When you actually compare what is written here to Manichaean exegesis of the passage we can begin to understand that the author here is clearly filtering Marcionite beliefs and traditions through a contemporary filter. Look again at the opening line:
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For, like many even in our day, heretics in particular, Marcion had an unhealthy interest in the problem of evil—the origin of it—and his perceptions were numbed by the very excess of his curiosity.
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Marcion is now identified as living a long time ago. The author clearly has other heretics in mind - radical dualists - whom Marcion is now being compared to. The only real possibility is Mani. Yet people will of course object and say that Mani's dates were much later than Tertullian. Mani living 216–76 and Tertullian writing Against Marcion c. 208 CE. The answer of course is to notice that the very beginning of the text confesses that our present version is three generations removed from Tertullian's original:
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Nothing I have previously written against Marcion is any longer my concern. I am embarking upon a new work to replace an old one. My first edition, too hurriedly produced, I afterwards withdrew, substituting a fuller treatment. This also, before enough copies had been made, was stolen from me by a person, at that time a Christian but afterwards an apostate, who chanced to have copied out some extracts very incorrectly, and shewed them to a group of people. Hence the need for correction. The opportunity provided by this revision has moved me to make some additions. Thus this written work, a third succeeding a second, and instead of third from now on the first, needs to begin by reporting the demise of the work it supersedes, so that no one may be perplexed if in one place or another he comes across varying forms of it. [AM 1.1]
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There is a remarkable lack of Montanist references in any of the five books Against Marcion. The person writing this preface is not Tertullian but a Catholic editor who clearly reworked the original text.
The clearest sign of his presence in the section cited above is that Tertullian himself always speaks of Marcion in the present tense. Indeed the rest of the work, strangely seems to be addressed at Marcion as if he were standing in the room with Tertullian:
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I shall prove to Marcion that his god has put to death a great many [AM 2.29]
All this jugglery of a putative corporeity in Christ has been taken up by Marcion with this in mind, that evidence of human substance might not serve for proof of his nativity as well [ibid 3.11]
So we must pull away at the rope of contention, swaying with equal effort to the one side or the other. I say that mine is true: Marcion makes that claim for his. I say that Marcion's is falsi-
fied: Marcion says the same of mine. Who shall decide between us? [ibid 4.4]
I desire to hear from Marcion the origin of Paul the apostle. [ibid 5.1]
So then let Marcion put in evidence any gifts there are of his god, any prophets, provided they have spoken not by human emotion but by God's spirit, who have foretold things to come, and also made manifest the secrets of the heart: let him produce some psalm, some vision, some prayer, so long as it is a spiritual one, in ecstasy, which means abeyance of mind, if there is added also an interpretation of the tongue: let him also prove to me that in his presence some woman has prophesied, some great speaker from among those more saintly females of his. [ibid 5.9]
for the Creator is not an angel, but God, and he would have been described as transforming himself into a god of light, not an angel, if the reference had not been to that Satan whom both Marcion and I know to be an angel. [ibid 5.13]
if these have been imported of their own by our false apostles and Judaizing preachers of the gospel, let Marcion tell us what is the fullness of that god of his who has created nothing. [ibid 5.19]
At least let Marcion admit that the principal term of his faith is from the school of Epicurus, for to
avoid making him an object of fear he introduces a dull sort of god, and puts on loan even with God the Creator matter from the porch of the Stoics when he denies the resurrection of the
flesh, which in fact no philosophy admits. [ibid]
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My point is not of course that Tertullian can't be speaking rhetorically here but rather that Book One is written in a completely different style. Marcion is never described as being present before the author of Against Marcion. I strongly suspect that it was written at exactly the time we would expect from reading its open words - over two generations after 208 or just before the time of Mani's death where Manichaean missionaries were spreading throughout the Roman world. The editor clearly has Manichaean heretics in mind even if he doesn't know exactly who Mani is.
09-07-2011, 02:40 PM
Even Tertullian's Testimony Doesn't Say that Marcion Was a Radical Dualist
