The Marcosian Redemption: Mythmaking, the Afterlife, and Early Christian Religiosity

ABSTRACT

The Marcosian ‘redemption’ afterlife practice, described by Irenaeus (Haer. 1.21.5; see also, 1.13.6), exhibits striking similarities with the Bacchic Gold Tablets. This article exploits this largely neglected comparative opportunity to interrogate how the Marcosian redemption would have been recognisable to people in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, thus bypassing the common focus in our field on ‘origins’ or ‘influences’. The Christians who participated in the Marcosian redemption emerge as people engaged in a broader genre of Greco-Roman religiosity that is associated with independent experts who adapted known mythic resources and offered access to afterlife benefits. This article thus pursues a level of social analysis we often take for granted in Early Christian Studies by attending to the constituent practices of the Marcosian redemption as well as to the social conditions within which it could have been intelligible or compelling. It furthermore leverages this analysis to suggest the fruitfulness of similarly redescribing other, more familiar early Christian materials in terms of practices.

Keywords:

• Marcus
• Valentinians
• Bacchic Gold Tablets
• afterlife
• myth
• religious specialists