Resist antisemitism. Know history. We can’t go down these roads again.
Marcion of Pontus “was one of the most dangerous men in Christian history,” according to my friend Mike Aquilina. He wanted an Old Testament-less Christianity.
Mike writes:
He arrived in Rome around the middle of the second century, the son of a bishop from Pontus on the southern coast of the Black Sea. He was wealthy, brilliant, disciplined, and utterly convinced that the Church had misunderstood the Gospel. Christianity, he believed, could not be reconciled with the religion of ancient Israel. The God of the Old Testament was a deity of law, wrath, judgment, and tribal violence. The Father proclaimed by Jesus Christ was a different God altogether — a God of mercy, love, and pure grace.
Marcion’s solution was bold and terrifyingly simple: cut Christianity loose from Judaism.
Discard the Old Testament. Reject the creator God. Keep only a purified version of Luke’s Gospel and the letters of Paul.
Christianity would then become what Marcion believed it was always meant to be: a universal religion of spirit and love, freed from the burdens of history, ritual, law, sacrifice, and Jewish particularity.
It was more than Marcion. From the piece:
Marcion’s ideas did not arise in a vacuum. He lived in the aftermath of the great Jewish revolts against Rome — above all the Bar Kokhba revolt of A.D. 132–135. The Roman world had grown increasingly hostile to Jews. Emperor Hadrian crushed the revolt with terrible severity, refounded Jerusalem as a pagan city, and barred Jews from entering it. To many Roman observers, Judaism now appeared stubborn, separatist, and politically dangerous.
When Polycarp — a disciple of John, as in the Beloved(!) — supposedly ran into Marcion on a Roman street, Polycarp is said to have called Marcion “the firstborn of Satan.”
Aquilina writes:
To modern ears, the response sounds shockingly harsh. Yet Polycarp understood something many modern Christians have forgotten. Marcion was not merely proposing a revised canon or a different interpretation of Paul. He was proposing a Christianity detached from Abraham, Moses, creation, covenant, and history itself.
For the Fathers, the God of Abraham was the Father of Jesus Christ. Creation and redemption were the work of the same divine hand. Genesis and the Gospel belonged to one continuous story. Christ did not abolish Israel’s Scriptures; he fulfilled them.
Without the Old Testament, they believed, Christians would no longer understand: covenant, sacrifice, Passover, Messiah, temple, priesthood — or even creation itself.
More fundamentally, they would no longer understand Jesus.
There is no Christianity without Judaism. And the people trying to make it so are denying who we are — individually, collectively, and spiritually.
Aquilina winds up saying:
We live in an age increasingly uncomfortable with the Old Testament. Modern readers recoil from its wars, judgments, sacrifices, and rituals. We also live in an age where Israel, the Jewish state founded in the shadow of the Holocaust, has become a flashpoint of intense political and religious dispute.
In the face of this, we see new pressures to distance Jesus and Christianity from their ancestors in the faith. Many Christians are tempted to prefer a softened Jesus detached from doctrine, covenant, and divine authority. The temptation remains what it always was: to construct a Christianity purified of whatever seems difficult, scandalous, or too “Jewish.”
But once Christianity is severed from Israel, it loses its roots in history. The Incarnation itself begins to fade. Jesus becomes less the fulfillment of a divine covenant than a wandering teacher of universal ethics.
Resist antisemitism. Christians need to do so for the sake of truth — and with knowledge of the evil that has been inflicted on men and women and children simply for being Jewish.
This cannot happen.
Mike quotes extensively from Joseph Ratzinger (later, Pope Benedict) — which, among other things, might have an impact on some of the more traditional Catholics, especially young men who find themselves untroubled in a bubble where antisemitism is tolerated, at best.
Antisemitism is evil. And yet, it is rampant. In Christian circles. Very possibly in your circles. Speak out against it. Show love against it — ecumenical Shabbat dinners or any other creative ways to encounter our similarities.
Know history.
I wish we didn’t need reminders.
We can’t go down these roads again.