https://www.academia.edu/29038347/A_New ... on_Studies
.
(b) Dating Marcion
My [initial 1984] study of Marcion thus began in an ordinary enough way: as a study of Tertullian’s idea of history. But in reading more of Tertullian—a dogged apologist for his new faith, and a tireless opponent of superstition, philosophy, and heresy--I was drawn to his invective against Marcion. What was an “arch-heretic” (hairesiarchḗs) I wondered? Was one as influential as an archbishop, or more poignant in his argumentation than the garden-variety heretics Tertullian compares to “weeds” and “fevers”? Soon Tertullian became the background for a much more extensive investigation into the impressive list of church fathers who had worried about the success of Marcion and his followers—a success that was a matter of record by the time of Justin Martyr, writing around 145 CE, when Marcion’s reputation was already secure:
But these scenarios, internally inconsistent as they were, were also made problematic by historical context: Was Rome in the mid-decades of the first(?)/[second] century a place where teachers from Asia Minor went for episcopal approval? Were Hyginus, Anicetus--or even Eleuthereus--in the position to grant that approval? How [does one] square the information that Marcion appealed to the authority of a “bishop” of Rome with the information that he sought forgiveness for a transgression (raping a virgin?), committed in his home province, from Roman presbyters, far beyond any jurisdictional authority they might have had or sought to have? Given the presumption that Peter’s “apostolate” in Rome provided the platform for Marcion’s rejection, why is his name never mentioned or invoked? Why, instead, is Peter’s authority more often employed by professed Gnostics than the proto-orthodox? The universally agreed Petrine forgeries of the New Testament provide no help in sorting the data. Marcion was never repudiated on the basis of a written Petrine tradition, for the simple reason that such a tradition is not discernible in literary terms before the late second century, when Marcion’s activity had been a matter of historical record, for over fifty years. Why, moreover, does one of our earliest references to the Church at Rome, if genuine, make no mention of a bishop there or of an association of Peter with the Christians in that city?
The first clear reference to Peter as a leader at Rome is also construed with heresy in view: Tertullian writes in the early third century that the church-list at Rome extended from Peter consecrating a certain Clement, possibly the author of the anonymous letter called the First Epistle of Clement, but which mentions nothing about a Petrine succession. Moreover, Tertullian’s reference in the same passage appeals to the Smyrnean practice, originating with John and Polycarp, as a warrant of how things were gradually unfolding at Rome. Peter in this saga is conspicuously missing.
Even if we take Epiphanius’ scenario as late (ca. 375) and merely slanderous, and Tertullian’s as earlier (ca. 210) and polemical, there is good reason to doubt that Marcion ever travelled to Rome.
The later the sources, the more the information, the less the textual support, and the greater the calumny. In all likelihood, the reports on Marcion grew in intensity as the success of his movement increased following his death. In late reports, he was a bishop; the son of a (beloved) bishop; a seducer, excommunicated for his moral laxity; a simonist who tried to purchase approval of his ideas; a penitent who died reconciled to the church, and a deceiver who persisted in heresy until his death.
By the end of the third century, almost any slander could be thrown at Marcion: his works had been hidden, concealed, then lost. Even Tertullian professes to have had Marcion’s works “stolen from him by a heretic.” His solitary gospel had disappeared, like a brick into a wall with the making of the orthodox canon. His Antitheses, a comparison of contradictions between the Law and the euangelion, similarly lost. His collection of Paul’s letters was baked into the Church’s impressive concoction of thirteen Pauline compositions. The cardinal accusation against him: that he subtracted from a canon that had existed from earliest times. Yet in every instance, his canon, teaching and work is presupposed by even the earliest attacks leveled against him. It is this rather obvious fact that apologists for a late dating of Marcion routinely miss in discussing his historical location.
The “apostolic” case against Marcion will have been more believable in the credulous period prior to the existence of the ecclesia magna, when the twin threats of persecution and heresy shaped and sharpened not merely Christian defenses but early doctrine. But, as Harnack rightly perceived, following the era of historical-critical study of the gospels and the canon, it is clear that Marcion’s influence must be assessed afresh, in the light of what we now know about individual texts, their composition, selection, and the theological tendencies of the collectors—both “orthodox” and other. To a large extent, as a recent Christian-apologist-critic of the present study suggested, the question of Marcion’s dates is of final importance in determining whether he was a lender or a borrower, a precipitator or a respondent.
https://www.academia.edu/29038347/A_New ... on_Studies
.
(b) Dating Marcion
My [initial 1984] study of Marcion thus began in an ordinary enough way: as a study of Tertullian’s idea of history. But in reading more of Tertullian—a dogged apologist for his new faith, and a tireless opponent of superstition, philosophy, and heresy--I was drawn to his invective against Marcion. What was an “arch-heretic” (hairesiarchḗs) I wondered? Was one as influential as an archbishop, or more poignant in his argumentation than the garden-variety heretics Tertullian compares to “weeds” and “fevers”? Soon Tertullian became the background for a much more extensive investigation into the impressive list of church fathers who had worried about the success of Marcion and his followers—a success that was a matter of record by the time of Justin Martyr, writing around 145 CE, when Marcion’s reputation was already secure:
The passage haunted me for no particular reason, except that to read Tertullian, and even Irenaeus, who made Marcion “successor” to an irrelevant and otherwise unmentioned and workless heretic called Cerdo in the episcopate of Hyginus (138- 142) would lead one to think that Marcion became troublous only when he began to teach at Rome “under Anicetus,” (157-168?). This made surprising (and nearly inexplicable) Justin’s complaint that as late as his day, Marcion was still teaching men to deny God the Creator.The demons put forward Marcion of Pontus, who is still, even in our time, teaching men to deny that God is the maker of all things in heaven and on earth, and that the Christ predicted by the prophets is his son, and preaches another god besides the Creator of all, and likewise another son. This man many have believed, as if he alone knew the truth, and laugh at us, though they have no proof of what they say, but are carried away irrationally as lambs by a wolf, and become the prey of atheistic doctrines, and of demons. [1 Apol. 58]
The First Apology was written not earlier than 138 in the reign of Antoninus Pius. Justin himself died in 165, roughly three years before the death of the Roman presbyter, Anicetus--said in one place (Irenaeus) to have been head of the church in Rome during Marcion’s time, and a generation before the Roman bishop, Eleuthereus (d. 189), alleged by Tertullian to have repudiated and excommunicated Marcion in Rome [De Praes. 30]. Marcion thus “came” to Rome, for reasons fleshed out incoherently by later writers like Epiphanius and the Pseudo-Tertullian, around the time of Hyginus, or during the time of Anicetus, or (again?) in the days of Eleuthereus —that is, between 136 and 189, a span of half a century.And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who even at this day is alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator. And he, by the aid of the devils, has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of this universe, and to assert that some other being, greater than he, has done greater works. [1 Apol. 26]
But these scenarios, internally inconsistent as they were, were also made problematic by historical context: Was Rome in the mid-decades of the first(?)/[second] century a place where teachers from Asia Minor went for episcopal approval? Were Hyginus, Anicetus--or even Eleuthereus--in the position to grant that approval? How [does one] square the information that Marcion appealed to the authority of a “bishop” of Rome with the information that he sought forgiveness for a transgression (raping a virgin?), committed in his home province, from Roman presbyters, far beyond any jurisdictional authority they might have had or sought to have? Given the presumption that Peter’s “apostolate” in Rome provided the platform for Marcion’s rejection, why is his name never mentioned or invoked? Why, instead, is Peter’s authority more often employed by professed Gnostics than the proto-orthodox? The universally agreed Petrine forgeries of the New Testament provide no help in sorting the data. Marcion was never repudiated on the basis of a written Petrine tradition, for the simple reason that such a tradition is not discernible in literary terms before the late second century, when Marcion’s activity had been a matter of historical record, for over fifty years. Why, moreover, does one of our earliest references to the Church at Rome, if genuine, make no mention of a bishop there or of an association of Peter with the Christians in that city?
The first clear reference to Peter as a leader at Rome is also construed with heresy in view: Tertullian writes in the early third century that the church-list at Rome extended from Peter consecrating a certain Clement, possibly the author of the anonymous letter called the First Epistle of Clement, but which mentions nothing about a Petrine succession. Moreover, Tertullian’s reference in the same passage appeals to the Smyrnean practice, originating with John and Polycarp, as a warrant of how things were gradually unfolding at Rome. Peter in this saga is conspicuously missing.
Even if we take Epiphanius’ scenario as late (ca. 375) and merely slanderous, and Tertullian’s as earlier (ca. 210) and polemical, there is good reason to doubt that Marcion ever travelled to Rome.
The later the sources, the more the information, the less the textual support, and the greater the calumny. In all likelihood, the reports on Marcion grew in intensity as the success of his movement increased following his death. In late reports, he was a bishop; the son of a (beloved) bishop; a seducer, excommunicated for his moral laxity; a simonist who tried to purchase approval of his ideas; a penitent who died reconciled to the church, and a deceiver who persisted in heresy until his death.
By the end of the third century, almost any slander could be thrown at Marcion: his works had been hidden, concealed, then lost. Even Tertullian professes to have had Marcion’s works “stolen from him by a heretic.” His solitary gospel had disappeared, like a brick into a wall with the making of the orthodox canon. His Antitheses, a comparison of contradictions between the Law and the euangelion, similarly lost. His collection of Paul’s letters was baked into the Church’s impressive concoction of thirteen Pauline compositions. The cardinal accusation against him: that he subtracted from a canon that had existed from earliest times. Yet in every instance, his canon, teaching and work is presupposed by even the earliest attacks leveled against him. It is this rather obvious fact that apologists for a late dating of Marcion routinely miss in discussing his historical location.
The “apostolic” case against Marcion will have been more believable in the credulous period prior to the existence of the ecclesia magna, when the twin threats of persecution and heresy shaped and sharpened not merely Christian defenses but early doctrine. But, as Harnack rightly perceived, following the era of historical-critical study of the gospels and the canon, it is clear that Marcion’s influence must be assessed afresh, in the light of what we now know about individual texts, their composition, selection, and the theological tendencies of the collectors—both “orthodox” and other. To a large extent, as a recent Christian-apologist-critic of the present study suggested, the question of Marcion’s dates is of final importance in determining whether he was a lender or a borrower, a precipitator or a respondent.
***
However that question will be answered, it is clear that Marcion’s literary collection (unlike that of the gnostic “schools”) was anything but posterior to the final orthodox solution reflected in a four gospel canon, an established hierarchy, and the theory of apostolic descent from a period of unpolluted truth. That fact in itself is of utmost importance in assessing Marcion’s position in the story of Christian literary and theological origins. The artillery used against him by most of his critics was not (as against the Gnostics) a charge of neo-Platonic density, but the fact that he chose to fight on the basis of texts already revered by the proto-orthodox teachers of his day: the Hebrew Bible, a gospel, and the letters of Paul. To follow the church fathers, especially Tertullian, down the road of finding sources or analogs of Marcion’s teaching in every school from the Stoics to Epicurus is simply to ignore the manifold issues inhabiting their polemic. https://www.academia.edu/29038347/A_New ... on_Studies
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Later -
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It is compelling to think that Justin knew something rather specific and unvarnished about Marcion as an elder contemporary. Irenaeus sees him as a figure of the recent past, no longer active but still a danger through his church and followers, who continues until the time of the Paulicians in Nicephorus’ day, through his churches. Tertullian knew him as a man whose influence had to be neutralized by rhetoric and strategy, though he stumbles badly in arguing that the Marcionite churches are “everywhere” and then challenging them to produce an account of those churches.
My emphasis on the dating of Marcion’s heresy was indeed, as a recent critic has alleged, the lynchpin of an argument. But it was never successfully challenged except by assertion, by then elderly scholars who in their specialized research had developed a kind of patristic myopia with regard to sources.
Of these, Gerhard May, Han Drijvers, and Ernst Bammel were the most persistent in their objections and wedded to private theories. A fair number of reviewers, took the liberty of accepting the propositions (sometimes without credit), and then in a fashion (attributed by More to Erasmus), retreating before their consequences. Bart Ehrman, Gerhard May, and an ageing Bruce Metzger and Joseph Tyson can be mentioned. Their work until the appearance of my study had given Marcion his grudging due, but no one was quite prepared to make him the central figure in a detective story.
Three decades on, I have not altered my view that Marcion of Pontus was, in a significant way, the creator of the New Testament canon; that orthodox Christianity including early patristic theories concerning episcopal succession, authority and theological formulations of Christology and grace, owe an unsigned debt to the challenges he represented. It is almost certain, it seems to me that Marcion was a collector of Paul’s letters and arguably an editor of some of them, including Galatians, and that some of the deutero-Pauline literature is a direct reflection of literary activity. The gospel Marcion possessed was not the canonical version of Luke but a pre-version of the Third Gospel. The canonical Luke, with its historical, “apostolic,” and pro-Roman bias, and the history provided in the Acts of the Apostles, Christianity’s Aeneid, is an incomplete work targeting Marcion’s church and followers. I am more convinced today, than when Marcion: [On the Restitution of Christianity] was written, that the political and apologetic motives of Marcion’s opponents largely determined their arguments against him and left him open to gross misinterpretation and slander.
... Marcion’s theology has been cast as the work of someone who actively sought to destroy the faith delivered from the apostles. Marcion comes to us as a man of earlier times, not as an innovator or spoiler but as something atavistic: in an age of doctrinal development, literary business, and rapid church expansion, his themes looked back to a generation plagued by the question of what precisely the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of the true God, meant for those who received the gospel of grace. We know how the Gnostics answered the question of salvation. We are much less certain how Marcion did.
By way of preview, let me synopsize here the conclusions of the present study
1. Marcion was a resident of the province of Pontus-Bithynia, a place mentioned by the second century writer of 1st Peter (1.2) and home to a thriving Jewish community served by scores of synagogues throughout greater Asia Minor. In his zeal to prove Marcion both philosophically wrong and religiously out of step with emerging orthodoxy, Tertullian spends an introductory salvo to impugn the region as geographically inhospitable and culturally deficient. He goes on to associate Marcion with a half dozen philosophical schools, including Stoicism and Epicureanism. The epithet “shipmaster out of Pontus” may be a simple circumlocution for “sailor”, an insult, or perhaps a snide tribute to Marcion’s wanderings and missionary activity in the region. That it provides any clue to his profession is unlikely, and that his father was a bishop is almost certainly a detail provided by the general pattern of making his heresy a rebellion (apostasy) from an orthodoxy that did not exist in his day.
2. Marcion’s identity and historical location must be sought within contestation for authority reflected in literary evidence and not primarily in the descriptions of his opponents. The key to his identity can be found in the particulars of canonical development, and secondly in the actual content and literary tendencies reflected in the description of particular threats. A vague and pliable doceticism, such as we find in “Ignatius,” is not enough to pinpoint Marcionism. Indeed, in the present state of study, it now appears to me unlikely that the Ignatian epistles are of any chronological value, even if they are not entirely spurious. Origen’s incidental references to a letter to the Romans and one to the Ephesians by Ignatius is sometimes seen as a mark of authenticity for those two letters, but shed little light on the crucial question of date and spuriousness.
3. The Pastoral epistles were anti-Marcionite in an explicit way, and must, as argued here, be located in the range of literary activity associated with Polycarp. The Epistle to the Laodiceans, either preserved or created by Marcion, is anterior to the Pastorals.
4. Marcion created the idea of the canon as a combination of Paul’s letters and a gospel. This was not done deliberatively but simply as a summary of Marcionite preaching: For Marcion, Paul had preached a “higher” God reflected in the teaching of the apostle whose work he revered. While a literary composition of this “canon” or proto-canon cannot be ruled out, Marcion himself would not have wagered his mission on a literary product, as writers after Polycarp had to do. That is to say, Marcion’s canon, consisting of a gospel and letters, was theologically determined by his belief that Paul alone had preached the “true gospel” [the euangelion]. The “orthodox” attack was apologetically and heresiologically driven. It applied the template of a deposit of faith delivered both in writing and tradition to the time before Marcion and made his teaching a deliberate perversion of the literature implicated in the strategy.
5. Marcion’s program was ideological; that is to say, he actively sought to subordinate the historical account of Jesus circulating widely in written and still in his time in competitive oral forms, to the doctrine of grace developed by Paul.
6. Marcion’s use for the Old Testament was “antithetical”: that is, it supported his dualistic-Anatolian idea that the God of goodness was ontically different from the God of law in the Hebrew Bible. Despite the efforts to restore or reproduce Marcion’s Antitheses on the basis of Tertullian’s mention of such a work, it can be doubted whether it existed or that is was much more than a collection of prooftexts and aides memoires used by Marcionites in preaching.
7. Marcion’s theology was a literalist form of Paul’s theology—a type of Paul-orthodoxy-- that trended toward anti-Gnosticism, and specifically against the Valentinian trajectory of gnosticism. Considerable attention has been paid to the exegesis of Paul’s letters in the Valentinian sect, and nothing is clearer than that Marcion not only [fell] far short of the esotericism of Valentinian speculation but that the dividing line between a-pneumatic-esoteric and psychic-exoteric form of Christianity is not available in his theology.
Marcion’s was simply a radical construal of teachings easily available, if tantalizingly vague, in Paul’s letters. There is nothing whatever to be said for the notion that Marcion’s teaching, among others’, in the Valentinian Ptolemy’s letter to Flora, preserved by Epiphanius , not composed until the late 4th century. The Letter is an interesting piece of instruction about the law, probably intended for a Roman woman confused about the variety of religious teaching available on the street-corners and salons of Rome but it does not possess any significant heresiological connotations that can be associated either with Marcion nor with the elucidation of Marcionism. Marcion’s heresy is univocally separated from that of Valentinus by all the anti-heretical genealogists and there is no literary basis for associating him with “Ptolemy”, and based on the description of Irenaeus —if it is the same figure—no shadow of the literary style, vocabulary, or conceptual structure that is found in the letter preserved in Epiphanius.
8. Marcion was the only recognizable continuator of the Paul-tradition in the second century, and provoked the crisis of the church that led finally to the canonizing of Paul’s writings, the remaking of the Gospel attributed to Luke, the writing of Acts, and a number of deutero-Pauline materials including the Pastoral epistles, with their curious renderings of Paul’s views on grace, faith and law and their anachronistic command to reprimand heretics. Marcion possessed an original letter of Paul, Laodiceans, that provides additional clues to his own understanding of Paul’s religious ideas; elements of that letter are visible in the redactions of Laodiceans known to the church as Ephesians and Colossians. It is possible that Marcion was the author or at least an editor of Laodiceans
6.9. There is nothing to be said for the idea that Marcion’s gospel was “gnostic.” A substantial portion of the following work was developed in the wake of major reconstruction and translation of the texts from Nag Hammadi, which provided a cache of heretofore unavailable information about the actual beliefs of the Gnostics in their own words. A detailed comparison of their thought world with that of Marcion and his circle shows decisively that Marcion (as Harnack, and others before him correctly argued), was not a gnostic but a rather typical representative of a syncretistic religious region, which will have been as much orientated towards and missioned in Syria as in the west, described by Walter Bauer as long ago as 1934.
7.10. Marcion was an opponent of both plexiform gospel-harmonies, such as that composed by Tatian, and expansive gospel collections based on prototype texts and the ancient habit of establishing the truth of witnesses by multiple corroborating testimonies—the final literary solution adopted in the orthodox canon. In short, as Irenaeus’ defense of the number of gospels shows, Marcion’s insistence of a singular gospel was understood to be defeated by the cloud of witnesses accepted by the emerging “orthodox” party. The pluriform gospel canon was known in the eastern provinces before the time of Irenaeus, in Syria at least by Tatian, who died about 184.
David Trobisch has persuasively suggested that the animosity between Polycarp and Marcion was specifically about the extent of the canon, making Polycarp in effect the creator of the first “edition” of the Christian Bible. Marcion’s provocation for this development would have to be assumed, and it can be assumed in two ways: the four gospel canon in the orthodox tradition was simply the approval of local variants of a common text, which was also possessed, in some form (probably closer to that of the third gospel) by Marcion. The addition of a further text whose provenance was thought to be Ephesus and by tradition attributable to “John” also makes sense in this context. Marcion’s insistence on one gospel can be seen as a response to certain tendencies he himself would have regarded as heretical measured by Paul’s language in the letter to the Galatians.
.
It is compelling to think that Justin knew something rather specific and unvarnished about Marcion as an elder contemporary. Irenaeus sees him as a figure of the recent past, no longer active but still a danger through his church and followers, who continues until the time of the Paulicians in Nicephorus’ day, through his churches. Tertullian knew him as a man whose influence had to be neutralized by rhetoric and strategy, though he stumbles badly in arguing that the Marcionite churches are “everywhere” and then challenging them to produce an account of those churches.
My emphasis on the dating of Marcion’s heresy was indeed, as a recent critic has alleged, the lynchpin of an argument. But it was never successfully challenged except by assertion, by then elderly scholars who in their specialized research had developed a kind of patristic myopia with regard to sources.
Of these, Gerhard May, Han Drijvers, and Ernst Bammel were the most persistent in their objections and wedded to private theories. A fair number of reviewers, took the liberty of accepting the propositions (sometimes without credit), and then in a fashion (attributed by More to Erasmus), retreating before their consequences. Bart Ehrman, Gerhard May, and an ageing Bruce Metzger and Joseph Tyson can be mentioned. Their work until the appearance of my study had given Marcion his grudging due, but no one was quite prepared to make him the central figure in a detective story.
***
Three decades on, I have not altered my view that Marcion of Pontus was, in a significant way, the creator of the New Testament canon; that orthodox Christianity including early patristic theories concerning episcopal succession, authority and theological formulations of Christology and grace, owe an unsigned debt to the challenges he represented. It is almost certain, it seems to me that Marcion was a collector of Paul’s letters and arguably an editor of some of them, including Galatians, and that some of the deutero-Pauline literature is a direct reflection of literary activity. The gospel Marcion possessed was not the canonical version of Luke but a pre-version of the Third Gospel. The canonical Luke, with its historical, “apostolic,” and pro-Roman bias, and the history provided in the Acts of the Apostles, Christianity’s Aeneid, is an incomplete work targeting Marcion’s church and followers. I am more convinced today, than when Marcion: [On the Restitution of Christianity] was written, that the political and apologetic motives of Marcion’s opponents largely determined their arguments against him and left him open to gross misinterpretation and slander.
... Marcion’s theology has been cast as the work of someone who actively sought to destroy the faith delivered from the apostles. Marcion comes to us as a man of earlier times, not as an innovator or spoiler but as something atavistic: in an age of doctrinal development, literary business, and rapid church expansion, his themes looked back to a generation plagued by the question of what precisely the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of the true God, meant for those who received the gospel of grace. We know how the Gnostics answered the question of salvation. We are much less certain how Marcion did.
By way of preview, let me synopsize here the conclusions of the present study
1. Marcion was a resident of the province of Pontus-Bithynia, a place mentioned by the second century writer of 1st Peter (1.2) and home to a thriving Jewish community served by scores of synagogues throughout greater Asia Minor. In his zeal to prove Marcion both philosophically wrong and religiously out of step with emerging orthodoxy, Tertullian spends an introductory salvo to impugn the region as geographically inhospitable and culturally deficient. He goes on to associate Marcion with a half dozen philosophical schools, including Stoicism and Epicureanism. The epithet “shipmaster out of Pontus” may be a simple circumlocution for “sailor”, an insult, or perhaps a snide tribute to Marcion’s wanderings and missionary activity in the region. That it provides any clue to his profession is unlikely, and that his father was a bishop is almost certainly a detail provided by the general pattern of making his heresy a rebellion (apostasy) from an orthodoxy that did not exist in his day.
2. Marcion’s identity and historical location must be sought within contestation for authority reflected in literary evidence and not primarily in the descriptions of his opponents. The key to his identity can be found in the particulars of canonical development, and secondly in the actual content and literary tendencies reflected in the description of particular threats. A vague and pliable doceticism, such as we find in “Ignatius,” is not enough to pinpoint Marcionism. Indeed, in the present state of study, it now appears to me unlikely that the Ignatian epistles are of any chronological value, even if they are not entirely spurious. Origen’s incidental references to a letter to the Romans and one to the Ephesians by Ignatius is sometimes seen as a mark of authenticity for those two letters, but shed little light on the crucial question of date and spuriousness.
3. The Pastoral epistles were anti-Marcionite in an explicit way, and must, as argued here, be located in the range of literary activity associated with Polycarp. The Epistle to the Laodiceans, either preserved or created by Marcion, is anterior to the Pastorals.
4. Marcion created the idea of the canon as a combination of Paul’s letters and a gospel. This was not done deliberatively but simply as a summary of Marcionite preaching: For Marcion, Paul had preached a “higher” God reflected in the teaching of the apostle whose work he revered. While a literary composition of this “canon” or proto-canon cannot be ruled out, Marcion himself would not have wagered his mission on a literary product, as writers after Polycarp had to do. That is to say, Marcion’s canon, consisting of a gospel and letters, was theologically determined by his belief that Paul alone had preached the “true gospel” [the euangelion]. The “orthodox” attack was apologetically and heresiologically driven. It applied the template of a deposit of faith delivered both in writing and tradition to the time before Marcion and made his teaching a deliberate perversion of the literature implicated in the strategy.
5. Marcion’s program was ideological; that is to say, he actively sought to subordinate the historical account of Jesus circulating widely in written and still in his time in competitive oral forms, to the doctrine of grace developed by Paul.
6. Marcion’s use for the Old Testament was “antithetical”: that is, it supported his dualistic-Anatolian idea that the God of goodness was ontically different from the God of law in the Hebrew Bible. Despite the efforts to restore or reproduce Marcion’s Antitheses on the basis of Tertullian’s mention of such a work, it can be doubted whether it existed or that is was much more than a collection of prooftexts and aides memoires used by Marcionites in preaching.
7. Marcion’s theology was a literalist form of Paul’s theology—a type of Paul-orthodoxy-- that trended toward anti-Gnosticism, and specifically against the Valentinian trajectory of gnosticism. Considerable attention has been paid to the exegesis of Paul’s letters in the Valentinian sect, and nothing is clearer than that Marcion not only [fell] far short of the esotericism of Valentinian speculation but that the dividing line between a-pneumatic-esoteric and psychic-exoteric form of Christianity is not available in his theology.
Marcion’s was simply a radical construal of teachings easily available, if tantalizingly vague, in Paul’s letters. There is nothing whatever to be said for the notion that Marcion’s teaching, among others’, in the Valentinian Ptolemy’s letter to Flora, preserved by Epiphanius , not composed until the late 4th century. The Letter is an interesting piece of instruction about the law, probably intended for a Roman woman confused about the variety of religious teaching available on the street-corners and salons of Rome but it does not possess any significant heresiological connotations that can be associated either with Marcion nor with the elucidation of Marcionism. Marcion’s heresy is univocally separated from that of Valentinus by all the anti-heretical genealogists and there is no literary basis for associating him with “Ptolemy”, and based on the description of Irenaeus —if it is the same figure—no shadow of the literary style, vocabulary, or conceptual structure that is found in the letter preserved in Epiphanius.
8. Marcion was the only recognizable continuator of the Paul-tradition in the second century, and provoked the crisis of the church that led finally to the canonizing of Paul’s writings, the remaking of the Gospel attributed to Luke, the writing of Acts, and a number of deutero-Pauline materials including the Pastoral epistles, with their curious renderings of Paul’s views on grace, faith and law and their anachronistic command to reprimand heretics. Marcion possessed an original letter of Paul, Laodiceans, that provides additional clues to his own understanding of Paul’s religious ideas; elements of that letter are visible in the redactions of Laodiceans known to the church as Ephesians and Colossians. It is possible that Marcion was the author or at least an editor of Laodiceans
6.9. There is nothing to be said for the idea that Marcion’s gospel was “gnostic.” A substantial portion of the following work was developed in the wake of major reconstruction and translation of the texts from Nag Hammadi, which provided a cache of heretofore unavailable information about the actual beliefs of the Gnostics in their own words. A detailed comparison of their thought world with that of Marcion and his circle shows decisively that Marcion (as Harnack, and others before him correctly argued), was not a gnostic but a rather typical representative of a syncretistic religious region, which will have been as much orientated towards and missioned in Syria as in the west, described by Walter Bauer as long ago as 1934.
7.10. Marcion was an opponent of both plexiform gospel-harmonies, such as that composed by Tatian, and expansive gospel collections based on prototype texts and the ancient habit of establishing the truth of witnesses by multiple corroborating testimonies—the final literary solution adopted in the orthodox canon. In short, as Irenaeus’ defense of the number of gospels shows, Marcion’s insistence of a singular gospel was understood to be defeated by the cloud of witnesses accepted by the emerging “orthodox” party. The pluriform gospel canon was known in the eastern provinces before the time of Irenaeus, in Syria at least by Tatian, who died about 184.
David Trobisch has persuasively suggested that the animosity between Polycarp and Marcion was specifically about the extent of the canon, making Polycarp in effect the creator of the first “edition” of the Christian Bible. Marcion’s provocation for this development would have to be assumed, and it can be assumed in two ways: the four gospel canon in the orthodox tradition was simply the approval of local variants of a common text, which was also possessed, in some form (probably closer to that of the third gospel) by Marcion. The addition of a further text whose provenance was thought to be Ephesus and by tradition attributable to “John” also makes sense in this context. Marcion’s insistence on one gospel can be seen as a response to certain tendencies he himself would have regarded as heretical measured by Paul’s language in the letter to the Galatians.
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ETA: Hoffman's Marcion, on the Restitution of Christianity: An Essay on the Development of Radical Paulist Theology in the Second Century was first published in 1984 by Scholars Press. His Wikipedia page says it was re-published in 1995 by OUP, and there is a 2016 version published by Wipf and Stock available on Amazon
