Marcion

Marcion was a wealthy ship owner from Sinope on the Black Sea, reportedly the son of a bishop, who arrived in Rome around 140 CE and made a substantial financial gift to the church there before his teaching split him from it. His central claim was that the God described in the Hebrew scriptures, a lawgiver who is just but also jealous, wrathful and inconsistent, cannot be the same God that Jesus revealed as an entirely loving Father previously unknown to the world. On this reading the creator of the material world is a lesser, flawed power, and Christ came from the true, higher God specifically to rescue humanity from the creator's law and from the world the creator had made.

That conviction shaped how Marcion read scripture and, more consequentially, which scripture he accepted at all. He rejected the Hebrew Bible outright as the record of the inferior creator rather than of the true God, and assembled what may be the earliest fixed Christian canon on record: a single edited Gospel, close to Luke but stripped of material he judged corrupted by Judaizing editors, together with ten letters of Paul, whom Marcion regarded as the only apostle who had understood Christ's message correctly. He called the two together the Antitheses and the Apostolikon. Because Marcion's God does not create matter, his Christology tended toward docetism, the view that Christ's body was not fully material and that his sufferings were accordingly not what they appeared to be, though how far Marcion himself pressed this point is argued over by historians working from hostile summaries rather than his own text, which does not survive.

The Roman church excommunicated Marcion around 144 CE and, by later report, returned the money he had donated. He did not simply disappear into obscurity afterward. Marcion organized a rival church with its own bishops, clergy and liturgy that spread across the Mediterranean and into the Near East, and evidence of Marcionite communities persists in some regions for centuries, well into the period when the wider church had settled its own canon partly in reaction to his.

That reaction was substantial. Justin Martyr wrote a treatise against him that survives only as a lost reference in later writers, Irenaeus addressed him at length in Against Heresies, and Tertullian devoted five books to Against Marcion, the most extensive rebuttal any single early Christian teacher received. The scale of the response is itself evidence of how seriously the wider church took the challenge: a bounded, edited canon and a flatly stated two God theology, argued by a wealthy and organized rival with his own clergy, forced the mainstream church to be explicit about claims it had previously left assumed.

Historians still disagree about how to classify him. Unlike the Gnostic teachers who read the Hebrew scriptures allegorically to extract a hidden meaning consistent with their own cosmology, Marcion read them literally and rejected them precisely because their literal sense struck him as unworthy of the true God, a distinction that has led some scholars, following the influential early twentieth century study by the German historian Adolf von Harnack, to treat Marcion less as a Gnostic than as a rigorous, if extreme, interpreter of Paul.