Really? There Wasn't a Marcionite Version of the Letters Which Personified Chrestos? Really?

[Secret Alias]

Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed" (Romans 2:4-5).

We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness (τοῦ πλούτου τῆς χρηστότητος αὐτοῦ) and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God (τὸ χρηστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ) is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.

Whenever I see the idea of "two powers" - one of judgement and the other of kindness - and when I know that everyone from Irenaeus onward identifies the dualism of the Marcionites as being of the "power of judgement" and "power of kindness" variety, how is it possible that "chrestos" here originally (remember as a student of Marcionism I don't necessarily accept the authority of the surviving canon) and indeed the entire section was rooted in Jesus being one of two powers in heaven? Just an almost rhetorical question. Of course the Marcionites had a version of this material which posited Jesus as Chrestos the "other" of the two powers in heaven. The other is "the power of judgement."

[Secret Alias]

When Irenaeus treats this material - again using our version of the scriptures (probably wrote them) - there is a sense of heavenly powers which have a role in the lives of Christians:

And in man, as well as in angels, He has placed the power of choice (for angels are rational beings), so that those who had yielded obedience might justly possess what is good, given indeed by God, but preserved by themselves. On the other hand, they who have not obeyed shall, with justice, be not found in possession of the good, and shall receive condign punishment: for God did kindly bestow on them what was good; but they themselves did not diligently keep it, nor deem it something precious, but poured contempt upon His super-eminent goodness. Rejecting therefore the good, and as it were spuing it out, they shall all deservedly incur the just judgment of God, which also the Apostle Paul testifies in his Epistle to the Romans, where he says, “But dost thou despise the riches of His goodness, and patience, and long-suffering, being ignorant that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest to thyself wrath against the day of wrath, and the revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” “But glory and honour,” he says, “to every one that doeth good.” God therefore has given that which is good, as the apostle tells us in this Epistle, and they who work it shall receive glory and honour, because they have done that which is good when they had it in their power not to do it; but those who do it not shall receive the just judgment of God, because they did not work good when they had it in their power so to do.

[Peter Kirby]

Thanks, I have been wondering about this passage also. I am interested in what you find.

[Secret Alias]

The thing is I have studied the Marcionite problem for a long time. That doesn't mean that I have come to the right conclusions. You know, analysis to paralysis. But nevertheless unlike some people at the forum by familiarity with the subject matter you can be rest assured I am not merely trying to put them in a closet and give them a label.

So with that said, my years of studying the Marcionite problem comes to one solution above all else. The principle texts we use to study Marcionism, Tertullian and Epiphanius derive in a large part from a lost text of Irenaeus which developed from a comparison of what Irenaeus claimed were "like passages" in Luke and the epistles of Paul. In other words, Irenaeus said:

1. the four gospels are like Paradise (using the symbolism of the four rivers), Marcion picked at the fruit of Luke, or if you will Marcion being an orthodox originally knew the four gospels and chose to falsify only Luke and make it his own
2. Marcion also falsified the letters of Paul and somehow obscured who Paul really was
3. Irenaeus then said instead of citing directly from Marcion's canon I am going to work from those passages of Luke that Marcion still retained. The same logic must have also applied to the letters of Paul, namely that instead of having the actual Marcionite collection of letters Irenaeus only went through his own New Testament canon, the one he was "hawking" in the contemporary age, and said here are some samples of passages that Marcion "still retained."

When Irenaeus's Adversus Haereses was recopied by Tertullian and "re-rendered" into Latin, some of the bizarre methodology of Irenaeus was "smoothed over." Tertullian never says he has before him a copy of Marcion's canon. Over a century later Epiphanius dictated the Panarion to his secretary. After the dictation process was complete he or his writing staff worked on a pamphlet where it was claimed that they had in their possession the Marcionite New Testament and some unusual selections are presented (the order of the letters don't follow our canon or any known canon and certain letters are entirely omitted). Not clear whether Epiphanius is lying or whether he is telling the truth but in the dictation stage of the Panarion it is apparent that Epiphanius had a copy either of Irenaeus's Adversus Marcionem or was approximating some of the language used in Book Three of Adversus Haereses where Irenaeus announces that he is about to write Adversus Marcionem.

With all that out of the way, I have to admit I am not convinced that the Marcionite gospel looked anything like Luke. The references in other sources like Ephrem who argued against Marcion from a Diatessaron-like gospel, make the Marcionite gospel seem more "Diatessaronic." When Cyril of Jerusalem attacks Marcion he uses passages from all four gospels. There are too many references from Matthew in Tertullian to make an "all-Luke" Marcionite gospel seem likely. It would seem then that Irenaeus's Paradise motif, that Marcion was like Adam choosing with his heresy to only pick one gospel was an elaborate and pretentious invention. Had little to do with reality. Luke may have been developed as the expansion of canonical Mark that was anti-Marcionite with its companion piece the Acts of the Apostles which countered the claims of the Acta Pilati, the Marcionite "Acts." The point here is that I don't think the Marcionite gospel looked like Luke and I don't think the Marcionite letters resembled exactly the letters of Paul as we have preserved them.

In short, give the fact that Irenaeus tells us that the Marcionites "divided" the one God into two powers, one of judgement and one of kindness/mercy that:

a) since we know that the Marcionites had a similar fixation on Paul that the Samaritans had with Moses the source of this two powers doctrine came to a large part from the letters of Paul. The Marcionites had no other sources for information other than Paul. All their beliefs were ground in Paul
b) as such what Irenaeus and others report regarding the two powers must necessarily have come from Romans chapter 2 wherever this material originally appeared in the Marcionite canon.

[Secret Alias]

I also suspect that "Chrestos" (or "Christ" if you will) must have appeared more often in the gospel. It's not there now in the canonical gospels because the orthodox redactor(s) didn't want to play up Jesus's "kindness." I know Christians at the forum take for granted Jesus's "Christ-like" (yuck) kindness. But that ain't "Christ-like." Christ-like means to bash your enemies head on a rock. Like those Islamists who ran about Paris shooting people at the cafes. I obviously don't support these people not in the least of which because I am going to visit these very places soon. But the idea here is that "messianic" assumed a war, a clash of civilizations, where the ancient Judaizers thought they were on the "right side" and those who held the cosmopolitan values of the Roman civilization were "evil." The portrait of Jesus's kindness in the gospel comes from him being the Chrestos. I just wonder whether Jesus was conceived as being masculine or neuter. To what degree did castration render one "neuter." The Marcionites as well as the followers of Marcus imagined Jesus to be a hermaphrodite. A third sex. To what degree was Chrestos Chreston? I don't know. Above my pay bracket.

[rgprice]

Interestingly, Jesus is not portrayed as "good" in the Gospel of Mark. While in the Gospel of John love is a major theme and the loving goodness of Jesus is emphasized.

As for Jesus Christos/Chrestos in the Gospels, as I explained in another thread, I think that the lack of XS is in the Gospels can be explained as a hiding of the identity of Jesus until his true identity is fully revealed after the Resurrection. But in the Gospel of Mark, the nature of the Resurrection is unknown because the original ending was removed. In the original ending IS XS is revealed only to Paul. The revelation of this identity as IS XS is a major plot element of the Gospel writer. That's why the writer plays coy with his identity all throughout the narrative and taken care never to actually address his as IS XS, saving this for the "final reveal". But in Mark that final reveal never comes for reasons I mentioned.

[Secret Alias]

Jesus's father is good. Chrestos is like "good-light." Useful is a kind of good.

[StephenGoranson]

If Epiphanius claimed he had a particular text, he likely did,
because he was not shy to quote opponents, confident he could refute them.
After all, he preserved many such texts.

[Secret Alias]

Tell that to Bart Ehrman. He didn't have it when he was dictating the Panarion. He claims to have had it. But the order of the Marcionite Epistles doesn't match. In other words during the dictation citing a text like Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem he cites the order of Adversus Marcionem but when he attaches the pamphlet the pamphlet has a bizarre epistle order. Hence one of the assumptions that during the dictation period he drew from Irenaeus.

[StephenGoranson]

Some of the text claims of Epiphanius have been confirmed.
The text he had (or may have had) did not necessarily follow the order of Marcionite Epistles elsewhere, or he may have skipped around.
Anyway, it remains the case, as far as I know, that he preserved several texts that he considered heretical, in order to argue against them. Ironically, many today are understandably less interested in his arguments than in the texts he preserved, because, otherwise, some of them would have been lost.