Christian Texts and History • BeDuhn: Marcion's instrumentum as "Charter Documents"

What then explains this peculiar selection that first Marcion and then his opponents considered Christian scripture? I have proposed that gospels and epistles closely correspond to the sort of texts one would find in the capsa, the chest of charter documents kept by Greco-Roman cultic associations. Epistolary correspondence played a major role in the chartering and operation of such associations, along with either a mythic or historical foundation-narrative for the cult. Both kinds of documents were read out in association meetings. What I am proposing, therefore, is that the Hellenised if not Hellene Marcion, rather than thinking in foreign and anachronistic terms of ‘scripture’, was working within this understanding of charter documents when he undertook a standardisation, or ‘canonisation’, of texts for his network of Christian associations. We need to cut through anachronism to recover this environment of sub-literary charter documents to get the nuance of terms quoted (albeit in Latin translation) from Marcion, such as instrumentum for his collection of gospel and apostle, which is precisely the Latin term for such charter documents; and concorporatio, which perhaps goes back to Greek sussomatizo (cf. somatizo, somatismos), to combine or merge into a (single) legal instrument.

It is only when we reset gospels and epistles in this category of charter documents that we can understand the very different expectations about texts that shaped the composition and modification of this material, and can properly situate Marcion’s textual and organisational actions. He is quoted by his opponents as reacting to the introduction of additional texts that he considered incompatible with the original charter documents. This innovation took the form of ‘reading from scripture’, which appears to have been spreading in Marcion’s own time, and for which there is little evidence before that time. This explains his move to ‘canon’, in order to set limits to the Christian instrumentum and to undo the concorporatio of an expanded one that included Jewish scripture, by delimiting and closing the set of accepted charter documents. His opponents, meanwhile, allowed the concept of ‘scripture’ carried by the Jewish Tanakh to gradually but substantially alter their relationship to text, and their view of gospels and epistles, to the one that is assumed today both in the practice of Christianity and in the modern academic study of the Bible.