datic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.
But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The "Law and Prophets" which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the Bible of the Jewish God, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil's book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God — likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community[1] as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the — one and true — Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the one prophet of Jesus, who was Paul.
Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to him, who not long before had written the Gospel "according to John." The intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels proper; what he did — and, unlike Mark, consciously did — was to create something quite new, the first sacred book of Christianity, the Koran of the new religion.[2] The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as something complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind "John" and Marcion. Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel; not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is not "born," he is "there," and wanders in human form over the earth. And this god is a Trinity — God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem of "Substance," which dominated the following centuries of the exclusion of everything else and finally led to the religion's splitting up into three churches. And — what is significant in more respects than one — the solution of that problem to which "John" stands closest is that which the Nestorian East stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though
- ↑ About A.D. 150. See Harnack, op. cit., pp. 32., et seq.
- ↑ For the notions of Koran and Logos, see below. Again as in the case of Mark, the really important question is, not what the material before him was, but how this entirely novel idea for such a book, which anticipated and indeed made possible Marcion's plan for a Christian Bible, could arise. The book presupposes a great spiritual movement (in eastern Asia Minor?) that knew scarcely anything of Jewish Christianity and was yet remote from the Pauline, westerly thought-world. But of the region and type of this movement we know nothing whatever.
