In this episode Phylicia explores Marcionism’s heretical views on the Old Testament, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in light of personal biases and promoting the Old Testament’s foundational role in Christianity.
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Transcription
No false teaching ever begins with the crazy stuff. Every false teaching begins with something that sounds true, but is actually a lie. Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Verity podcast. I’m Phylicia Masonheimer, your host and the founder of Every Woman a Theologian. And right now we are doing a series on ancient heresies and false teachings. How do we discern these as they reappear in today’s society? In this episode, we’re going to look at a heresy called Marcionism named for a man named Marcion from the first few centuries of church history. We’re gonna learn about what Marcion didn’t like about the Old Testament and how we’re seeing parallels to this same attitude today. Then we’re gonna talk about the importance of the Old Testament and why Christians need to pay attention to the important truths that are found in this text.
This is going to cross over a little bit with what we talked about in the Gnosticism episodes. So if you haven’t watched those two episodes that we did on Gnosticism, head back and watch those. Let’s start with who Marcion was, what he taught, and then we’ll get into some of the implications of his worldview. So Marcion was a pastor’s kid. His father was a bishop in the Southern Coast Of The Black Sea. And this is still very early on in Christianity. We believe he was not Jewish. He was gentile or Greek and at this point the church has spread out of Israel and Palestine throughout Europe and so now it’s reaching up towards the Black Sea which is where his father was pastoring a church.
And so he grows up in the church. He grew up around Christianity. But as he grows, he begins to develop this worldview that includes two very significant factors. Number one, he absolutely hates Judaism. And number two, he doesn’t like the material world. Now again, if you watched or listened to the Gnosticism episode, you know that a hatred or a dislike or distrust of the material world is a fundamental of the Gnostic worldview because the material world is evil and the spiritual world is where true freedom and true destiny is found. And so Marcion for whatever reason developed this kind of syncretistic view that included Christian elements and also gnostic elements. Around the year 01/1944, so again this is very very early in church history, he went to Rome and began to teach.
And so in Rome, he began to found his own church that utilized these different elements of his philosophy. So because Marcion has this view like gnosticism that the world is evil, he has to come to a conclusion. And this is what all Christian Gnostics must wrestle with. He comes to the conclusion that the creator of the world, the material world must also be evil. Now how do you get to this point? I think that like the beginning point for most false teachings, it’s looking around at our world and saying how there could be so much suffering and evil in the material world. Later on when we start to move into the medieval era, we’re going to look at a worldview called Pelagianism and the starting point there was the same. Pelagius wanted to figure out how to deal with the problem of evil in the world and he didn’t think that it was possible for people to take responsibility for their sin unless they had a completely free will and had to take complete ownership of their own evil. And so out of that worldview, he developed a very unbiblical framework that took God basically completely out of the equation in terms of salvation.
So here we’re seeing similar things. The starting point is honest and it’s real but the solution to the problem is not consistent with what Christ taught. So instead of falling into gnosticism which relies on these genealogies of eons and these different, spiritual entities that you would, try to comprehend or come in contact with to reach gnosis, Marcion says instead that the God and father of Jesus is not the same as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. So Yahweh made the world. He’s the material God and the father of Jesus only wanted a spiritual world. He didn’t want a material world. So Yahweh makes this evil physical world and this other spiritual father is the father of Jesus. This is very similar to Christian Gnosticism and it’s also very similar to some modern ideologies that we’re seeing pop up through YouTube teachers, through health and wellness bloggers, and influencers that are saying that the God of the material world, the God in the Jewish scriptures, Yahweh is evil but there’s a different a different God that is the the father of Jesus.
So what this led Marcion to do was to be extremely dissatisfied with the Old Testament, right? Now, he already had a bias against Judaism and we don’t know if his bias against Judaism was because of his view of the Old Testament or if it had another reason. It’s kind of a chicken and the egg situation. Did he hate Judaism because he hated the Old Testament God? Or did he hate the Old Testament God because he hated Judaism for other reasons? We don’t really know. But what we do know is that he wanted to remove the Old Testament from the Christian ethic from the Christian church practice. So at this point, remember, in church history, the church comes out of the synagogue. The word church comes from the Dutch word kirk and it refers back to the Hebrew word for assembly in Old Testament. So the Greek word in the New Testament regarding the church refers to assembly as it is used in the Hebrew scriptures. So in the Hebrew scriptures the word church would have been the assembly of the righteous and that’s how it’s used in the New Testament.
And then when it goes through all the different translations into other languages it becomes church. So when we see the church referred to here it means the assembly of God’s people. And as he is, you know, looking out at how the church is using the Old Testament which carried forward from when the church was predominantly Jewish and then becomes predominantly non Jewish, they’re still using the Old Testament. They’re reading it aloud. And if you’ve ever been to an Anglican church service or a Catholic church service where it’s more liturgical and they give you the readings that you’re following along with, you’ll see that there’s big chunks of of Old Testament readings that you’re going to be reading from alongside gospel readings and Psalm readings. Well, Psalms are in the Old Testament. But all of this, again, pointing back to this legacy that that began very early of reading the Old Testament and it being a significant part of our of our faith in liturgy. Well Marcion did not like this and he wanted to remove the Hebrew scriptures from Christian life and worship.
And again the reason for this is that Yahweh in the Old Testament, Marcion perceived him as vindictive, full of favoritism, and selfish. He’s not willing to, you know, listen or, hear his people or show mercy. He sees him as an evil God with an arbitrary sense of justice. And my source for this, if you’d like to follow along, or read more about this is the story of Christianity by Justo Gonzales, has a whole section on Marcy. And if you’d like to read more about it, I’ll put the link in the show notes. So Marcin decides we’re just gonna get rid of the Hebrew scriptures. We’re going to not use these at all because this is as Justo says here, it is the word of an inferior god. So I’m not going to receive that.
I’m going to receive the New Testament which is the word of a superior God, the true God. So when he removed the Old Testament, that meant that in his churches, now you have this massive void. I mean, there’s 39 books in the Old Testament and there’s only 27 in the New and Old Testament is a significant portion of scripture. So he makes his own list of books and these included the epistles of Paul, the gospel of Luke who was Paul’s companion, and the rest he removed because he claimed that these were affected by Jewish viewpoints. So clearly Marcion was unapologetically anti semitic which is a problem in and of itself. But it also reveals that he could not comprehend. He was so fully biased by his own determined philosophy that even in the gospel of Luke, Jesus consistently speaks of his Jewishness, how he came to fulfill the law, how he came as the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of Abraham’s prophecy, the fulfillment of the Adamic and Noahic and Mosaic Abrahamic and Davidic covenants, That he is the sacrificial lamb. He is the lion of Judah.
That all of the significant prophecies of the Old Testament are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Marcion lost all of this significance by cutting off the Old Testament. But why did he cut off the Old Testament? Again, his struggle with what he perceived as a God of injustice and evil. And what’s sad about this is that his personal hatred of the Jews kept him from understanding the context of the Old Testament that would have helped him see that Yahweh is a God of mercy not a God of arbitrary justice. And I think there’s a warning in this. Obviously we can see how Marcion’s actions are being replicated today in our society, but there’s another lesson here and it’s how our personal biases can prevent us from understanding the truth, especially the truth about God. That we get so comfortable and we get so content and stuck in our ways with what we think. We’re unwilling to possibly be wrong.
Even if being wrong means that there’s good news at the end of it. He was so set in his ways, so stubborn, his own will so elevated that he refused to consider the possibility that his hatred for Judaism and for the Jews was preventing him from understanding Jesus rightly. And in the end, what did he have to do? He had to disrespect and dishonor the words of Jesus’ own disciples who knew him better than anyone else in order to preserve his worldview. He had to disrespect and dishonor an old Jesus to say this is the real Jesus you need to follow. And that’s the lesson here. How often do we allow our own philosophies, our own ideas of who Jesus is make us think I know Jesus better than Jesus knows himself. And I know Jesus better than two thousand years of church history. All the apostles and disciples and early church fathers who attested to who he was and what he did and what he said.
I know better. And you guys, that is the very first sin. That’s the very first sin. If we go back to Genesis three, that was the very first thing. Did God really say? Casting doubt on what God says, not just to do but also what God says about us and what God says about himself. And then saying, well, if you disobey him, you aren’t actually going to die. There won’t be any negative effects. He’s lying to you.
He’s exaggerating. That’s not the truth. This is how the enemy works. This is how evil works. It’s never going to present you with this blatant idea or philosophy that is just absolutely wackadoodle and you accept it right out. Right? It always starts with something subtle. I’ll give you an example of this. So, I follow a couple of ex new age bloggers and teachers, and it’s interesting to hear their testimonies about what they believed when they were still embroiled in new age philosophy and astrology and things like this.
And so they’ll talk about how they believe things like lizard people in Hollywood. Like that Hollywood Actors are like lizard people that are sent from other planets to dominate society. And when I hear that or probably you hear that, you think that is insane. Like, are you crazy? How could someone believe that? Because it didn’t start with that. It started with something like astrology where it’s like, well I can look at the stars and if I follow my birth chart and I can see the stars, I can sense them and the horoscope seems to line up with what I’m experiencing. That makes sense to me. And starting with something like that, they start down a pathway that opens into these other ideas that are offshoots as they keep deep diving throughout their worldview. And you can arrive at wild things from almost any avenue, any worldview.
You can come to extremes. My point though is whenever you’re looking at heresy or false teaching, it’s never going to be this situation where it’s like, oh, here’s an absolutely insane idea and I’m gonna sell you on that first. It’s always going to start with something that’s very believable, very sane. And that’s how Marcion started. He looked out. He saw a suffering world and he said, there’s no way a good God could create this. But what’s wild about this to me is that he completely skipped over the fact that a good God created a good world and it was human beings who chose to break it. So when we are looking at the Bible now, I just want to encourage you to be honest with yourself about the biases that you bring to the Old Testament and ask yourself are there things you assume about it that maybe aren’t true? Now in the second half of this episode we’re going to talk more about the Old Testament and my encouragement for those of you who want to learn to study it.
But before we get there I want to tell you about a brand new totally free pdf download that I made for you. I made this last week and I think it will be so helpful to those of you who really are bothered by the Old Testament. Maybe you’re listening to this or you’re watching this and you’re like, that’s me. I just feel like the Old Testament intimidates me and I have so many questions. This free PDF is five pages long. It’s called 10 myths about the Old Testament. And it is just a short readable pdf that includes an overview of the genres of literature that are in the Old Testament, the purpose of these books, and then a list of 10 myths that are often shared about the Old Testament. If you are interested in this free download, I am going to put the link right in the show notes.
Whether you’re on iTunes, Spotify, or watching on YouTube, You can just head to the show notes, click it, enter your email and you’ll immediately receive the download. So hopefully this 10 myths of the old testament PDF is helpful to you. And if you read it, you still have questions, feel free to email me at phyicia@phyliciamasonheimer.com. Okay. So back to the Old Testament and kind of responding to Marcion’s idea. What’s so interesting about Marcion, is that he was actually a bigger threat according to Gonzales than narcissism was. Why do you think that is? I think it’s because he was so convincing. Right? Gnosticism is kind of like the lizard people.
Like, when you read about gnosticism as a Christian, you’re like, I mean, y’all are a little crazy. But if you read Marcion’s arguments, it’s a little bit more convincing. And that’s why when we see this repackaged Marcionism today, particularly the idea that Yahweh is not the same as the father God and Jesus because Jesus and the father and the spirit are one. They’re trinity. This is important. We’re gonna be doing an episode on that soon. When we look at things like this, it’s easy to go, well, that’s actually really convincing because, like, didn’t Yahweh just, like, arbitrarily kill a bunch of people in the Old Testament? Or didn’t Yahweh, like, harden people’s hearts? Didn’t Yahweh, like, strike people dead? And we start to think that, you know, yeah, it seems like God is kind of unfair. Yahweh is kind of unfair.
And so we don’t ever deal with those particular situations. We don’t actually learn to wrestle with them. And so we then come away with kind of this just a little idea in the back of our minds that maybe Marcion is right. And that’s what’s still happening today. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about the Old Testament, and why we should care about it in contrast to Marcion’s view. So the Old Testament, we call it the Old Testament because of the Greek and Latin words that were used for that particular section of scripture, testamentum. Now what it really meant was the old covenant and the new covenant.
So the old and new testimonies really are referring to the old and the new covenants. And this is a reference to the Last Supper. Jesus says, this is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. So what he’s saying is the final covenant, there was Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David. You have and I’m sure I’m missing one in there. I think Ezra renews the covenant. You have Jesus cutting a new covenant in his blood instead of in the blood of animals.
Right? So when we say Old Testament, New Testament, we’re just referring to the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. In Judaism, the Old Testament is not the Old Testament. It’s the testament. It’s the covenant because they do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. So that is why their scriptures are the we have the same scriptures in the Old Testament, but theirs are in a slightly different order just because of how through church history ours were moved from scrolls to codexes and then rearranged. Same content, different order. And if you want to learn more about that, you can head back to the second season of Verity podcast and listen to the canon series where I I talk about how the Bible was translated, how it was compiled, or you can head to our website phyliciamasonheimer.com and I have a book called How the Bible Came to Be if you prefer to read about old testament but these are the same content as the Jewish scriptures which are divided in three parts: Torah, writings, and prophets. Again we have the same books we just have them in a slightly different order and we don’t have them divided out in the same way that the Jews do.
So all of this to say we’re both referring both Jews and Christians are referring to the same content. Obviously Christians see it differently because we see the Old Testament as pointing to and being fulfilled in Christ and that Christ was the Jewish Messiah who came to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham that through Abraham the whole world would be blessed. So Israel was chosen according to Exodus and Deuteronomy not because they were better than everyone else or not because that they were, holier, bigger, greater, you know, more moral than anybody else but because God loved them and he wanted to use their family, their nation as a way to bring life and blessing to the whole world. And as you go through the book of Exodus and Deuteronomy, we just finished this in the bible in a year, we’re looking at God forming a nation but not just a random nation. It’s not like God’s like, oh yeah, I just liked you better so this is what I’m doing. No. Israel was set apart in the Old Testament to act as a priest to the world. So you have this microcosm if you look down inside Israel and in Exodus and Deuteronomy, you look inside and you see, there’s 12 tribes.
The Levites are consecrated. They’re set aside as the priests of the people. So they take care of the tabernacle where the whole presence of God dwells. And so they are the priests to the people. They’re set apart. But all the tribes, all of Israel, are priests to the world. So the nation itself is also set apart. They also have a responsibility.
This is why the law was given. It is the grace of God so that Israel can live in the presence of God. It is the new Eden, the new garden that is where God dwells with his people. This was happening back in Eden. Sin breaks it. God makes a way for himself to dwell with his people again and he dwells in a temple made by hands and he gives them a law so they can be holy so that they can draw all nations unto him. And if you go back into Exodus, I believe it’s in, I wanna say it’s Exodus 14, it says that when the people left Israel the exodus is the most important event like in the entire Old Testament. There this is the pillar event that is anchoring, looking forward.
I mean like everybody in Genesis is looking forward to it and everybody in the rest of the old testament is looking back to it. This is the formative event. And so in this event, God delivers his people out of slavery. This becomes an emblem, an icon, if you will, of that that represents everything God is and everything God would do in the future. The Passover is to remember this. An important event that showcases God’s faithfulness throughout the years. Why am I bringing all this up? Because in that event, it says that a multi ethnic crowd went up with Israel. These were the people in Egypt who believed, who believed God, who marked their doors with blood, and who were passed over and redeemed.
And then when you get up to the promised land, they enter the promised land and one of the very first accounts we see is the story of Rahab who saves the Israelite spies who were told to come in. They’re coming in to judge the Canaanites. Israel’s being used by God to judge the Canaanites who’ve had four hundred years to repent. Earlier in the Old Testament, God is talking with Abraham, Genesis fifteen sixteen, and he predicts the coming slavery of their people. But he says this about the Canaanites. He says, the sins of the Amorites have not yet reached their full measure. So while Israel is enslaved, God is showing mercy to the Canaanites, giving them chance after chance to repent and know him. And then when Israel comes as judgment on the Canaanites for their complete abject sinfulness and evil and injustice and child sacrifice, when he comes and he and Israel goes in, even then a Canaanite could call upon the name of the lord and be saved.
And that’s what we see Rahab do. She saves the people of Israel. She puts her faith in God and she and her whole household are saved. So it’s not like God in the Old Testament is playing favorites because if you go further in to Kings and Chronicles, God is prophesying through his prophets saying turn from the ways that you’re following. You’re following after these old Canaanite ways. Don’t you remember what they did? Don’t you remember the judgment that came on them? If you do not turn you will be judged as they were judged. And that is exactly what happens and that’s why you see the Babylonian and and Assyrian exiles to Israel and to Judah and why they are taken away and they are in captivity. Because they chose to follow the ways of the Canaanites instead of choosing to follow the way of the Lord and act as a priest to those nations.
When you understand the context of what’s happening in the Old Testament, when you understand the mercy of God to continue to strive with his people, to try to reach them, to show them his grace, to live among them in a fallen and broken world as a holy, holy, holy God. You see that Marcion’s hatred for the Jewish scriptures and for the Jewish God was extremely misplaced and the product of his own lack of study and his own bias. And this is what I want to leave you with today. Where are you bringing your own bias? Where are you bringing your own reluctance to really study these things and allowing it to change your view of God. No false teaching ever begins with the crazy stuff. Every false teaching begins with something that sounds true, but is actually a lie. So you have the opportunity to study this for yourself and I hope that you do so. Remember, Verity podcast is just the starting point.
We can’t answer all your questions but we can point you, at every woman a theologian, to the answers. And we’re so happy to do that. Now before we end this episode, I want to remind you that we have the 10 Myths about the Old Testament free download available. Head to the show notes. Go ahead and click that. It will answer some of these questions including the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart and some questions about women in the bible. But I want to mention one more thing. 03/31/2025, we are launching a brand new understanding of the Old Testament course.
I’m so excited about this. This course is going to be six modules and it is co taught by both myself and Chad Bird from 1517.org. Chad is a phenomenal Bible teacher. He knows so much about the Old Testament, about Christology, so the appearances of Christ in the Old Testament, and understanding hard passages like the Lament Psalms, or the Imprecatory Psalms where it sounds like, David is wishing judgment on people, or, Proverbs 31. He’s gonna talk about that in the course. Our course during this launch at the March will be a $45 one time fee. You get to own the course. You’re not paying more than 45, but the price will go up after the launch.
So in later April, we’re gonna be raising the price. So if you are interested in understanding the Old Testament, highly recommend that you stay tuned for that launch. If you download the 10 myths about the Old Testament guide, we will be sure to let you know when the course comes out and we hope that you can join us in studying the Old Testament for yourself.