Marcosian Rituals for Prophecy and Apolytrosis

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MARCOSIAN RITUALS FOR PROPHECY AND APOLYTROSIS

Niclas Förster

“Another among them (is one) who boasts that he corrected his teacher, Marcus by name, extremely experienced in magical deception …” With these words Irenaeus introduces the Valentinian Gnostic Marcus in the thirteenth chapter of the first book of Adversus haereses.1 By calling him “extremely experienced in magical deception,” he inspired the use of the epithet “the Magician” that is still used today. In spite of the considerable number and quality of sources, Marcus, and his Valentinian doctrine and rites have been neglected in modern research.2 For a long time, Marcus’s speculations about numbers and letters were responsible for this lack of interest. This was because these speculations were not considered to be a serious subject for research. This attitude is reflected in the typical comment of William H. Simcox, who assessed the intellectual level of Marcus’s thinking as follows: “Gnosticism as an intellectual system had run its course.”3 Marcus was also called a “mere charlatan”4 or “Gnostic Casanova”.5 However Marcus’s doctrine, and special Gnostic rites and ceremonies, were not at all mere witchcraft or playing with numbers and letters, but a kind of religious syncretism. I will argue that it was so successful precisely because it was not understood as a syncretistic mixture of different religions and non-religious traditions. I will begin by establishing Marcus’s dates. Thereafter, I will turn my attention to the community-life and cultic practice of the Marcosians and the challenge presented to the early Catholic Church by Marcosian syncretism. Finally, I will discuss why Christians of the second and third century became Marcosians. At the end I will give a brief survey of Marcus’s gnosis in the setting of second and third century religion.

1 AH 1.13.1: Rousseau-Doutreleau 1979, 189: ·Ἄλλος δέ τις τῶν παρ’ αὐτοῖς, τοῦ διδασκάλου διορθωτὴς εἶναι καυχώμενος, Μάρκος δὲ αὐτῷ ὄνομα, μαγικῆς ὑπάρχων κυβείας ἐμπειρότατος. 2 The first monograph on Marcus was Förster 1999. 3 Simcox 1881, 364. He also poured scorn on Marcus as a “impostor and villain” (1881, 363). 4 Kidd 1922, 213. 5 Filoramo 1990, 168. 434 niclas förster

Dating Marcus the So-Called Magician

Unfortunately the reports of the Fathers of the Church on Marcus tell us almost nothing about his biography. The dates of his birth and death, and his place of origin, are unknown as is the geographic starting point of his missionary work.6 However, on the basis of the work written by Irenaeus against the heretics, it is at least possible to deduce a terminus ante quem. This is because it can be assumed that Marcus has successfully spread his teaching for quite a long time before Irenaeus started to write his book. This is suggested by two pieces of information given by Irenaeus.7 On the one hand, he quotes from a poem mocking the Gnostic.8 The mere existence of such a poem presupposes quite a long period in which Marcus taught and successfully spread his Gnostic thought and stood out owing to the difference between his teaching and the doctrine of the church. Only after that could he have become the target of such a fierce literary attack. On the other hand, Irenaeus expressly reports on the missionary work done by “pupils” of Marcus in the river valley of the Rhône,9 i.e. in the immediate vicinity of Lyon, the seat of Irenaeus’ bishopric.10 This implies that a group of adherents had developed in the meantime, which was loosely associated with Marcus and was independently spreading his teaching. This fact makes it also likely that several years had already passed since the first appearance of Marcus as a Gnostic missionary. It remains unknown if at this point of time Marcus was still alive and, if so, where he was living. Irenaeus does not offer us a specific date for Marcus’s activities, although by inference, it might be possible to reconstruct the general period in which Marcus carried out his missionary work. Because the first book of the large work of Irenaeus written against the Gnostics can be dated around 180ce, Marcus probably taught between 160 and 180ce.11 Irenaeus does, however, specify that the Gnostic carried out his missionary activity primarily in Asia Minor. This means that he was active in a very old centre of Christianity where a dense net of Christian communi-

6 Förster 1999, 389. 7 Cf. N. Förster 1999, 38. 8 Cf. e.g. AH 1.15.6: Rousseau-Doutreleau 1979, 251–252. On this poem, cf. Förster 1999, 18–22, 389. 9 AH 1.13.7: Rousseau-Doutreleau 1979, 205; cf. on this Förster 1999, 159–160. 10 Förster 1999, 389–390. 11 Förster 1999, 390.