First of all, Marcion did not just
reject the Old Testament Scriptures, but repudiated what the church called ‘apostolic
tradition’ on a much broader scale. Not only the Old Testament was thought to
contain revelation from the Creator God, according to Marcion, but parts of the
oral and written gospel tradition as well, as transmitted by the church.
Wilhelm Schneemelcher here makes the sensible note that the question, whether
Marcion wanted to replace the ‘Scriptures’ of the church, i.e. the ‘Old
Testament’, with his ‘New Testament’, must be denied. The question at stake was
much broader. Although the rejection of the ‘Old Testament’ was a central part
of Marcion’s teaching, its dismissal would naturally also bring about a radical
transformation of the oral and written tradition, which until then had been
living within the church (Bibel III: Die Entstehung des Kanons des Neuen
Testaments und der christlichen Bibel, 37).
Von Campenhausen made a similar
point a couple of years earlier, maintaining that it is inappropriate to regard
the formation of Marcion’s NT as just a substitute for the existing OT scriptures,
on the supposition that a church without Scripture is unthinkable (Campenhausen,
The Formation of the Christian Bible, 152, n. 15). And, as already
indicated, the question of a scriptural canon is not at all the primary issue
in the Marcionite conflict. Instead, it is the Christian theological identity
and the doctrinal tradition as a whole—not least in its relation to the Jewish
heritage—that is at stake. In this connection von Campenhausen points out that,
according to Marcion, the Christian message and preaching had to be rejected,
since even the earliest disciples had misunderstood Jesus’ words and
consequently adulterated them with Jewish interpretation (Ibid., 151f.).
In Marcion’s view, not only the ‘New
Testament’ Scriptures, but the whole of the Christian tradition had been
corrupted and therefore could not be trusted any longer. We may note that historical
reconstruction would seek to accentuate the scriptural canon in a narrow sense,
in this situation when the totality of Christian identity was at stake, tend to
miss the broader issue at stake. The anti-Marcionite reaction concentrated on
what was more important under these circumstances, namely fundamental theological
issues such as the question of God, ecclesial theology and tradition,
continuity with the Jewish prophets and the apostolic origin.
It is here worth noting some
further remarks listed by Wilhelm Schneemelcher: (Bibel III: Die Entstehung
des Kanons des Neuen Testaments und der christlichen Bibel) 1) prior to
Marcion, the Old Testament was sacred Scripture for the church; 2) the Pauline
corpus, consisting of ten letters, was found by Marcion as sued in the church
before he ‘cleansed’ it; 3) the Jesus tradition as recorded in the Gospels,
such as the Gospel of Luke used by Marcion, was already regarded as normative
in the church; and 4) Marcion’s ‘New Testament’ did not possess any sacredness.
Another interesting point to be
made is the fact that Justin, Irenaeus and Tertullian in their polemics against
Marcion primarily concentrate on his rejection and handling of the ‘Old
Testament’. The ‘New Testament’ is focused upon only secondarily. The New
Testament, as argued above, formed by ‘natural growth’ rather than by sudden
criticism of Jewish elements of the Christian Scriptures inspired by Marcion.
The authority of the old Scriptures, moreover, belonged to another category
than that of the new apostolic writings. These simply could not replace the OT.
We may also ask whether the new writings at the early date really would count
as sacred books in precisely the same way at the OT did . . . (Thomas Bokedal, The
Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual
and Interpretation [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014], 186-88)