Marcion / Marcionism

Marcion came from Sinope on the Black Sea, made a considerable fortune in shipping, and arrived in Rome around 140 where he gave the church there a very large donation. Reading Paul on law and grace, he concluded that the just, law-giving creator of the Hebrew Scriptures and the merciful Father whom Jesus revealed were simply two different beings. And that Christ, sent by the higher God into a world he had not made, could not have taken real flesh from it. In 144 the Roman church expelled him and returned his money. He replied by organizing congregations of his own, which spread fast along the trade routes he knew and endured for centuries in the East. He gave them their own Scripture: a single gospel based on Luke and ten letters of Paul, edited to remove what he judged to be Jewish corruption, together with a book called the Antitheses setting the two Gods against one another point by point. Not one line of his own writing survives. Everything we have comes through the men who wrote to refute him, above all Tertullian, whose Against Marcion runs to five books.