The Archivist, Not the Heretic: Marcion, Scriptural Proof, and the False Charges of Docetism, Ditheism, and Gnosticism

This paper argues that the three canonical charges leveled against Marcion of Sinope - Docetism, Ditheism, and Gnosticism - are not descriptions of his theology but polemical constructions manufactured by his second and third-century adversaries and transmitted uncritically through the heresiological tradition. None of the terms appears in Marcion’s own writings, nor do the systems they designate exist in the texts he preserved and transmitted: the Evangelion and the Apostolikon. Building on the modern critical reassessment initiated by Adolf von Harnack and consolidated by Jason BeDuhn, Dieter Roth, Judith Lieu, and the “Marcionite priority” school (John Knox, Joseph Tyson, Matthias Klinghardt, Markus Vinzent), this paper reexamines each charge in turn against the reconstructed text of the first Christian canon. It then turns to the most consequential of the heresiological slanders - that Marcion edited the Gospel of Luke - and argues, in line with the forensic model advanced in the author’s earlier study of the Theophanic Replacement Protocol (Mitchell 2025), that the dependency runs in the opposite direction: canonical Luke is a Judaized expansion of the Evangelion, longer precisely because material binding Christ to the Hebrew tradition was added, not excised. The paper concludes that all four labels functioned rhetorically to delegitimize a Pauline canon that the Yahwist movement could not refute on its own merits.