Marcion of Sinope: The Two Gods and the First Christian Canon

Marcion of Sinope (c. 85–c. 160 CE) was a second-century Christian teacher from the Black Sea coast who taught that the God revealed by Jesus was a different, higher and wholly good God from the just but harsh creator who gave the Law to Israel. Expelled from the Roman church around 144, he organised a rival church with its own bishops and its own scripture, a single gospel and ten letters of Paul, which many historians regard as the first fixed Christian canon. Often grouped with the Gnostics, he differed from them in important ways.

Life of Marcion: From Sinope to Rome§

Marcion came from Sinope, a prosperous port on the southern shore of the Black Sea in the Roman province of Pontus. Ancient sources call him a nauklēros, a shipowner or sea merchant, which suggests that he was wealthy. Hostile writers later claimed that his own father, a bishop, had expelled him for seducing a virgin, but this story appears late and is usually read as a metaphor for corrupting the virgin church.

Around 140 he came to Rome and joined the Christian community, making it a gift of 200,000 sesterces, a very large sum. In the years that followed he seems to have developed his distinctive teaching, possibly under the influence of a Syrian teacher named Cerdo, whom Irenaeus describes as teaching two gods. Around 144, traditionally in July of that year, the Roman presbyters rejected his views. He was excluded from the community and his money was returned to him, a detail Tertullian later mentioned with some irony.

Marcion then organised his own church, which spread with remarkable speed. Writing in Rome around 150–155, Justin Martyr complained that Marcion was teaching people of every nation to blaspheme the creator. Irenaeus records a story in which Polycarp of Smyrna, meeting Marcion, called him the "firstborn of Satan". Marcion probably died around 160.

The Two Gods: The Creator and the Stranger§

At the heart of Marcion's teaching was a contrast between two gods. The first is the creator, the God of the Hebrew scriptures, who made the world and gave the Law. Marcion did not regard him as an ignorant or evil demon in the manner of the Gnostic demiurge. He was just, in the sense of strict justice, but also changeable, warlike and vengeful: his law demanded "an eye for an eye", he hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he repented of what he had made, all points his critics report Marcion pressing. He would one day send his own Messiah to restore Israel.

The second is the good God, unknown and alien to the world, who had no connection with creation and no obligation to humanity. Out of pure goodness and mercy he sent Jesus to rescue humans from the creator's dominion. This God judges no one and inflicts no punishment. Salvation comes by faith in him, not by knowledge of a cosmic myth.

Marcion read the Hebrew Bible literally and refused allegory. He did not claim that it was false; he accepted it as the true record of the creator's dealings with Israel. What he denied was that it spoke of Jesus or of the Father whom Jesus revealed.

The Antitheses§

Marcion set out his case in a work called the Antitheses ("Oppositions"), which is lost but known from his critics. It placed passages from the Law and the Prophets beside sayings of Jesus and Paul to show their incompatibility, for example the command to love one's enemies set against the conquest of Canaan. Jesus's saying that good fruit cannot come from a bad tree, and that new wine cannot be put into old wineskins, served him as a key.

Marcion's Bible: The Gospel and the Apostle§

Marcion believed that the apostles other than Paul had misunderstood Jesus, mixing his message with Judaism, and that the writings in circulation had been corrupted by them. His remedy was a fixed and purified scripture in two parts.

• The Gospel (Euangelion) was a single gospel closely related to Luke but shorter. It lacked the birth narratives and began in the fifteenth year of Tiberius with Jesus descending to Capernaum.
• The Apostle (Apostolikon) contained ten letters of Paul: Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, "Laodiceans" (our Ephesians), Colossians, Philippians and Philemon. The Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews were absent.

Because no Marcionite copy survives, the texts must be reconstructed from quotations, chiefly in Tertullian's five books Against Marcion (c. 207–208) and in Epiphanius's Panarion. Adolf von Harnack's reconstruction of 1921 remained standard for decades. In recent years scholars such as Matthias Klinghardt and Jason BeDuhn have argued that Marcion's gospel was not a cut-down Luke but an earlier gospel that canonical Luke expanded; others, notably Dieter Roth, have produced cautious critical reconstructions. The debate is unresolved.

Marcion's influence on the formation of the New Testament is also disputed. Harnack argued that the church formed its canon largely in response to him. Many scholars now think the process was slower and more varied, as described in our article on the Christian Bible and its canon, but Marcion remains the first person known to have defined a closed collection of Christian scripture.

Christ, the Body and Marcionite Asceticism§

Since the good God had nothing to do with the creator's world, Marcion held that Jesus could not have been born of a woman or possessed a body of flesh made by the creator. Christ appeared suddenly as an adult with a body that was real to the senses but not of created matter, a view his critics called docetism. His death, nonetheless, was understood as the price paid to the creator for the release of humanity.

This rejection of the creator's order shaped Marcionite ethics. Baptised members were expected to renounce marriage and sexual relations, so as not to fill the creator's world with more people, and to abstain from meat. Married people could become catechumens but were baptised only if they separated. The church accepted the risk of martyrdom, and Marcionites are recorded among the martyrs of the persecutions.

The Marcionite Church After Marcion§

Unlike many of the teachers called Gnostic, who worked within existing communities, Marcion founded an organised church with bishops, presbyters and liturgy. It became one of the principal rivals of the emerging catholic church in the second and third centuries. A Greek inscription of 318–319 from Deir Ali near Damascus marks a "synagogue of the Marcionites", showing that they had their own meeting houses.

His successors modified his teaching. Apelles, his most famous pupil, taught a single first principle and accepted that Christ had a real, though not born, body. Others proposed three principles. In the fifth century Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria, claimed in his letters to have brought whole villages of Marcionites in his diocese into the catholic church. Marcionite communities may have survived even later in parts of the East, and early Manichaean writers took up and debated Marcionite ideas.

Was Marcion a Gnostic?§

Ancient heresiologists placed Marcion among the Gnostics, and modern books often do the same. The two shared important features: a lower creator distinct from the highest God, a negative view of the material world, a docetic tendency in Christology and a sharp separation from the Jewish scriptures.

Yet the differences are fundamental. Marcion had no pleroma, no aeons and no fallen Sophia of the sort described in our overview of Gnosticism. He did not teach that humans possess a divine spark that is consubstantial with the highest God; on the contrary, humans belong entirely to the creator, and the good God saves them as strangers, out of grace. Salvation is by faith, not by gnosis, and he rejected the allegorical interpretation that was central to Valentinian exegesis. For these reasons Harnack insisted that Marcion was not a Gnostic but a radical reformer of Paulinism, and most specialists today treat him as a distinct case.

Marcion's Afterlife in Modern Thought§

Marcion has had an unexpected modern career. Harnack's Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (1921) admired his religious seriousness and argued that Protestantism should finally set aside the Old Testament as canonical scripture. That proposal, made in good faith as a theological argument, was later echoed in very different and sinister forms by antisemitic movements in Nazi Germany, a history that has made "Marcionism" a warning label in Christian theology. Theologians today use the term for any tendency to separate the God of Jesus from the God of Israel, a tendency the creeds discussed in our article on Christian creeds and councils were designed to exclude by confessing one God, maker of heaven and earth.

Frequently asked questions§

What did Marcion believe?§

He believed that the creator and lawgiver of the Hebrew Bible was a just but inferior god, and that Jesus revealed a different, purely good God previously unknown. He accepted only one gospel and ten Pauline letters as scripture.

Why was Marcion excommunicated?§

The Roman church rejected his teaching of two gods and his rejection of the Hebrew scriptures as Christian scripture. Around 144 he was excluded from the community and his large donation was returned.

What was in Marcion's Bible?§

It consisted of the Gospel, a version of Luke without the birth narratives, and the Apostle, ten letters of Paul. It omitted the other gospels, Acts, the Catholic Epistles, the Pastoral Epistles, Hebrews and Revelation.

Is Marcion's gospel older than Luke?§

Most scholars still regard it as an edited form of Luke, but some recent studies argue that it represents an earlier gospel later expanded into canonical Luke. The evidence is indirect, coming from quotations by his opponents.

Sources and further reading§

• Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God — Adolf von Harnack, 1921
• Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century — Judith M. Lieu, 2015
• The Arch-Heretic Marcion — Sebastian Moll, 2010
• The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon — Jason D. BeDuhn, 2013
• The Text of Marcion's Gospel — Dieter T. Roth, 2015
• Adversus Marcionem — Tertullian, Ernest Evans (ed. and trans.), 1972
• Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism — Kurt Rudolph, 1977