Fortress Press

David Litwa's book provides a fresh start with Marcion. The author offers for the first time an investigation of Marcion that breaks with reliance on the polemical remarks of his opponents and lets go of the questionable project of trying to reverse-engineer those polemical distortions to arrive at reliable information. For those who thought that was our only option, Litwa's book will be eye-opening. He assembles a portrait based primarily on material traceable to Marcion himself, as either author or authorizer. Building on recent advances in reconstructing the Marcionite scriptures, Litwa gives a careful reading of the theology they support. His close analysis of the remains of Marcion's Antitheses is unparalleled in previous scholarship for its depth and insight. The result is a major contribution to the current renaissance of work on Marcion. At the same time, it is a lesson in the difference a disciplined methodology can make in a field where the "church fathers" all too often still set the terms of our understanding of early Christianities.

In attempting to remove Marcion from the long shadow of Adolf von Harnack, Litwa aims to undermine any and all heresiologically inflected interpretations of Marcion on the grounds that they are inescapably reductionistic. In addition to offering an interesting reconstruction of Marcion's life and thought, Litwa provocatively proposes that present-day Christians would do well to carry on Marcion's legacy by rejecting any hint of divine terror or violence. The Old Testament and biblical passages containing any trace of divine violence, Litwa argues, should be "decanonized." That is, they should by no means be received as divinely inspired. Litwa suggests further that Christians' attempts to account for divine violence in the Bible must be supplanted in favor of Marcion's Gospel of the wholly good God according to which Jesus's Father cannot be identified with the God of Israel in the Old Testament. In short, Litwa reinvigorates Marcion in order to venerate him and the legacy he putatively ought to have among Christians today.

In the last four or five decades, Marcion has been the focus of much innovative and intense research that has challenged many of the assumptions of previous scholarship, in particular that of Adolf von Harnack. David Litwa's new book is a welcome and bold attempt at formulating a new interpretation of Marcion for the twenty-first century. It is comprehensive and circumspect in its handling of the sources, well informed in its critical dialogue with the whole range of previous scholarship, cautious regarding the many methodical problems besetting its subject matter, and precise in its proposals of new interpretations. Readers--be they experts on the topic or new to it--will find their views of Marcion and the theological and philosophical context of the second century enriched and challenged at every turn. Moreover, Litwa's perceptive exploration of Marcion's theology and the ancient controversies triggered by it is constantly alive to their modern resonance. This monograph will surely inform future debates on the shape of early Christian theological discourse and one of its most controversial protagonists.

If you have ever questioned the stories about the violence of God found in the Old Testament, Litwa's reexamination of the early Christian theologian Marcion offers some answers. This book is a much-needed corrective to two thousand years of mistreatment and mischaracterization of Marcion as the archenemy of Christianity when, in fact, Marcion was the original framer of the New Testament as the gospel of the wholly good God. Read on!