Old Marcionism Writ Large?

More than one scholar has asked whether the new “apocalyptic” Paul is a Marcionite Paul. 

Douglas Moo has accused Douglas Campbell’s Deliverance of God of presenting a Paul who teaches an “incipient Marcionism.” Contributors to Beyond Old and New Perspectives on Paul raise similar concerns about Campbell more gently. David Hilborn asks whether Campbell’s emphasis on the “retrospective” direction of Paul’s thought “might underplay the quite specific and positive contribution made by the patriarchs, the law, and Israel itself to the divine ‘rescue mission’?” He wonders, “could it not in fact be that Paul’s christological vision is divine precisely because the Christ-relation is, as a pattern, analogous to the YHWH-Israel relation?” (Beyond, 118). 

Insofar as Paul depends on the categories, characters, and events of the Old Testament, there seem to be some “forwardizing” elements in Paul, a certain kind of “foundationalism” or, to use Campbell’s terms, “Arianism.” 

In response to Hilborn, Campbell asks for patience as he completes the positive account of Paul’s views on Torah and salvation history that did not appear in his ground-clearing operation in Deliverance. Campbell claims that “the fact that I am resisting bad answers and readings here should not be taken to suggest that Paul does not himself ultimately possess good answers to these critical questions” (Beyond, 124).

Fair enough, but one does have cause to wonder. One of Campbell’s inspirations, after all, is J. Louis Martyn, who states clearly in his Galatians commentary that God was “in the far-distant background” when the law was given (366). Martyn has been accused of a sort of Marcionism himself.

Marcionism has dogged modern theology; sometimes it has overtaken modern theology. We’ll have to wait to see how the apocalyptic Paul plays out. But it would be an ironic outcome if the cutting edge of Pauline scholarship turned out to be an energetic revival of the same old Paul.