In the introduction to his commentary on the Mishna, Maimonides lists the Thirteen Foundations of Judaism. Here is foundation number 3, “The denial of physicality in God”:
This means to believe that the One is neither a body nor a force within a body, and is not susceptible to the changing states of bodies like motion and rest, neither in essence nor in accidents. … And the prophet [Isaiah] says: “To whom then will you liken me, and to whom shall I be equal, says the Holy One” [40:25]. If he were a body, he would be like other bodies. And everything that appears in Sacred Scriptures that describes him in bodily terms, like walking, standing, sitting, speaking, and so forth, is metaphorical, for as our Rabbis of blessed memory said, “the Torah speaks in the language of men.” … This third foundation is attested to by the verse, “For you saw no image” [Deut 4:15] meaning that you did not see an image or any form [when you stood at Mount Sinai], because as we have said, He has neither a body, nor is he a force within a body.”1
For Maimonides, God’s incorporeality is attested first and foremost by His being without visible form and image. God may be described in bodily terms, but these descriptions are mere metaphors, imprecise language that complies with the imprecise rules of human communication. Upon careful examination, these imprecisions can be detected and “neutralized.”
But Maimonides’s “Aristotelized” God was an exception. Most rabbis thought that the “Great Eagle,” as Maimonides was known among his admirers, had gone too far in dematerializing God. The sages were much less troubled than he was by Greek metaphysical angst. Consider the following description from the Babylonian Talmud:
Rabbi Abahu said: “Were it not written [in the Bible], it would be impossible to utter. For it is written [Is 7:20]: ‘In that day, the Lord will shave with the razor hired from the other side of the river, the king of Assyria—the head and the hair of the feet, and also the beard shall be entirely removed.’ The Lord came to Sanherib, appearing to him like an old man. And he said to Sanherib: ‘When you came to the kings of the East and the West, whose sons you took with you and killed, what did you say to them?’ And [Sanherib] answered: ‘I myself am trembling about this. Can you advise me what to do?’ [The Lord] said to him: ‘Go and change your appearance.’ [He said:] ‘How shall I change it?’ [The Lord] said to him: ‘Go bring me scissors and I will cut your hair off.’ [Sanherib said:] ‘Where shall I find them?’ [The Lord said to him:] ‘Go to this house [over there] and bring them.’ He went there, and found the house. [And he saw there] ministering angels who had appeared to him as men grinding the kernels of dates. He said to them: ‘Give me scissors.’ And they answered, ‘Grind one measure of kernels’ and gave him the scissors. When he returned [to the other side of the river] it grew dark. [The Lord] said to him: ‘Go bring light.’ So he went and brought light. And while he was carrying the light, he blew on it and the fire caught onto his beard. And [the Lord] shaved his hair and his beard, as it is written, ‘And also the beard shall be entirely removed.’ … Sanherib went away and found a plank of Noah’s ark. And he said: ‘This is the great God, who saved Noah from the flood.’ And he said: ‘If I go and succeed, I will sacrifice my two sons to him.’ When his sons heard this, and they killed him, as it is written, ‘Now it came to pass, as he was worshiping in the temple of Nisroch his god, that his sons Adrammelech and Sharezer struck him down with the sword; and they escaped into the land of Ararat’ (2 Kgs 19:37).”2
Strange. So strange that in the English translation of the Babylonian Talmud published by Michael Rodkinson in 1918 the text reads: “The Lord sent an angel, who appeared before Sanherib as an old man.”3 It is not just that the supposedly Ineffable God of the Jews took human form, but that He did so for reasons that seem trivial and even ridiculous to us. This Incarnation of the Almighty is not aimed at bringing deep divine messages to humanity, nor does God perform an act that is of great significance. He could have judged the king of Assyria, for example, or smote him down in his righteous anger, but He didn’t. Instead, He shaves him (hair, beard, and legs). The just punishment of this great enemy of the Chosen People is brought about by natural means quite unrelated to the episode just cited. The king worships a plank from Noah’s ark (probably mentioned here because his sons and would-be assassins flee into the land of Ararat, where the ark landed after the flood). He promises this ludicrous idol that he shall sacrifice his sons to it and finds himself the victim of a preventive strike. We may assume he died with impeccably shaven legs, but we cannot be sure.
It must have been obvious to Rabbi Abahu, as well as to his interlocutors, that Isaiah did not mean that God would shave the king of Assyria literally, but this, apparently, did not matter. What is particularly striking is the realistic plot worked out by the rabbi. God does not simply emerge from His heaven and shave Sanherib. He disguises Himself as an old man and sends his ministering angels to work in a date-kernel mill across the river. He convinces the king to cross the river in search of scissors. He makes sure that the angels humiliate the king by asking him to grind some kernels (a nice extra not mentioned in the prophecy). He plans the whole thing so that Sanherib, who returns to the “barber” after dark, is sent to bring light and then singes his own beard blowing on it. The only detail left uncovered is, sadly, the shaving of the legs. It may have been skipped for technical reasons (it is not easy to shave legs with scissors), or perhaps it did happen and the rabbi forgot to mention it. Whatever the case, R. Abahu seems to have considered the prophecy fulfilled (“[the Lord] shaved his hair and his beard, as it is written”). We’re not told why it was so important for God to shave the king of Assyria in person. But then his judgments are unsearchable and his ways untraceable.
More striking than the strange tale itself is the statement with which it is opened: “Were it not written [in the Bible], it would be impossible to utter.” This formula usually appears in the rabbinic literature before statements that challenge the accepted, “normative” perception of God.4 R. Abahu, in other words, is fully aware of the problematic, indeed scandalous, nature of his Midrash. An equally shocking Midrash appears in Lamentations Rabbah, one of the earliest collections of Midrashim. It deals with the destruction of the Temple. The text describes God’s reaction to the destruction of his house:
At that hour the Holy Lord was crying and saying, “Woe to me, what have I done? I brought my presence [shekinathi] down to earth for [the people of ] Israel and since they have sinned, I have returned to my previous dwelling, becoming, heaven forbid, a mockery in the eyes of people.” At that hour Metatron [the angel serving as God’s vicar] came and fell prostrate before Him and said: “Master of the universe; I will cry and you will not cry.” [The Lord] said to him: “If you would not let me cry now, I will enter a place that you are not allowed to enter and cry,” as it is said, “But if you will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride” [Jer 13:17]. … And when the Lord saw them [the patriarchs coming to Him upon learning about the destruction], He wore sackcloth and pulled out His hair, and were it not written it would have been impossible to utter. This is why it is said, “[And in that day the Lord God of hosts called for weeping and for mourning], for baldness and for girding with sackcloth” [Is 22:12]. And they were crying and walking from gate to gate [of the Temple] like a man whose dead lies before him. And the Lord was mourning and saying: “Woe to a king who succeeded in his youth and failed in his old age!”5
God clearly has a body upon which he can wear sackcloth and hair that He can pull out. In another occurrence of the formula, it precedes God’s declaration that since the destruction of His earthly abode, He has been sitting outdoors and not in the shelter of His heavenly home. As proof, He invites His sons to feel the wetness of His hair “for my head is covered with dew, my locks with the drops of the night” (Sg 5:2).6 More than the anthropomorphism, it is the overfamiliar attitude toward God that makes us uncomfortable. The God of R. Abahu is willing to compromise His incorporeality for a practical joke, and the God of Lamentations Rabba is much too human. He regrets His own decisions. He cries, instead of simply reversing them—He is, after all, almighty. He has to hide from His servants who seem more concerned about His dignity than Him. And He openly declares that He, the eternal and ageless one, has lost His powers in old age. The highly problematic nature of these descriptions did not elude their originators: “Were it not written, it would have been impossible to utter.”
But is it written? The fact of the matter is that it is quite clearly not written. As Maimonides would no doubt have argued, there is absolutely no reason to concoct this epilatory tale on the basis of Isaiah 7:20. Isaiah’s text is, as anybody can see, a metaphor. God will crush the king of Assyria, not remove his facial hair with scissors from across the river. Similarly, the call for “weeping and mourning, for baldness and for girding with sack-cloth,” is a warning for human sinners to repent, not an autobiographical statement of God.
These are not even particularly hard-to-understand verses. One could think of other verses that could more aptly qualify for the formula “were it not written, it would have been impossible to utter.” I am thinking of the reference in Genesis 6 to the sons of God lusting after the beautiful daughters of men, or the story of Moses seeing God’s back in the cleft of the rock (Ex 33:19–23).7 One could think, for example, of the strange episode where Jehovah suddenly threatens to kill Moses in the desert:
And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that Jehovah met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet, and said, “For you are a husband of blood to me!” So He let him go. Then she said, “You are a husband of blood, because of the circumcision.” (Ex 4:24–26)
Or better still,
And he arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. … Then Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when he saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.” But he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!” So he said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” And he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel [one who struggles with God],8 for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me your name, I pray.” And he said, “Why do you ask about my name?” And he blessed him there. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel [the face of God].9 “For I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved.” (Gen 32:22–31)
Generations of exegetes have done their very best to explain these episodes in which God appears as a being inexplicably hostile to humans. Why does Jehovah seek to kill Moses, who has been obediently doing His will just a couple of verses earlier? Why does the circumcision of Moses’s son by Zipporah appease Jehovah? Exegetes were willing to offer anything but the sort of literal explanation offered by Rabbi Abahu and by Lamentations Rabba. Although the “man” who wrestled with Jacob all night reveals himself as God at dawn, the God of Israel to be precise, numerous artists have followed the “canonical” exegesis and depicted the mysterious aggressor as an angel. But Jacob is quite clear that this was neither an angel nor a man. He has, he declares, “seen God face to face.” “You cannot see my face,” God warns Moses in Exodus, “for no man shall see me, and live.” Yet Jacob survived. In fact, he did not simply live to tell the tale. He struggled with God and with men and prevailed. Why did God attack Jacob in the form of a man? How is it possible that the nation’s sacred name was given at the end of a struggle in which the Almighty was vanquished by a human and forced into blessing him? Surely, “were it not written, it would have been impossible to utter.”10
One would expect the rabbis to be involved in a process of defusing theological bombs in Sacred Scriptures. Instead, our Midrashim detonate unproblematic statements. It seems that while the rabbis do at times deliteralize certain passages in the Torah, at other times (and we have just seen a few examples) they are quite willing to go in the other direction and reliteralize what are quite clearly metaphorical statements.
The rabbis of the Talmud, and many of their successors, are quite un-shocked by the idea that God has a body. “The question,” writes Alon Goshen Gottstein, “of whether the rabbis believed in a God who has form is one that needs little discussion and therefore is of lesser interest. … Instead of asking, does God have a body? We should inquire, what kind of body does God have.”11 The Bible describes bodily aspects of God quite often, not only in what we now think are the earlier layers of the text, but also in later strata, most notably in the epiphanies described by Isaiah (chapter 6) and Ezekiel (chapter 1). In fact, while our implicit assumption is that the “natural” course of theological development is from material to spiritual and from the concrete to the abstract, the rabbis’ God is in general less abstract than at least the prophetic God. The rabbis of the Talmud do not simply disregard the Greek obsession with incorporeality. They are quite uncommitted to the idea of divine infallibility and omnipotence. While God is indeed Master of the Universe, He is far from perfection. As in the Bible, He is given to mood swings and to often-inexplicable likes and dislikes. But the rabbis’ God is not simply a powerful and capricious ruler who can be prevented from using His power in harmful ways by favorites who know His soft spots. The rabbis of the Talmud add psychological depth and self-awareness to their God.12 He does not just change His decisions, but also regrets His mistakes. They depict Him as willing to acknowledge weakness and at times moral and intellectual inferiority. We saw this in Lamentations Rabba, but it is given a particularly bold expression in the famous story of the dispute between R. Eliezer son of Hyrkanos and R. Yehoshua, where the former represents the minority opinion and the latter the majority one. The dispute concerns the hala-chic status of a specific type of oven. The issue itself is of no consequence. What matters is the way the dispute unfolded:
On that day Rabbi Eliezer brought forward every argument in the world, but they did not accept them from him. He said to them: “If the halacha agrees with me, this carob-tree will prove it!” Thereupon the carob tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place (others claim that it was four hundred cubits). They said to him: “No proof can be brought from a carob-tree.” Again he said to them: “If the halacha agrees with me, the stream of water will prove it!” whereupon the stream of water flowed backward. They said to him: “No proof can be brought from a stream of water.” Again he said to them: “If the halacha agrees with me, the walls of the schoolhouse will prove it!” whereupon the walls inclined to fall. But R. Yehoshua rebuked them, saying: “When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what authority do you have?” So they did not fall, in awe of Rabbi Yehoshua, nor did they resume the upright position, in awe of Rabbi Eliezer; and they were standing thus inclined. Again he said to them: “If the halacha agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!” Whereupon a Heavenly Voice was heard saying: “why do you dispute with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halacha agrees with him?!” But Rabbi Yehoshua stood up and said: “It is not in heaven” (Deut 30:12). Rabbi Yirmiah explained: Since the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because you have written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, “Turn aside after many” (Ex 23:2).
Rabbi Nathan met [the prophet] Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One Blessed be He do in that hour? He answered him: he smiled and said: “My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.”13
“My sons have defeated me.” Twice. He is not even outraged. He smiles!14 And the divine defeat does not end with God’s readiness to tolerate Rabbi Yehoshua’s talking back, throwing at God his own words. The final irony is in Rabbi Yirmiah’s proof text. The verse the rabbi is using is in itself an example of the rabbis’ exegetical omnipotence. The original wording—upon which the rabbis established the idea that at any moment the law is not a reflection of the absolute truth of divine utterance (the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, for example) but the consensus sapientium—is as follows: “You shall not follow a crowd to do evil; nor shall you testify in a dispute so as to turn aside after many to pervert justice.” God, in other words, says the opposite of what His sages claim He is saying. When they wish to make sure that their mastery of the text is absolute, the rabbis use another verse, this time from Psalms (119:126): “It is time for Jehovah to act; they have broken thy law.” In their reading it means, “It is time to break the law for Jehovah.”15 It is humans who decide when the time is.
The rabbis refuse to see God as omnipotent, omniscient, or infallible. They are quite prepared to argue with Him, knowing that they can defeat Him, just like Jacob-Israel in the crossing of Jabbok. They do not hesitate to portray Him in all kinds of ways: as a great king and as Judge of the World, but also as a half-naked old mourner, as a barber, as a man sitting outdoors, getting wet from the rain and dew, and as a heavenly observer graciously losing an argument. All those images (and many others, as we shall see) are not just metaphors for God, they are God’s avatars. Beyond those avatars, there lies the ineffable source—God as an incomprehensible ontological force. The ontological source is there to save appearances, but appearances themselves—and those include all God’s concrete manifestations—behave according to the rules of human knowledge and need. That means that while the Hidden Lord’s commandments—eternal and unchanging, but also meaningless—are absolute, the allocation of meaning through interpretation is a human affair: “it is not in heaven.”
In a more discrete fashion, St. Augustine would concur. The real prophet, he notes, is not the person transmitting the message, but the person revealing its hidden meaning. It is Joseph, not Pharaoh, Daniel, not Belshazzar.16 Without the authority of the Holy Church (the one authorized—human—interpreter of revelation), says Augustine, he would not believe Sacred Scriptures.17
TRULY DIVINE AND TRULY HUMAN
Judaism remains to this day a religion with weak philosophical sensibilities. It could be argued that Maimonides is the only major halachic authority until the modern era with a strong commitment to systematic philosophy. For the rabbis of the Talmud and many of their descendants, the contradiction between the Hidden Lord and the God of revelation is better left unexplained. It works in ways that defy ordinary logic and is of little consequence in the everyday life of religious experts dedicated mostly to action (what a Jew must do) rather than abstract ideas (what a Jew must believe). One can be a great rabbi without a systematic theology.
Christianity is different. As the importance of Jewish converts to Christianity shrank, the importance of gentiles, deeply influenced by Hellenistic modes of thinking, grew. The decision to accept the Jewish Scriptures “as is” meant that Christian thinkers, accustomed to the modes of thought of the philosophical schools of their time (mostly Platonism, but also Stoicism and Aristotelianism), had a momentous task of reinterpretation before them. The now-obsolete commandments, strange myths, alltoo-human histories, wisdom literature, and prophecies had to become “relevant” malgré eux.
Making systematic sense out of problematic texts was a challenge, but Hellenistic culture had a long tradition of doing just that. What are the writings of Plotinus if not a radical rereading of Plato? Turning the commandments of Leviticus into allegories and the histories into elaborate prefigurations was relatively easy. More challenging was the task of turning the Galilean rabbi, Jesus, into the Son of God. First, there were all those Jewish titles that he came with: What is the meaning of “messiah”? What exactly is the “Son of Man?” What is the Son of God? The Jewish idea of sonship (a “son of God” is someone who enjoys divine favor, like the king of Israel and the entire people of Israel) was soon replaced by the idea that since a son is like his father, the Son of God must somehow be like God. Now, unless there are to be two Gods, the Father and the Son (and then, in a weaker sense, the Holy Spirit), the Son must be one and the same God. The greatest problem, from a philosophical and a psychological point of view, was not the fact that there was more than one God, but the Incarnation. One could argue that the divine persons were different manifestations of the one godhead. But why would the eternal logos, God, the divine Son, choose to soil Himself with human flesh? Wasn’t it the aspiration of every rational being to rid itself of matter? And how could the divine ever fuse with something as base as flesh?
In his work on the Incarnation (De carne Christi, On the Flesh of Christ), written against the second-century heresiarch Marcion, Tertullian gives voice to the horror a well-educated Roman gentleman felt toward the idea of God choosing to be conceived and born as man:
So if your repudiation of embodiment (corporationem) is due neither to the supposition that God would find it impossible, nor to the fear that it would bring him to peril, it remains for you to reject it and arraign it as undignified. Beginning then with that nativity you so strongly object to, orate, attack now, the nastiness of genital elements in the womb, the filthy curdling of moisture and blood and of the flesh, for nine months to be nourished on that same mire. Draw a picture of the womb swelling up daily, heavy, uneasy, unsafe even in sleep, uncertain in the whims of dislikes and appetites. Inveigh against the shamefacedness of the travailing woman, which ought to be respected at least because of the peril involved or because of its sacred nature. You shudder, of course, at the child passed out along with his afterbirth, and of course bedaubed with it. You think it shameful that he is straightened out with bandages, that he is licked into shape with applications of oil, that he is beguiled by coddling. This natural object of reverence you despise, Marcion. … But there is no doubt that Christ loved that man who was curdled in uncleanliness in the womb, who was brought through organs immodest, who took nourishment through organs of ridicule. For his sake he came down, for his sake he cast himself down in all humility even unto death, yea, the death of the cross. … If these are the constituents of man whom God has redeemed, who are you to make them the cause of shame to him who redeemed them, or to make them beneath his dignity, when he would not have redeemed them unless he had loved them?18
As always, Tertullian’s rhetoric is very effective. His deliberate dwelling on what for men of his time were the most unpleasant aspects of human birth to prove God’s love of man (and Marcion’s hatred) is no less than brilliant. But the rhetoric should not conceal the fact that it wasn’t really propriety that was troubling the philosophically minded. It was the Christian insistence on mixing unmixables—divine and human, atemporal and temporal, necessary and contingent, unchanging and changing. Tertullian has no patience for such philosophical qualms. To God, nothing is impossible except what is against His will:
You say, “the reason why I deny that God was really and truly changed into man, in the sense of being both born and corporated in flesh, is that he who is without end must of necessity also be unchangeable: for to be changed into something else is an ending of what originally was: therefore change is inapplicable to one to whom ending is inapplicable.” I admit that the nature of things changeable is bound by that law which precludes them from abiding in that which in them suffers change—the law which causes them to be destroyed by not abiding, seeing that by process of change they destroy that which they once were. But nothing is on equal terms with God: his nature is far removed from the circumstances of all things whatsoever. If then things far removed from God, things from which God is far removed, do in the process of being changed lose that which they once were, where will be the difference between divinity and the rest of things except that the contrary obtains, namely that God can be changed into anything whatsoever, and yet continue such as he is? Otherwise he will be on equal terms with the things which, when changed, lose that which they once were—things with which he is not on equal terms, as in all respects so also in the outcome of change.19
Neither Marcion nor Tertullian deals with the full range of metaphysical problems raised by the Incarnation (neither was a very systematic thinker). Insisting, as Christian orthodoxy does, on the real—not simply perceived—presence of God in the world, on His involvement in history as object and not just as subject, creates an impossible quandary for a systematic thinker. But Tertullian is not deterred by what is impossible for humans. To God, nothing is impossible except what is against His will: “Nothing is on equal terms with God: his nature is far removed from the circumstances of all things whatsoever.” The contradiction between the Hidden God and the God of revelation is acknowledged and then dismissed. It is in De Carne Christi that Tertullian makes some of his most famous claims on the necessity of believing that for God nothing—no matter how absurd in human terms—is impossible:
I am saved if I am not ashamed of my Lord. Whosoever is ashamed of me, he says, of him will I also be ashamed. I find no other grounds for shame, such as may prove that in contempt of shame I am splendidly shameless and felicitously foolish. The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed—because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is immediately credible, because it is absurd (credibile est quia ineptum est). He was buried, and rose again: it is certain, because it is impossible (certum est quia impossibile).20
On a certain level, believing that everything is possible for God is simply claiming that dogma takes precedence over reason. Some of the things that we believe make no sense—were they not written (or rather accepted by sacred Christian tradition), they would be impossible to utter (or, more accurately, impossible to understand). This means that reason is switched off at certain critical points in the theological system and continues to operate (and even dominate) at all others. “Simple” believers may not be bothered by this, but the intellectual must be able to switch, heroically, from one mode of thinking to the other. The exact locations where these switches occur are not always obvious, as the theological consensus on which Tertullian-style faith is founded is constantly shifting, but this must not result in historically induced relativism. At any given moment, the inspired consensus of the Church is absolute and infallible. The split personality that this system requires must be as fiercely denied as the heretics’ assertion that God cannot be “truly” one and “truly” three. He—for whom nothing is impossible—can.
Marcion was one of the few thinkers who sought to rid Christianity of its split personality. He thought that the Old and the New Testaments were incompatible. He thought that the Lord of the Old Testament was too carnal, too interested in blood sacrifices, and too quick to punish and kill in the name of justice to be identical with the loving and forgiving God of the Gospels. The emotionally unstable and vindictive God of the Jews, argued Marcion, was a lesser divinity, a demiurge who created the material world. As anyone who has eyes can see, he did not create it well. The Jewish religion was nothing but false hopes and empty rituals. Jewish prophets were expecting a royal messiah who would win wars for them. Christ has nothing to do with all this. He is not the continuation or fulfillment of the Old Testament, but its radical upturning. The spiritual God, a God of love, did not become flesh. He made himself visible as a fully grown man. The earthly Christ was a phantasm, since bodies are neither worthy nor capable of salvation. Christ preached a radical new message, reversing the moral values of the Creator and His representatives. The devotees of the Creator refused to listen and were damned. Sinners, who had nothing to lose, were saved. The enemies of the new message arrested, tormented, and crucified a mere phantasm. The passion and crucifixion were not “real” in the carnal sense. They were a symbolic rejection of the values of power and vengeance. They released mankind from the clutches of Jehovah.
After Christ’s “death” and “resurrection,” His gospel was falsified by people who either failed to understand it or were doing the work of the Creator. Marcion believed that the true salvific message of the spiritual God could be found in ten of St. Paul’s epistles (Marcion excluded 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and Hebrews) and in a revised version of the Gospel of Luke from which all references to the Old Testament as a source of true doctrine and all “carnal” references to Christ had been removed.21
At first glance, Marcion’s theory of the demiurge and his denial of the corporeality of Christ would make him a Gnostic, but this would be wrong. Marcion does not advocate a secret knowledge (gnosis), directed only to the initiate. The redemptive message of Christ is addressed to all. The demiurge plays no important role in his economy of salvation. He is not the metaphysical evil force of the dualists who seeks to harm for harm’s sake. Many of the Creator’s actions are the result of a misguided sense of justice. Marcion used methods resembling those used many years later by Quellenforschung—he tried to make sense of the sacred texts by assigning them to different authors and by “identifying” interpolations based on his preconceived ideas of coherence. If it is to achieve coherence, argued Marcion, the new religion should abandon its Jewish baggage. The Old Testament simply doesn’t fit the message of the New. In the name of coherence Marcion discarded the Incarnation, not because the corporeal Christ is unseemly, but because he cannot be incorporated into a systematic monotheistic worldview without constantly having recourse to Tertullian-style strategies of making sense out of nonsense.
The Church, as we know, refused to forgo either its old Jewish baggage or its new Greek cargo. Least of all was it ready to give up its most important mystery. Like Judaism, it chose incoherence. Unlike Judaism, it felt deeply uncomfortable with it. This was a fatefully fruitful choice.