared “in the likeness of men.” Capitalizing “God” throughout this passage in Paul’s letter, the Revised Standard Version mistranslates it. Paul’s world contained both God, the chief biblical deity, and gods, such as those represented by the nonhuman “knees” in this same passage in Philippians 2: they will bend to the victorious returning Christ and to God the Father. Jesus is not “God.” He is, however, a divine mediator; a human being (anthrōpos), though “from heaven.” (What James, Jesus’ brother, would have made of such claims I have no idea.) Jesus becomes radically divinized— as much god as God the Father— only during the imperially sponsored episcopal councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, a period when the (now Christian) emperor was also (still) considered divine. Back in the mid-first century, when Christians were Jews, Jesus was high on the cosmic gradient, but he was nonetheless human. Our current categories of “humanity” and “divinity” do not stretch in these ways. Theirs did.”

Fredriksen crafts her narrative in some surprising ways. For example, she favors John’s gospel on a variety of issues. Thus, Fredriksen accepts the Gospel of John’s testimony to the number of years that Jesus was active and the number of trips he made to Jerusalem. She also accepts at least John’s version of the timing of the statements that Jesus made concerning the moneychangers in the temple.

The reason she favors John is that it is important to her that Pilate and the temple priests knew Jesus was not a real rebel and posed no threat to the established order. Thus, the temple priests had no real reason to seek Jesus’s death, and they were too involved in Passover activities to be able to spend any time on all the back and forth of trials and crucifixion. This places the blame on Pilate, who knew that Jesus was a peaceful teacher rather than an agitator. Moreover, because Jesus’s teachings were known from his prior trips to Jerusalem, Pilate and the High Priests did not have to try Jesus, and there was no opportunity for the crowd scenes attested in the gospels.

It could have happened this way, of course, but the problem is that I didn’t find the excising of so much of the gospel text to be particularly convincing. Then, again, I have to reflect on Fredriksen’s personal biases. She is a Catholic who has converted to Judaism and has made many comments critical of what she finds to be anti-Jewish attitudes in, or read into, the New Testament. The basis of her decisions about what to accept from the New Testament seems to favor a reading that distances Jews, both high priests and the man in the street, from the Crucifixion.

Some of Fredriksen’s speculation was interesting. Her idea that the disciples congregated in Jerusalem in the expectation of Christ’s imminent return, because they wanted to be where the action would happen, makes a lot of sense. Other proposals that she makes are worth considering.

However, overall, I was disappointed by how unsophisticated and shallow Fredriksen’s analysis was. Fredriksen starts from the proposition that Jesus was obviously merely an apocalyptic preacher whose crucifixion started a movement that changed history. From that assumption, her task is simply to tell a “just so” story about disappointment and cognitive dissonance, and to retroject future events onto the historical Jesus. Fredriksen’s approach may be accurate, but I didn’t find it convincing or interesting.

Many times, Fredriksen missed opportunities to offer something of interest to those who don’t start from her assumptions. For example, Fredriksen writes: “If these pagans were baptized into the Jesus movement, however, they could no longer worship their native gods, the gods of their families and of their cities.”

This is true so far as it goes, but the key point is that pagans were not merely baptized into the Jesus movement; they were baptized into the Jesus movement in the “name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” This baptismal formula dates back to the beginning of the movement. If Fredriksen is correct that Paul did not divinize Jesus as God, then who was the Son? And why was “the Son” given an equal status with that of the Father by first-century Jews?

We don’t hear a word about this, unfortunately, but it seems that it would shed light on the time “when Christians were Jews.”

I was torn between giving this two or three stars. I think there might be something of interest to others, but this book does not live up to Ms. Fredriksen’s prior work.

This is the second volume of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.”

In the first book, “Out of the Silent Planet,” we followed the Oxford philologist Ransom as he was kidnapped by the Oxford scientist Weston and taken to Mars, aka Malacandra. On Mars, Ransom met multiple intelligent species, including the awesome Oyarsa, who secretly run the solar system. Throughout the book, we learn that Earth is under the dominion of a “bent Oyarsa,” who has corrupted the arc of human history. At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom and Weston return to Earth, aka Thulacandra.

It is obvious that Out of the Silent Planet is an allegory. The Oyarsa are angels. Ransom is a Christian discovering what an unfallen world might look like if it had to fight off an invasion by evil. Ransom’s conflict with Weston is between a reason informed by Christian theology and one informed by atheism.

In the second book, Perelandra, Ransom is tasked by the Oyarsa of Mars to travel to Venus (aka Perelandra) nude and in a transparent box. On Perelandra, Ransom discovers a world that has not Fallen. Perelandra is a world of lush floating islands. There is one island on Perelandra that does not float; it is “fixed” in one permanent position.

Ransom meets the Green Lady, Perelandra’s analog of Eve, the mother of humanity. Unfortunately, the snake enters in the form of Weston, who arrives by another spaceship. Weston announces that he has been converted to a belief in the spirit and realizes that all rational creatures are tools of the Spirit, which seeks to evolve into self-awareness. In the middle of a dialogue with Ransom, Weston has a stroke and dies (?), to be possessed by something that tempts the Green Lady to violate the one rule given to her by the Ruler of the Universe, Maleldil, which is never to sleep on the fixed land. Ransom calls Weston in this state the “unman” to represent that it has become an avatar of evil, and evil is not ultimately a thing.

Perelandra dives more deeply into allegory than Out of the Silent Planet. Any pretense of writing science fiction is abandoned. There is no science fiction spaceship to take Ransom to Perelandra, nor does Ransom meet aliens. The Green Lady and here absent King are obvious stand-ins a prelapsarian Adam and Eve and the Unman is the serpent.

I had read Perelandra originally in high school or college. Coming back to it decades later was interesting because I can now see influences and threads I could not have seen before. For example, the final chapter – the Dance of Venus and Mars – is an extended exposition of Thomistic themes.

Likewise, the influence of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy is unmistakable in the Unman. The Unman is a grotesque parody of a human being. Weston occasionally re-emerges to plead for mercy from Ransom. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius argues that “blessedness” is found only in becoming divinized through a participation with God’s essence, since God is Blessedness itself. Those who fail to achieve this become inhuman or unhuman:

For you learned a little earlier that everything that exists is one, and that oneness itself is good, so it follows that everything that exists would also seem to be good.27 In this way, therefore, whatever falls short of the Good ceases to be. Thus it happens that evil men cease to be what they had been—though the remaining appearance of the human body shows that these men had once been humans. And so, since they turned to evil, they have also lost their human nature. And since virtue alone is able to make a person surpass his fellow men, it must be the case that those whom wickedness brings down from their human state are sunk so low that they don’t deserve to be called human. Thus it happens that if you saw a man transformed by vices, you couldn’t consider him human.

Boethius, Anicius; Goins, Scott. The Consolation of Philosophy: With an Introduction and Contemporary Criticism (Ignatius Critical Editions) (p. 120). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

In the next paragraph, Boethius explains:

“Suppose a violent robber burns with desire for another man’s riches—you would say he’s like a wolf. A wild and restless man, who busies his tongue with lawsuits—you would compare him to a dog. A man who sneaks and lurks about hoping to trip up others by deceit—he’s just like a little fox. A man who can’t control his rage seems to bear the spirit of a lion. A timid, frightened man who flees from things he shouldn’t fear is like a deer. A sluggish, dull, lazy man lives the life of an ass.29 Suppose a fickle, inconstant man keeps changing his pursuits—he’s no different from a bird. A man who drowns in foul and impure lusts—he’s held by the pleasures of a dirty sow. And so it happens that a man who abandons virtue, since he can’t become godlike, turns into a beast.

Boethius, Anicius; Goins, Scott. The Consolation of Philosophy: With an Introduction and Contemporary Criticism (Ignatius Critical Editions) (pp. 120-121). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.

Evil vices destroy the humanity of the vicious and render them unhuman.

Lewis read and appreciated Boethius. He devotes a chapter to Boethius in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, where he says:

Boethius (480–524) is, after Plotinus, the greatest author of the seminal period, and his De Consolatione Philosophiae was for centuries one of the most influential books ever written in Latin. It was translated into Old High German, Italian, Spanish, and Greek; into French by Jean de Meung; into English by Alfred, Chaucer, Elizabeth I, and others. Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages.

Lewis, C. S.. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (p. 67). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

For me, the surprising reference was to our old friend, F.W. G. Hegel.

When Weston returns from his hospital stay after his trip to Mars, he is in the full-throated grip of Hegelianism. He speaks about the Spirit that moves history, seeking its own illumination and using great men. The significance of this idee fixe is that Weston strokes out in the middle of his peroration:

“Idiot,” said Weston. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. “Idiot,” he repeated. “Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely. . . .”

Then horrible things began happening. A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Weston’s face out of recognition. As it passed, for one second something like the old Weston reappeared—the old Weston, staring with eyes of horror and howling, “Ransom, Ransom! For Christ’s sake don’t let them—” and instantly his whole body spun round as if he had been hit by a revolver bullet and he fell to the earth, and was there rolling at Ransom’s feet, slavering and chattering and tearing up the moss by handfuls. Gradually the convulsions decreased.

Lewis, C. S.. Perelandra: (Space Trilogy, Book Two) (The Space Trilogy 2) (pp. 70-71). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Previously, Weston had ranted:

“My dear Ransom, I wish you would not keep relapsing on to the popular level. The two things are only moments in the single, unique reality. The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism. When the leap has been made our ‘diabolism’ as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage; but while we are making it, we are called criminals, heretics, blasphemers. . . .”

Lewis, C. S.. Perelandra: (Space Trilogy, Book Two) (The Space Trilogy 2) (p. 70). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

So, the gospel that Weston is preaching is that (a) there is no distinction between thought and the universe; (b) the world progresses through great men; (c) humanity passes through successive stages in which a new morality applies; and (d) a man can be the Life Force.

It could only be clearer if we called the “Live Force” the “World Spirit.”

Hegel and Weston can argue about who was really the World Spirit.

The puzzle here is why Lewis, writing in 1945, would have presented Hegelianism as the bete noir animating Weston. Was Hegelianism still a viable idea in 1943, when this book was written? Nietzsche was giving Hegel a good drumming in the 1860s.

To wit:

A still recent system, [10] which has won for itself a world-wide scandalous reputation, has discovered the formula for this self-destruction of philosophy; and now, wherever the historical view of things is found, we can see such a naive recklessness in bringing the irrational to ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’ and making black look like white, that one is even inclined to parody Hegel’s phrase and ask: ‘Is all this irrationality real?’

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Future of our Educational Institutions (pp. 203-204). Kindle Edition.

Perhaps Hegelianism had held on to the minds of older professors when Lewis was young, and he used the long-held memory as the model for Weston?

Perelandra is a good read. It provokes the mind and has some action sequences. It is not really science fiction, fantasy, or horror,

Maybe it is the only true Utopian novel ever written?

This is a Tor.com short story set in Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” universe.

Tor.com short stories are generally mere sketches or gestures designed to hook the reader into diving into an author’s established series or universe. In general, these stories don’t explain the principles or background that have been established in the author’s universe. This can lead to a feeling of incompleteness or disorientation. Likewise, the plot and character development are usually left at a rudimentary level. As I said, these stories are often sketches that can be turned into a more satisfying work.

In this case, the setting is McGuire’s “Wayward Children” universe. McGuire is a well-known fantasy writer, best known for her October Daye series. In the Wayward Children universe, McGuire posits that unhappy children can sometimes find portals to escape into a fantasy universe. Some of these universes seem nice, such as a Candy Crush world with soda pop lakes. Others are scary, such as a Gothic Horror world or a world where people are statues, and the escapees practice being pale and not moving.

In this case, the world is one where everyone is a skeleton magically revivified by a song at night. The “wayward child” is a boy who escaped from a hospital. The boy falls in love with the “bone princess,” and she reciprocates, but it is hard to see how the two can ever by together.

Like the world, the solution is horrifying but is presented by McGuire as romantic and wonderful.

Mmm’kay.

This is a short read. If you don’t know the background, it will probably be confusing.

I would recommend starting with the first book in the series.