Marcion, the Antitheses, and the Battle for Gospel Order

At first glance Papias’s little remark about Mark looks like a throwaway line in Eusebius: Mark, he says, “wrote down accurately, though not in order (οὐ μέντοι τάξει), whatever he remembered of the things said or done by the Lord.” For generations that was read as a kind of backhanded literary review. Mark is honest, yes, but he is a hack: a stringer of anecdotes, lacking the smooth narrative of Matthew.

If you sit with Papias’s language, though, it begins to feel like something else. “Order” (taxis/ordo) in second-century Christian discourse is never just about chronology. It can mean fitting arrangement, hierarchy, pedagogy, even the staged unfolding of a divine plan. Papias is not saying Mark got the facts wrong; he is worrying about how dominical logoi are arranged. The implication is that the shape of a gospel, its sequencing and structuring of sayings, is already a theological issue. A gospel can be accurate and still be problematic because the material is not yet ordered in a way that reveals its inner logic.

Once you recognize that, Papias’s little comment starts to connect with later fights. By the time of Marcion, “order” has become one of the main weapons in the emerging Church’s arsenal. Tertullian throws around ordo, gradus, dispositio like a lawyer obsessed with a procedural code: revelation must come in the proper sequence, nothing from God appears “suddenly,” everything is prepared by prophecy and then fulfilled. What Papias hints at in miniature—“he wrote accurately, but not in order”—Tertullian turns into a full-blown theology of revelation: truth is not just what Jesus said, but the way those sayings are embedded in a long, ordered scriptural economy.

Now drop Marcion into that landscape. The standard story is clear enough. Marcion turns up in the mid-second century with a sharply dualistic theology, dumps the Creator, keeps Paul, and chops up Luke. Irenaeus and Tertullian both say his gospel was an abridged Luke. Modern reconstructions of Marcion’s text are Luke-based. On that account, Papias is just talking about canonical Mark, and Marcion is a later vandal working on another evangelist.

But there are older hints that the Marcionite gospel stream was, at least in some circles, perceived as Markan. Hippolytus refers to Marcion’s church as using “the Gospel according to Mark and the letters of Paul.” Titles like “Gospel of Jesus Christ” with no author’s name, beginning like Mark 1:1, fit that profile more readily than a neat “Gospel according to Luke.” If you take those hints seriously, you get a different picture: a Mark-shaped gospel, possibly in more than one form, circulating as the apostolic proclamation; Marcion seizing on that stream; later Catholic authors rebranding his text as “Luke mutilated” to fit a fourfold canonical scheme in which Matthew must be first and Mark relegated to second place.

In that reconstruction, Papias’s worry about Mark’s taxis becomes a kind of proto-heresiological criterion. Once you decide that the Lord’s logoi must appear “in order,” any Markan text that looks abridged, discontinuous, or resistant to the new theological structuring can be pushed toward the heretical side. A Mark that is “accurate but not in order” can be tolerated while everything is fluid; a Markan variant that threatens to crystallize into a rival canon can be demonized as Marcionite. Irenaeus’s neat sequence—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—does not simply report a neutral history of publication. It imposes a taxis and, in the same move, assigns each gospel its heretical foil: “Luke” for Marcion, “Mark” for another Pauline tendency, John for the Valentinians, Matthew for the Judaizers. The fourfold gospel and the heresiological map are two sides of the same ordo-project.

The argument becomes sharper once the Antitheses come into view. Matthew 5:21–48 has long been called “the antitheses”: six “You have heard that it was said … but I say to you” contrasts. In mainstream exegesis they represent intensifications of Torah, not contradictions of it: Jesus radicalizes the commandments (anger = murder, lust = adultery, etc.) but does not overthrow Moses. The Sermon on the Mount opens with a programmatic “I have not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it,” and most commentators take Matthew at his word.

Yet the second century saw people who read those same sayings precisely as antitheses in the strong sense: two opposed laws, two opposed gods. Marcion’s followers possessed a work called Antitheses. Tertullian says plainly that Marcion “compiled a creation of mutually opposing statements, entitled Antitheses, to separate Law and Gospel.” Irenaeus and Tertullian both labor through the very topics that line up with Matthew’s six contrasts—murder, adultery, oaths, retaliation, love of enemies—and rebut a reading in which Jesus’s “but I say to you” proves that the Christ of the Gospel has broken with the Creator of the Law. The structure of their refutation implies a structured Marcionite attack: someone has put those topics together in a sequence and used them to argue for two gods.

If that is right, you can flip the usual dependence question. Perhaps Marcion is not merely twisting Matthew’s antitheses. Perhaps a Marcionite antithesis-collection—or at least a Marcionite way of arranging and hearing those sayings—comes first, and Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, as we have it, is the canonical attempt to re-order and domesticate them. In that light, Matthew’s careful framing—“not to abolish but to fulfill”—is not a floating theological slogan but a deliberate answer to a rival taxis: the same sayings, placed in another structure, had been weaponized against the Law. Matthew’s response is not to discard the material but to embed it in a different narrative and liturgical order so that its energy now runs toward fulfillment and continuity instead of rupture.

Clement of Alexandria’s material adds an Alexandrian strand to this story. In Stromata and in the Letter to Theodore, Clement knows a Markan tradition in which Jesus extends the prohibition of adultery into an absolute “you shall not lust,” framed explicitly with an “I say to you” formula. It is recognizably antithetical in shape, but the spin is decidedly not Marcionite. Clement reads “you shall not lust” as the climax of God’s ethical project, the inner heart of the Decalogue brought to light. Paul’s use of “You shall not covet” in Romans 7 becomes, for Clement, a kind of proof that the tenth commandment already contains Gospel intensity. Law and Gospel are one voice, the difference is between outer and inner, not between two gods.

The striking thing is that Clement treats this antithetical saying as belonging to a Markan gospel held in common, at least in part, with groups like the Carpocratians, and then in the next breath turns to Marcionite extremism on the other side: Carpocratians running to orgiastic license, Marcionites to a hatred of marriage and procreation. Both, in his view, misuse the same basic antithesis: one collapses “do not adulterate,” the other absolutizes “do not lust” into a rejection of the Creator’s world. The Alexandrian solution is to keep the antitheses, but to “order” them within a larger metaphysic in which one God is behind both tablets of the Law and Jesus is their expositor, not their rival.

Here Samaritan and Philonic patterns about the two tablets of the Decalogue become suggestive. In some Samaritan traditions, the commandments are split across two tables in a way that invites a symbolic reading: one tablet aligned with judgment, the other with mercy. Philo can talk about the division of the ten “oracles” into two groups of five, the first focused on God as Creator and Father, the second on interpersonal prohibitions. Once you have that scaffold in your head, it is not hard to imagine Christians, especially those already enamored of “two powers” exegesis, reading the Decalogue and the antithetical sayings in terms of two divine agencies—one harsher, one merciful—and then aligning their gospels accordingly.

Tertullian’s charge that Marcion “divides two gods, each belonging to a different testament” fits snugly into that world. So does his obsession with ordo. For him, the problem is not just that Marcion has the wrong god; it is that Marcion has disrupted the providential order of revelation. He hits Marcion at precisely the points Papias had already made crucial: you cannot have logoi of the Lord that appear out of nowhere, cut loose from the prophetic scaffolding; you cannot have a gospel that pretends to be the first and only word when, in fact, God has been speaking through the Law and the prophets for centuries. An “antithesis” that slices Law and Gospel apart is an assault on divine taxis itself.

This is where the idea of a Secret Gospel of Mark becomes uncomfortable. Clement’s Letter to Theodore describes a Mark re-worked at Alexandria, with deeper material reserved for the “initiated.” That is precisely the sort of secret, discontinuous revelation Tertullian rails against in Adversus Marcionem IV when he mocks the notion of Christ turning up with sayings never foreshadowed in Scripture, disclosed only to a few. Tertullian’s rhetorical questions—what is hidden, whose things are hidden, by whom, in what order?—are aimed at Marcion, but they ricochet toward any claim of a private, esoteric gospel. From his point of view, the very idea of a “secret Mark” is a violation of the same ordo he wields against Marcion: it suggests a supplementary gospel, sealed off from the public prophetic line.

The revisionist picture that emerges from putting all this together is not shy. It suggests that what we now call “Marcion’s gospel” may stand closer to an early Markan stream—possibly including material like the Alexandrian “secret” Mark—than the catholic histories admit. It proposes that the sharp antitheses of Matthew 5 do not float free as pure Matthean redaction, but sit in counterpoint to a pre-existing Marcionite way of arranging and hearing Jesus’s sayings. It reads Papias’s remark about Mark’s lack of taxis not as a quaint aside but as the embryonic form of a criterion that later writers weaponized: a gospel that is “out of order” is doctrinally dangerous. And it views Irenaeus’s fourfold gospel, and Tertullian’s ordo-theology, as retrospective scaffolding designed to tame and reframe a much more volatile early marketplace of gospels and antitheses.

None of this, on its own, overturns the mainstream reconstruction that Marcion’s text is best modeled as an edited Luke. The surviving evidence from Tertullian and Epiphanius still tracks most naturally against Luke’s structure. But the tensions and cross-currents in the patristic data at least make room for another memory: that before the fourfold canon was set, Markan and Mark-adjacent gospel forms, some of them antithetical in shape, circulated in ways that later heresiologists were determined to forget. On that view, the clash between Marcion, Matthew, Clement, and Tertullian is not simply about who has the right verses; it is about who gets to decide the order in which Christ’s words are heard and what kind of God that order reveals.