Epiphany asked what I, or we, thought about Marcion.

Please note that I answered the question what I THOUGHT of Marcion. I have thought about Marcion and here is what I thought.

Through an oversight I cannot understand, nobody has ever nominated me for Pope, much less elected me, so what I think about Marcion is all I can give you.

Marcion was a wealthy Roman who wanted Christianity to get rid of the Old Testament and most of the New which contained references to the Old. To me, he was an example of a man who can take a bad situation, apply his intellect to it, and make it worse.

There were some six million Hellenized Jews, or anyway a major portion of the total Roman population, at the time of Jesus. As Christianity advanced they disappeared from history. Most of us have only heard of the historian Josephus as one of them.

What Mommy Professor would prefer would be to say that Christianity rose and killed those six million Jews and anyone who disagrees will go to prison. But the more likely explanation is that the Hellenized Jews accepted Jesus, a Greek name, as Christ, also a Greek name.

This may be referred to in Jesus’ pointing out that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country and the question at his disappearance from the Tomb in one of the Gospels, “Has he gone to the Greeks?”

It is my deduction that Hellenized Greek Jews looked upon their Hebrew-speaking coreligionists in Palestine as a bunch of hicks. In fact, they assembled the Septuagint, seventy-something scholars, to write a New and CANONICAL Greek version of the Old Testament. The new Greek version was considered more canonically correct than the one in the old language, which does not show a deep reverences for their country cousins’ inheritance.

This is all based strictly on my own experience with Intellectuals and their pretensions. None of THIS is canonical.

The Hebrew-speaking Jews of the Temple were, if human nature hasn’t changed, regarded a bit like South Italian monks are by theologians today, simple-minded with admirable characteristics but no idea of what The Latest Dogma is all about.

Hellenic Jews considered themselves to be out in the wide world, not a bunch of rubes stuck in a thousand years of provincialism. In The Name of the Rose it is odd to see theologians in the Middle Ages quoting Aristotle as if it were Holy Writ, but this is seldom noticed. Both were part of the Hellenic Jewish tradition.

There was another “sophisticated” tradition, that of Zoroastrianism. In the Gospel of Judas, third century, Jesus is talking to Judas and laughing with the same leer a Mommy Professor would give at a bunch of Bible Belters while he said to Judas, as one Intellectual to another Sophisticate, that the God they were speaking of was The God of this World.

That is as much of a giveaway to the writer’s Zoroastrian background as Political Correctness would be to its Marxist origins if Mommy Professor’s products were capable of thinking.

This attitude on the part of the WRITER of the Gospel of Judas is as familiar to us today as the attitude of the Septuagint Jews toward their hick cousins down in Jerusalem.

There is certainly a contrast between Jesus’ Father and the genocidal Jehovah so often depicted in the Old Testament. But for over three centuries, that was the only official Bible the Hellenic Jews had. Apparently each group had its own unique Gospel or two, but none of them were accepted by all.

Marcion was rejected in his attempt to get rid of the connection between Jehovah and Jesus’ loving and merciful Father. Or at least that is the way one COULD think of it.

But Marcion, being a good Intellectual, did not just criticize the old. Like Mommy Professor it was not enough just to point out the failings in Adam Smith. He wanted his own Marxism to replace it.

Marcion came in about the time the Gospel of Judas did. He too wanted Zoroastrian Intellectuality to replace the Rube Religion. Whereas Paul had recommended that all unmarried young women remain sterile, but admitted that some couldn’t do it, Marcion demanded that ALL Christians be sterile.

My opinion is that Marcion was a Mommy Professor of his time.

Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, said he was synthesizing the two Great Religions of his day, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and his name has been attached to all the Christian heresies that have demanded total sterility.

I am fascinated by some of what seem to be parallels in the first centuries of the rise of Christianity, which was almost as dominated by writers as ours is, and our own. I am also aware of just how wrong a person who makes such an observation can be when he tries to make everything fit into it.