Christians have sometimes downplayed the goodness of creation. And often, that goes hand in hand with distancing ourselves from the Old Testament. The reason seems pretty clear: the Old Testament is where all the creation narratives appear, and so much of the Old Testament story is set in the promised land, which is a kind of recapitulation of the garden of Eden and a pointer to new creation.

I think the New Testament doctrine of the incarnation of God taking on flesh in Jesus Christ should also stress the importance of physical creation. But there is no doubt the Old Testament is the anchor for this view. And there were two early Christian movements that tried to dispense with this anchor, to cut themselves free from the Old Testament and its vision of a creator God.

You hear a lot about the so-called Gnostic gospels, those gospels of the second and third centuries which sought to correct the earlier 1st-century gospels in our New Testament. I’m talking about the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Phillip, and so on. The word gnostic refers to the secret “gnosis” or knowledge apparently revealed by Jesus in these gospels. In short, they all say that Jesus came not from the Old Testament God, the God who got his hands grubby by being involved in the physical creation. No, Jesus came from the higher Being, one who has nothing to do with physicality. And once you learn the special teachings contained in these gnostic gospels, your spirit can be free from being trapped inside a physical body and it will eventually merge with that highest being for eternity. If it sounds a bit like Hinduism, that’s because there was plenty of eastern influence in Gnosticism.

But strongly allied to this denigration of physical creation was the complete rejection of the Old Testament. The gnostic Christians (if you can even think of them as Christians) were dead against the Old Testament. They thought Jesus came to deliver us from the Old Testament, deliver us from the God of the Old Testament. These gospels, quite unlike the earlier New Testament gospels, were almost antisemitic. We will do a full-blown episode on the gnostic gospels one day. So many fun topics ahead.

Another interesting movement in the 2nd century was led by a Roman priest named Marcion. As part of his effort to reach the Roman world, he thought it best to jettison the Jewishness of Christianity and, in particular, the Old Testament. So he collected his own canon, his own collection of authoritative books, and of course it had no Old Testament. He also deleted most of the gospels, except for Luke, and even then he edited that so it was a little less Jewish. He did love the letters of Paul though, especially the bits that seemed to draw a contrast between the Jewish law and the Christian gospel. It was a much simpler version of Christianity, this Marcionite Christianity. It was much easier to sell, certainly in the Roman world. And the movement Marcion founded lasted a century or more after he was kicked out of the Church of Rome in the 140s AD.

“Do we, then, nullify the Jewish law by this Christian faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law. What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, discovered in this matter? What does Scripture say? [he means Old Testament scripture] “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness”. King David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the one to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: “Blessed are those whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered”

The Christian gospel, said Paul and all of the first Jewish Christians, is nothing other than the fulfillment of the promises of God in the Old Testament. Or, as Jesus himself put most succinctly in Luke 24, “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations”.

There are gnostic and Marcionite tendencies today – people who want to dispense with the Old Testament and have a “simpler” Christianity. But frankly when you chuck out the Old Testament, you not only chuck out a good creator of a good creation, you chuck out Jesus himself. 

By John Dickson

Want to hear the rest of the episode?
Check out episode 87: “Old Christ”