The God of love, according to Marcion, does not punish. His dealings with man are, all benevolence, communication of free grace, bestowal of ready forgiveness. [pg 239] For if sin be merely violation of the law of the God of this world, it is indifferent to the highest God, who is above the Demiurge, and regards not his vexatious restrictions on the liberty of man.
Yet Marcion was not charged by his warmest antagonists with immorality. They could not deny that the Marcionites entirely differed from other Pauline Antinomians in their moral conduct—that, for example, in their abhorrence of heathen games and pastimes they came fully up to the standard of the most rigid Catholic Christians. While many of the disciples of St. Paul, who held that an accommodation with prevailing errors was allowable, that no importance was to be attached to externals, found no difficulty in evading the obligation to become martyrs, the Marcionites readily, fearlessly, underwent the interrogations of the judges and the tortures of the executioner.[398]
Marcion, there is no doubt, regarded St. Paul as the only genuine apostle, the only one who remained true to his high calling. He taught that Christ, after revealing himself in his divine power to the God of this world, and confounding him unto submission, manifested himself to St. Paul,[399] and commissioned him to preach the gospel.
He rejected all the Scriptures now accounted canonical, except the Epistles of St. Paul, which formed with him an “Apostolicon,” in which they were arranged in the following order:—The Epistle to the Galatians, the First and Second to the Corinthians, the Epistles to the Romans, the Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, and to the Philippians.[400]
Besides the Epistles of St. Paul, he made use of an [pg 240] original Gospel, which he asserted was the evangelical record cited and used by Paul himself. The other Canonical Gospels he rejected as corrupted by Judaizers.
This Gospel bore a close resemblance to that of St. Luke. “Marcion,” says Irenaeus, “has disfigured the entire Gospel, he has reconstructed it after his own fancy, and then boasts that he possesses the true Gospel.”[401]
Tertullian assures us that Marcion had cut out of St. Luke's Gospel whatever opposed his own doctrines, and retained only what was in favour of them.[402] This statement, as we shall see presently, was not strictly true.
Epiphanius is more precise. He goes most carefully over the Gospel used by Marcion, and discusses every text which, he says, was modified by the heretic.[403]
The charge of mutilating the Canonical Gospels was brought by the orthodox Fathers against both the Ebionites on one side, and the Marcionites and Valentinians on the other, because the Gospels they used did not exactly agree with those employed by the middle party in the Church which ultimately prevailed. But the extreme parties on their side made the same charge against the Catholics.[404] It is not necessary to believe these charges in every case.
If the Gospels[405] were compiled as in the manner I have contended they were, such discrepancies must have occurred. Every Church had its own collection of the [pg 241] “Logia” and of the “Practhenta” of Christ. The more voluminous of these collections, those better strung together, thrust the earlier, less complete, collections into the back-ground. And these collections were continually being augmented by the acquisition of fresh material; and this new material was squeezed into the existing text, often without much consideration for the chain of story or teaching which it broke and dislocated.