on his personal religion as contrasted with all
statutory religion. That was also its basis in the case of the prophets
and of Paul, only the statutory religion which was felt to be a burden
and a fetter was different in each case. As regards the prophets, it was
the outer sacrificial worship, and the deliverance was the idea of
Jehovah's righteousness. In the case of Paul, it was the pharisaic
treatment of the law, and the deliverance was righteousness by faith. To
Marcion it was the sum of all that the past had described as a
revelation of God: only what Christ had given him was of real value to
him. In this conviction he founded a Church. Before him there was no
such thing in the sense of a community, firmly united by a fixed
conviction, harmoniously organised, and spread over the whole world.
Such a Church the Apostle Paul had in his mind's eye, but he was not
able to realise it. That in the century of the great mixture of religion
the greatest apparent paradox was actually realised: namely, a Paulinism
with two Gods and without the Old Testament; and that this form of
Christianity first resulted in a church which was based not only on
intelligible words, but on a definite conception of the essence of
Christianity as a religion, seems to be the greatest riddle which the
earliest history of Christianity presents. But it only seems so. The
Greek, whose mind was filled with certain fundamental features of the
Pauline Gospel (law and grace), who was therefore convinced that in all
respects the truth was there, and who on that account took pains to
comprehend the real sense of Paul's statements, could hardly reach any
other results than those of Marcion. The history of Pauline theology in
the Church, a history first of silence, then of artificial
interpretation, speaks loudly enough. And had not Paul really separated
Christianity as religion from Judaism and the Old Testament? Must it not
have seemed an inconceivable inconsistency, if he had clung to the
special national relation of Christianity to the Jewish people, and if
he had taught a view of history in which for paedagogic reasons indeed,
the Father of mercies and God of all comfort had appeared as one so
entirely different? He who was not capable of translating himself into
the consciousness of a Jew, and had not yet learned the method of
special interpretation, had only the alternative, if he was convinced of
the truth of the Gospel of Christ as Paul had proclaime