Whoever does not want to throw away the tradition has to cut. The question is who holds the scissors and whether he makes a business of it.
The Question
Faced with any great doctrine, a Rhinelander first asks: “Watt soll dä janze Käu?”, roughly, what is all this fuss about? It is not contempt. It is the question of what still holds once the talk is subtracted. We asked it in a fool’s speech to the Jesuits, and it can be put to the whole of Christianity.
Two answers come to mind, and both are comfortable. One throws everything away: two thousand years of superstition, power apparatus and tutelage, done with. The other leaves the field to those who administer it and simply stops going. Both overlook the same thing. People need something that goes beyond them, and whoever declares that need settled has not abolished it. He has only released it. In “The Cultivation of Longing” we described who takes it over then: the merchants, for whom it is the most lucrative business model in the world.
There is a third answer, as old as Christianity itself: take the tradition, cut out what is valuable and leave the rest lying. Many have tried it. Two men did it with particular determination, seventeen centuries apart. They show what succeeds and where it fails.
The Shipowner from Sinope
Marcion was a wealthy shipowner from Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea. Around the year 140 he came to Rome and gave the community there a large sum. Then he presented his teaching.
He had read the holy scriptures the Christians had taken over from the Jews and found in them a God who is jealous, punishes and has peoples exterminated. In the Book of Numbers this God orders a campaign after which all the boys and all the women are killed and 32,000 girls are distributed as booty. We described this passage in “32,000 Girls for God”. And then Marcion read in Luke of a father who runs out to meet his lost son. For him these could not be the same God. He wrote a book, the “Antitheses”, setting sentence against sentence: here an eye for an eye, there the other cheek.
His conclusion was radical. The creator god of the Jews was another, lower god. Jesus had proclaimed a strange, hitherto unknown, good God. So the entire Hebrew Bible did not belong in the Christian tradition. What remained was one gospel, a shortened Luke, and ten letters of Paul. Even from these Marcion struck out whatever sounded like the old God.
In 144 the Roman community expelled him. According to Tertullian it gave him back his money, 200,000 sesterces. It is one of the few moments in church history when a community gave up money to be rid of a doctrine.
Yet the most remarkable thing about Marcion is not his teaching but its effect. With his list he created the very first Christian canon, the first binding answer to the question of what counts. The church had none until then. Only in response to Marcion did it begin to settle which writings belonged. How that process went, with compromises, quarrels and after-the-fact sanctification, we described in “How Old Stories Became Divine Messages”. The heretic forced orthodoxy to define itself.
The Rescue Becomes a Church
Marcion did not stop at the book. He founded a church of his own, with bishops, priests, congregations and strict discipline. It spread quickly, from Rome to Persia. Even in the fifth century, three hundred years after his death, Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus in Syria boasted of having converted more than a thousand Marcionites in his diocese.
This is the first pattern, and it reaches far beyond religion. Whoever wants to rescue something from an encrusted apparatus and builds a new apparatus for it has, after one generation, a second encrusted apparatus. Francis of Assisi wanted nothing but to live poor like Jesus. A hundred years later his order fought bitterly over whether it might own its monasteries, and the strictest of the brothers were burned as heretics. Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen founded loan societies so that farmers would not be at the mercy of usurers. They grew into one of the largest banking groups in Europe. Luther wanted to cleanse the church and got territorial churches whose highest bishop was the prince.
Marcion’s cut also has a dark afterlife. He cut the Jewish out of Christianity, and the idea never quite disappeared. In 1921 the great Berlin theologian Adolf von Harnack wrote a book on Marcion and recommended removing the Old Testament from the canon. He was no antisemite. But in 1939 the “German Christians” founded an institute in Eisenach “for the study and elimination of Jewish influence on German church life” and in 1940 published a New Testament purged of everything Jewish. Whoever takes the scissors to a tradition must know that others will later use his scissors for quite different purposes.
The Long Line of the Exterminated
Marcion was neither the first nor the last. For almost two thousand years people have tried again and again to draw out of the tradition what holds, and to escape the apparatus that administered it. The merchants of salvation persecuted almost all of them, and many they exterminated.
The Gnostics of the second century sought salvation in knowledge, not in obedience to a bishop. For centuries their writings were known only from the polemics of their opponents, who quoted them in order to refute them. Only in 1945 did a farmer near Nag Hammadi in Egypt find a clay jar with thirteen books that monks had buried in the fourth century, probably after the bishop of Alexandria had decreed in 367 which scriptures were valid and rejected the rest. What we know from them in their own words we owe to a hiding place.
The Bogomils in the Balkans, named after a Bulgarian priest of the tenth century, rejected church buildings, icons and priestly hierarchy and lived in strict poverty. Around 1100 the Byzantine emperor Alexios had their teacher Basil burned in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. From them the teaching travelled west, to southern France, where its followers were called Cathars, the pure. Their leaders, the Perfect, owned nothing and lived by their crafts. Against them the pope in 1209 proclaimed the first crusade directed at Christians in Europe. In Béziers the whole town was put to the sword, Catholics and Cathars alike. The sentence “Kill them all, God will know his own” is recorded only decades later and was probably not spoken in those words. But it describes what happened. In the end, in 1244, some two hundred people were burned in a single day below the castle of Montségur. And for the survivors the church created a tool of its own: the Inquisition.
The Waldensians go back to Peter Waldo, a rich merchant from Lyon who around 1175 gave away his fortune, had the gospels translated into the vernacular and preached as a layman. He wanted no new doctrine; he only wanted to do what is written. In 1184 his followers were excommunicated. In 1545 thousands of them were slaughtered at Mérindol in Provence, and in 1655 again in Piedmont, so cruelly that John Milton wrote a sonnet about it. Others followed: Jan Hus, burned at Constance in 1415 despite a promise of safe conduct; the Anabaptists, drowned in the sixteenth century in mockery of their second baptism; and Giordano Bruno, whose case we described in “The Case of Giordano Bruno and the Credibility of the Catholic Church”.
Looked at without mercy, it was seldom only about doctrine. The crusade against the Cathars won the Languedoc for the French crown, and the goods of condemned heretics fell to church and lord. Whoever made no business out of faith was a double threat to those who did: living proof that it could be done without them, and booty.
And one thing more: what we know about most of these movements comes from the records of their judges. The interrogation files of the Inquisition are the most detailed sources on the Cathars that exist. The canon we take today for the tradition is also the result of these exterminations. Marcion and Jefferson were not the only ones holding scissors. The largest scissors were held by the apparatus, and it cut not into books but into people.
The Razor in the President’s House
Seventeen hundred years later Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, sat over his Bibles and cut. In 1804, still in office, he put together a first selection, which is lost. Around 1820, retired at Monticello, he did it thoroughly. He took the New Testament in four languages, Greek, Latin, French and English, cut out with a razor the verses he considered genuine and pasted them in four columns side by side onto blank pages. He called the result “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”.
Jefferson cut out something different from Marcion. What bothered him was not the old God but the supernatural. With him there is no virgin birth, no miracles, no angels and no resurrection. His text ends with the sentence: “There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.” What remains is a teacher whose moral teaching Jefferson considered the most sublime the world had ever seen.
In October 1813 he wrote to John Adams how he imagined the work. One had to extract the genuine words of Jesus from what his reporters had made of them, and they were as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The dunghill he took to be the work of the priests, who had made a business out of a simple teaching.
And then Jefferson did something Marcion had not done: nothing. He founded no church, he did not publish the book, he showed it only to a few friends. In the election campaign of 1800 his opponents had denounced him as godless, and he knew what publication would set off. He read in it in the evenings. Only in 1895 did the Smithsonian Institution buy the copy from his great-granddaughter, and only in 1904 did Congress have it printed. For almost fifty years afterwards every new senator received a copy. A doubter’s private little book became a gift of state.
What the Scissors Cannot Cut
Looked at without mercy, both did the same thing. They knew beforehand what was to come out and shortened the source until it confirmed it. Marcion had his good God in his head before he had the scripture for it. Jefferson took the reason of his century as the measure and cut away what it could not grasp. It is the same figure one knows from every expert opinion that knew its result in advance: the shortest way to the desired result runs through changing the basis.
And the scissors cut only the text, not the one cutting. Jefferson held the moral teaching of Jesus to be the purest in the world and over his lifetime owned more than six hundred enslaved people. The little book lay on the same table as the plantation ledgers. Whoever believes the matter is settled with the right selection of words underestimates how well people can live with sublime texts and shabby practice at the same time.
The deeper weakness lies elsewhere. Jefferson’s text ends at the closed tomb. He preserved what reason approves of, a magnificent ethic. But he cut out what actually led people into the churches: hope beyond death, shared ritual, the feast, the community that catches you. Leo Tolstoy did the same again in 1881 in his “Gospel in Brief”, and his followers then founded rural communes that mostly fell apart after a few years. An ethic alone carries a thoughtful old man at Monticello. It seldom carries a widow at her husband’s grave.
Why the Merchants Win
This is exactly why the merchants are so successful. They offer what the scissors of the Enlightenment cut away, and they offer it without the ethic that could have limited them. The prosperity gospel of the American megachurches promises that God will make the believer rich if only he gives enough. We described it in “The Last Domain” as the management of inner reserves. The guru promises enlightenment for a fee and claims for it the highest of all divine attributes, as we showed in “Gurus, Ascended Masters and Other Substitute Gods”. The mindfulness app sells silence by monthly subscription. And the charismatic movement, whose growth we examined in “The Machine Without God”, offers ecstasy, community and certainty, everything Jefferson took for dung.
The merchants have understood what the Enlighteners did not want to understand: the need is not directed at the right doctrine. It is directed at something to hold on to. And something to hold on to can be sold.
What Can Be Made of It
So throwing away does not help, and neither does leaving the field to the merchants. What Marcion and Jefferson show can be put in three rules.
The first rule: cut in the open. Marcion wrote down his antitheses, sentence against sentence; anyone could check what he rejected and why. That is more honest than the silent selection every church also makes. The orthodox canon too is the result of leaving things out, only there an apparatus did the cutting, and the scissors were hidden afterwards.
The second rule: no one may live from it. Jefferson’s little book stayed clean because no one earned from it. As soon as an office, a salary or a building hangs on a doctrine, the doctrine begins to protect the office. The Quakers have taken this furthest, for three hundred and seventy years. They have no priests, no liturgy and no fixed creed. People sit together in silence, and whoever has something to say stands up. They have stayed small, but they fought slavery while Jefferson still held slaves. But honesty requires adding that this rule does not protect. The Perfect of the Cathars lived on nothing, and precisely for that reason no one had an interest in defending them. The Waldensians survived only because they withdrew into the Alpine valleys and in 1532 joined the Reformation, placing themselves under the protection of the powerful. Whoever makes no business needs allies stronger than the merchants.
The third rule: do not make a new canon out of the cut. Marcion failed because he took his selection to be final. Our “Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy” contains the sentence that one should take no doctrine entirely seriously, not even one’s own. Rhenish Catholicism has always practised this without writing it down. People go to the procession and to carnival, to the fair and to the funeral, take from Rome what holds and do not hear the rest. That is no theology. But it may be the most durable way of using two thousand years without being used by them.
This does not solve the problem Jefferson left open: what holds people at the grave once the miracle has been cut away. Perhaps it is the community that is there on that day. Perhaps it is the ritual that one need not understand to be carried by it. The only certainty is that it should not be the merchant.
The question is not whether one cuts. Cutting always happens. The question is whether one makes a business of the cut again.
Sources. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion. Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, Leipzig 1921. · Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem and De praescriptione haereticorum (return of the 200,000 sesterces). · Theodoret of Cyrrhus, letters (conversion of Marcionites in his diocese). · Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, c. 1820; National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. · Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 1813, Founders Online, National Archives. · G. Wayne Clough, “Secretary Clough on Jefferson’s Bible”, Smithsonian Magazine. · Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton 2008 (Eisenach institute). · Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief, 1881. · Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 1975. · Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, 1979 (Nag Hammadi). · Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy. Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd ed. 2002. · John Milton, “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont”, 1655.