Modern Kitab-ı Mukaddes Eleştirisinin Erken Dönem Habercisi Olarak Marcion: Harnack Sonrası Araştırmalar Bağlamında Bir Değerlendirme
Marcion as an Ancient Forerunner of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Evaluation in the Context of Post-Harnackian Studies

Summary/Abstract: Modern researches, contrary to traditional beliefs, has shown that early period here-tics had greater direct and indirect effects on the canonization of Christian scriptures and in the process of the separation of Christianity from Judaism. In this context, many studies that deal with the first three centuries of history of Christianity have brought to light historical figures that were somewhat ignored by the dominant Christian tradition. Also, these studies opened up for discussion some traditional theological assumptions about the place of these heretics in the formation of the Christian belief. Undoubtedly, Marcion (d. 160/161/165) has a special place among the names discus-sed in these studies. Because he was a person of influential active participants in the institutionalization process of early Christianity. He was also one of the first figures to form his holy canon by taking the initiative in a conscious theological stance. So, most scholars who dealing with the history of Christianity almost agree that Marcion was the first to collect an authoritative canon by set certain selections from the texts already known and accepted by a large part of the Messianic movement in the 2nd century AD. Thus, he was able to somewhat create a belief that was shaped around his own theology and had a permanent effect on her followers. Nevertheless, traditional Christianity has an interesting silence about Marcion’s pre-cursor role in the formation of the Christian canon. Therefore, there is substantially silence about the methodology which he used in his search for the historical life of Jesus and Paul and in his critical studies of the scriptures. For example, Church fathers who were interested in the edition of the scriptures mostly ignored Marcion's influ-ence in the canonization of the New Testament and did not prefer to cite him because he was a heretic. So, his place as a biblical critic has been abandoned to conscious silence by the Church for centuries. Undoubtedly, it was Adolf von Harnack (d. 1930) who pointed out the most important heretic of the second century as a biblical critic by removing him from a long silence for centuries. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Harnack’s success was to both write the monography of Marcion and (to put it in S. Moll’s words) was to convert this most important heretic of the 2nd century to a hero. Harnack, in his monography (Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott) first published in German in 1921, not only demonstrated Marcion’s direct or indirect influence on the Christian canonical tradition but also determined the direction of critical studies and discussions in the following years. For this reason, studies on Mar-cion may be largely divided into two main fields so-called pre-Harnack and post-Harnack. This paper is about Marcion’s place as an ancient forerunner of modern biblical criti-cism in the context of post-Harnackian studies. In this context, our research aims to reveal possible aspects of the relationship between Marcion’s critical method and the basic features of modern Biblical studies. We do not address some issues that are important about Marcion and his gnostic theology because of exceeding the scope of this article. But in this paper, we discuss various aspects of the theological and metho-dological background of Marcion’s Old Testament criticism. Also, we try to explore how Marcion organized his New Testament canon and how it related to her Old Tes-tament criticism. From this aspect, the study aims to show the influence of Marcion on modern critical studies in the context of post-Harnackian discusses. We also aim to contribute to the newly developing literature about Marcion in the Turkish-speaking world and to draw attention to his biblical theology in the academic field. This article consists of four-part. In first part, we tried to show how Harnack made Marcion a forerunner of modern biblical criticism and biblical theology. In this con-text, we have drawn attention to some features of Marcion’s biblical theology and textual criticism. And we discussed the main features of his theology which is centred on faith and salvation and we referred to some common grounds between Marcion's theology and modern biblical theology. In the second part, the philosophical and theological background of Marcion's criti-cism of the scriptures is tried to be shown. Accordingly, we discussed Marcion's dualis-tic faith in god. We emphasized the connection between his dualistic faith of god and his understanding of scripture. As various researchers realized before, Marcion used the distinction between the just god (the god of the Jews), namely Demiurge, and the good God as the basis for the distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the third part of the paper, Marcion’s Old Testament criticism is treated. We tried to show that she approached the Old Testament as a manifestation of the Jewish god. So we argued that Marcion did not approach the Old Testament books as a problem of the source. Because he was not concerned with whether the authenticity of the Old Testament books. His main purpose was to separate Christianity from Jewish origins. Perhaps this was the important feature that distinguished him from modern biblical critics. Also, in this part, we gave some concrete examples of Marcion's Old Testament criticism. In the final part, Marcion New Testament canon was addressed in the context of post-Harnack discussions. For this, firstly, we gave some essential pieces of informa-tion about Evangelion and Apostolikon which attributed to him. So, we tried to show that Marcion believed in the existence of an authentic Gospel. Secondly, we dealt with the connection of Marcion's canon with Luke. We discussed the connection of Marcion’s New Testament canon with the Gospel of Luke especially in the context of the views of post-Harnackian researchers such as E. C. Blackman, J. Knox, U. Schmidt, G. Quis-bel, M. Vinzent, S. Moll, D. Roth, J. Lieu, J. BeDuhn.

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