Marcion was a Christian from the Black Sea coast, a wealthy shipping magnate whose arrival in Rome some four decades before Irenaeus travelled there had generated a sensation. Outraged that the churches in the capital refused to accommodate his teachings, he had indignantly turned his back on them and founded his own. Marcion, like numerous other Christian intellectuals, was revolted by any notion that Christ might have had a human body, with human limitations and human functions – but that was hardly the most eye-opening of his teachings. Altogether more so was his take on the God of Israel, who, so Marcion had insisted, was not the supreme deity at all. Instead, he was the lesser of two gods.
Marcion contended that the supreme God (the true father of Christ) did not create the world nor had anything to do with it; until in his infinite mercy, had sent his son to redeem it. It was a novel and startling doctrine, but Marcion claimed that it was manifest in the contradictions between Jewish scripture and the letters of Paul. Rather than struggle to square these differences, he proposed a canon.
Christians, according to Marcion, should regard as definitive only a closed selection of writings: ten of Paul’s letters, and a carefully edited version of the gospel written by his follower Luke. Here, in place of Jewish scripture, was a witness to the divine purpose that Christians could authentically regard as their own: a New Testament. It was a momentous innovation. Never before – so far as we know – had a Christian proposed a canon. The concept was one that Irenaeus found too suggestive to ignore.
While Irenaeus obviously didn’t agree with Marcion’s contemptuous attitude towards Jewish scripture, he made sure to reinstate his own canon.
Yet Irenaeus, even as he sought to repudiate Marcion’s influence, could not help but betray it. In what role, after all, was he casting Jewish scripture, if not as an ‘old testament’? What hope of finding treasure in it, except by the light of a new? This was why, just as Marcion had done fifty years previously, Irenaeus promoted a corpus of writings from the age of the apostles. Alongside Luke’s gospel, he included John’s, and the two others most widely accepted as authoritative: one attributed to Matthew, a tax-collector summoned by Jesus to follow him, and the second to Mark, the reputed founder of the church in Alexandria. Compared to these, so Irenaeus declared, all other accounts of Christ’s life and teachings were but ‘ropes woven out of sand.
As the generations passed, and the memories of those who had known the apostles with them, so could the faithful find in the gospels of Irenaeus’ canon a sure and certain mooring to the bedrock of the past: a new testament indeed.
Source: Dominion