The Arch-Heretic Marcion (review)

The Arch-Heretic Marcion offers a succinct, clearly written, up-to-date primer in the principal questions of Marcionite studies, and that will be its primary value, rather than offering any original contribution to the subject. In succession, after a glance at the lasting impact of Harnack (Introduction), Moll discusses "Problems of Sources" (Chapter 1), "Marcion's Life" (Chapter 2), "Marcion's Gods" (Chapter 3), "Marcion's Bible" (Chapter 4), "Marcion's Works" (Chapter 5), "Marcion's Church" (Chapter 6), and "Marcion's Time" (Chapter 7). Even though Harnack's portrait of Marcion as a second Paul and proto-Luther has been challenged on many points before, a comprehensive reconsideration is long overdue. Rather than generate progress toward this goal, however, the primary purpose of this book is to restore the pre-Harnack Marcion of the polemical tradition. Moll proposes that historically Marcion was very much a heretic in the "classical sense" (2 n. 6), just as he was seen by his "orthodox" detractors; the latter may invent pejorative stories about Marcion's personal life (Chapter 2), and may confuse his original teaching with its development by his successors (Chapter 3), but can be largely depended upon to accurately represent his motives, his core issues, and the acts of "forgery" by which he sought to carry through his vision of the Christian message.

Moll's Marcion is a man of "pathological traits" (132), a "soul . . . infested by a fanatical hatred of the world" (159), who "had nothing but disgust and hatred for . . . life itself" (59), whose asceticism merely expressed a Trotz (defiance or spite) against the law and the creator, wishing "in an almost childish feeling of revenge" to "irritate the Creator by not using his creation or by deliberately disobeying his commands" (131). The author's remarks on the pathological character of asceticism and martyrdom cry out for even a modicum of engagement with the extensive secondary literature on both subjects. No better informed by current scholarship is his assumption of the existence in Marcion's time of something he seems quite comfortable calling "the Church," which adhered to a clearly defined "orthodoxy," to which Marcion's radical doctrine was in such direct opposition that he was the first person ever to be expelled (hence the "arch-heretic" [44-45]). These characterizations of Marcion and his time are little more than transcriptions of the polemical sources. With rare exceptions (e.g., Chapter 2), Moll generally fails to take into consideration the agendas of these sources, their participation in traditions of polemic, their use of rhetorical themes, patterns in their handling of particular issues, or even the larger context of their discussion of Marcion. Even when the author notes that characterizations of Marcion correspond with polemical tropes (e.g., 117 n. 57), the reader is asked to believe that Marcion was the one figure for whom the cliché was accurate. This uncritical attitude towards his sources explains how Moll comes to what he regards as the two major original claims of his study.

In his novel reconstruction of Marcion's original teaching (Chapter 3), Moll deals with discrepancies in the sources by hypothesizing an elaborate history of doctrinal development within Marcionism. Foregoing any consideration of the relative brevity or length of the sources, the degree to which they may be informed or uninformed, the larger projects within which they were commenting on Marcion's system, and how those factors might cause oversimplification or distortion, Moll posits that they accurately report the "deformations" of Marcion's original teachings current among the Marcionites of their respective times and regions. The fact that several of the later sources apparently had Marcion's Antitheses in front of them fails to complicate this theory for the author (in fact, he drastically downplays the value of Antitheses for getting at Marcion's thought [111-14]). Moll thus comes to rest crucial importance on Ptolemy's Letter to Flora (supported by a single passage in Irenaeus) as a contemporary witness to a teaching of stark dualism, despite the fact that we cannot...