Henry's Theological Blog

An Ai rendering of Marcion derived from a medieval wood-cut circa 1550s.

Recent Posts - newest first .. I post every Friday

25-12-14 - Put the Christ Back into Christmas

Obviously, turning Christmas into an orgy of consumerism--the frantic Xmas shopping and then .. The Sales... and then ... get-party-dress-and-Champagne for New Years Eve, etc.--is an appalling corruption of any Christian message. A properly Christian way to celebrate Christmas would be a stripping away of consumerism and culinary indulgence much closer in spirit and format to, say, Lent. Remember, the devil cannot innovate he can only invert and the inversion of Christmas is more or less done and entrenched at this point. What about the fight-back by actual Christians. Well, there is none. None whatsoever and there never will be because more than 99 percent of C of E and Catholic clergy are timid and complacent. Some of them are so thick it is toe-curling. Last year I was at HTH in Hastings on Christmas Day and the Vicar and his wife got up on stage and invited kids to come up one-by-one and show the congregation what presents they had got for Christmas--a plastic T.rex, etc.--with each getting a round of applause. As I tried to explain to Sarah and Simon not long after the service: going to church on Christmas Day is the one possible time these families might have engaged with the Christian message. The two both looked at me blankly ... and then proceeded to blank me on Sundays. That is to say, the one thing that often lacks in the C of E is any sort of dialogue about any theological matter. That is the sole main problem. The second problem is that many C of E clergy are lazy dimwits which means that it is a bit difficult for them to understand what is being said, and then, even if they did understand, the effort required to actually lift a finger would be all too much. And so hence Tommy Robinson's campaign to Put the Christ Back into Christmas. It is a consequence of weak clergy and lazy clergy. You reap what you sow.

25-12-12 - After Synagogue

I once went to Holland Park Synagogue for a service, not that long ago. Everyone in my Church of England congregation was invited as it goes. It was moving and wonderful. There is an MC guy with a top hat on! Women sit upstairs and they chat all together as a community of women. It was the most wild arcane thing ever. After the service I was invited to lunch and the table could not--after about ten minutes in--resist espousing their views. Jesus was a time-waster, a poser, a false prophet, a dingus. I was going to write "I was taken aback" but I avoid cliche where I can and in fact I was not taken aback at all. However, I did think to myself: Look, if you came over to my church and stayed after for refreshments there is no way me and my friends would sit there going Moses was a major bellend and stuff like that. Or: still waiting for your prophet to come are we boys and girls? Good luck with that! I mean that would never happen, but the other way is fine apparently.

25-12-05 - Luke 4

In Luke 4 the devil comes to test Jesus' Faith by trying to tempt him over to the side of evil. In Luke 4 we learn a lot about the devil: the devil can invert but the devil cannot innovate. The devil is also an omniscient supernatural being like Jesus. And, if you don't like what the devil is proposing you can tell him you are not interested and eventually he will lose interest and fuck off to find someone more susceptible. These days people don't generally think about the devil as an entity literally tempting them into evil but they do assert that they have "guilty pleasures" or that they do things that "make your brain rot." Well, it's the same thing. Getting you sitting there scrolling through TikTok for hours on end is a quick win for the devil and he is pretty buzzed about it. He takes the wonder and beauty of human thought processes and creativity and tamps that down with mindless bullshit. Another hour that a person has wasted when they could have been soaring, dreaming, planning, building, evolving, etc. I know, I know, you thought the devil is just active for shite horror movies .. nope. He is there, omniscient, tempting you towards acts of egomania, self-aggrandisement, or activities that blunt-or-dull the mind. It's just that is his thing: he takes something wonderful and seeks to turn it to shit. But never forget, all you have to do is tell him you are not interested, and he will eventually lose interest and move on--as he does with Jesus in Luke 4. The devil is a bit like the oft-recalled playground bully: if he is getting no joy then he is apt to go and seek elsewhere. The devil gets bored when he gets nowhere.

25-11-28 - Hippy chicks

The hippy-chick and hippy-dude Jesus lovers that one sometimes sees around at festivals, or in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, or Brighton, are really--as Bart Ehrman and others have pointed out before me--Marcionites by any other name. They pursue a life of peace and love. They love Jesus and they know that Jesus is the way of love. They are not in the slightest interested in the vicious god of the Jews. They don't study "The Bible" but they do read the Gospels. Their relationship with Moses and Judaism is non-existent and they like it that way. When I see the wonder of a group of hippy-chick and hippy dude Jesus lovers gathered I often feel the urge to go over and say: "Hey guys there once was this man called Marcion and he espoused exactly what you seem to know quite instinctively: the way of Jesus is the way of LOVE. That is what this fellow Marcion was saying too."

25-11-21 - St Mellitus

Some people think I was asked to leave St Mellitus for the reason of being a heretic. This is not really accurate. The picture is this: as I continued my studies at St Mellitus, a Church of England training college, I became first enamored by, and then committed to, a Marcionist position. It was I suppose a downer for all concerned as it meant that I would have to leave--which I did without requesting any refund on fees--and not be able to continue at the wonderful loving, supportive environment that the St Mellitus staff create so brilliantly. "It is weird being a heretic, but there you have it," was my reaction. The main debate was all about the curriculum. Every Monday I sat there in these vastly long lectures on the Torah ("Good morning everyone and welcome to lecture nine in our fifteen week series on the book of Exodus"). After a while I began to voice the obvious: "Look, I came here to study Christianity not Judaism dude." The fact is that at St Mellitus, and I suppose at pretty much all Episcopalian seminaries, the sacred texts of Judaism are taught completely uncritically as if a natural part of Christianity. It is odd because a Christian is a follower of Jesus--nothing more nothing less. And Jesus very definitely rejected orthodox Judaism. If he hadn't then he would not have had something completely new to offer, rather he would just have been a very lovely Rabbi teaching Jewish Law. My position is this: it is well worth reading the Hebrew Scripture (we don't call it the Old Testament any more as it is patronising and tends to cultural appropriation) for context, sure, but to think the Hebrew Scripture forms a part of Christianity is absurd and is utterly without foundation. For example, if a Christian concerns himself with the Ten Commandments, he is not involved with anything that Jesus ever discussed or really commented on except in passing. The Law of Moses is just that: The Law of Moses. It's a different religion! The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus trying to explain how his thinking differs very definitely from the Law of Moses. As for the 613 prohibitions, or obligations, of the "observing" Jew, Jesus was repeatedly scathing and contemptuous of these endless rituals. Yes indeed. And don't take my word for it. Check out the Gospels. (Academic theologians use the NRSV translation as standard, but the NIV is pretty good too.)

25-11-14 - The First Gospel

A commonly held Marcionite position is that the first Gospel was the Gospel of Luke and that the original version of Luke is indeed the much-debated "Q" source. When discussing such matters it is important to accept that no living authority--e.g. Bart Ehrman or anyone else--has really got enough evidence to argue a definitive position. We just don't know for sure and we probably can't ever know beyond all doubt. But that is not to say that making propositions and theorizing is not relevant. Me personally, I have always, quite instinctively, felt that the first Gospel was not the earliest version of Luke but rather the Gospel of Thomas. Why? Because if one is remembering a person's wisdom like say Bowie, or Burroughs, or Morrissey--to note a few that come to mind--one tends to just get stuck into quotes: the things that the person said. Exactly where they were and where they travelled around is somewhat secondary especially when the person concerned here never travelled more than a hundred miles or so from his "hometown." This "just the quotes" approach is what the Gospel of Thomas consists of: 114 things Jesus said as written down sometime soon after his disappearance from Earth. The Nag Hammadi copy of Thomas was written out around 350 CE copied into Coptic from a Greek manuscript that seemingly dates from around 160 CE but we really have no way of knowing when or where the urtext emerged. Perhaps the absolute urtext was begun just days after Jesus left Earth, i.e., about one month after the crucifixion. It stands to reason that the first thing that the initial followers of Jesus (likely about 200-300 persons only) would have wanted to do was get down on paper (as it were) his commentary, or if you like, his philosophy. Exactly where and when Jesus travelled around during his ministry would have surely been secondary at that point. About 70 percent of Thomas appears in Luke often with very similar turns of phrase. One crucial aspect of Thomas is that Jesus' contempt for orthodox Judaism is even more pronounced. Particularly on things like the tradition of infant ritual mutilation that Judaism insists upon. In Thomas when Jesus is asked about the value of circumcision he answers only to assert: "If God wanted little boys circumcised they would be born circumcised."

Quick Q+A on Marcionism

What are the core values of a Marcionite?

- Trusting in God as Jesus described him to be: loving and benevolent always.

- Following Jesus through Luke.

- Abandoning the study of the Hebrew Scripture ("Old Testament").

Who was Marcion?

- Marcion was a follower of Jesus who lived from the year 85 CE to about the year 160 CE. At a time when Jesus' epoch on earth was still within living memory for some.

What do Marcionites believe?

- Marcion and his followers held that the vengeful, spiteful, and often aggressive God--commonly known as Yahweh--as described in Hebrew scripture ("Old Testament") could not possibly be the same God of Love that Jesus described during his three-year-long ministry.

- Marcion proposed and expounded a complete clean-break with Judaism as had been indicated by Jesus. For example in Luke 5: "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins and will spill out, and the skins will be ruined. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins."

- Marcion held what became known as a Docetic Christology. Marcion and his followers did not accept that Jesus was "fully divine and yet also fully human" i.e. the hypostatic union that was foundational to Catholicism and then later the Church of England. Marcionites believe that Jesus was always-and-only divine and merely took on a human-like form in order to interact with humans.

What happened to Marcion?

- During his lifetime in the period of the Early Church there were numerous competing nascent formats of Christianity of which Marcionism was just one. However, in 325 CE the views of Marcionites were definitively declared to be heresy by the dominant Catholic Church.

Do Marcionites study the scripture?

- The Marcionite scripture is a precursor of canonical Luke. Marcionites also study ten of Paul's letters: Galatians, I Corinthians, II Corinthians, Romans, I and II Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon.

Key Resources

- Reconstruction of the Gospel of Marcion by Jason BeDuhn, 2013 pdf.

- Reconstruction of the Gospel of Marcion by Dieter Roth, 2015 pdf.

- Ben Smith's English schematized version synthesized from BeDuhn and Roth, 2015 pdf.

- Tertullian: Five Books Against Marcion (Trans: Peter Holmes) facsimile of 1868 edition pdf.

Further Resources

- Marcionite Bible published by the Marcionite Christian Church (USA), 2020 pdf.

- The Complete Writings of Tertullian (ed. Philip Schaff) pdf.

- Biographical article on Marcion by Julian Spriggs link.

- Gospel of Marcion Wikipedia article.

- Priority of the Gospel of Marcion Wikipedia article.

- A Bart Ehrman blogpost from 2021 link.

2025 Dr Henry Bond