Marcion: The Man Who Rewrote the Bible to Fit His Heresy

Marcion (85-160 A.D.) was the son of a bishop in Pontus, on the shores of the Black Sea in northern Turkey.  He struggled with reconciling the God of the Old Testament with Jesus of the New Testament and concluded they must describe two separate gods.

Marcion showed up in Rome sometime around 140 A.D. and became a generous member of one of the congregations there.  In July 144 A.D., he was given a hearing with that city's church leaders about his belief system.  He did not win a lot of friends that day.  They were shocked, promptly rejected his views as heretical, excommunicated him from the church, and even returned the money he had given to the church.

From that point, Marcion went on a church planting spree all over the Roman empire.  After his death, these Marcionite churches continued to spread.  By the 4th century they had fizzled out in the western empire, but continued to exist in Syria until the 10th century.

The early church leaders and theologians were largely unanimous in opposing Marcion's teachings.  Tertullian, who was sympathetic to the Montanists, vigorously opposed Marcion.  In fact, he wrote a 5-volume treatise against his teachings.  While Marcion's own writings have not survived, one can infer his main doctrines from the works of his opponents like Tertullian.

Marcion's book was called Antitheses (Contradictions) and he described what he considered to be irreconcilable contradictions between the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.  He resolved it by deciding there must be two separate gods:  one who is good and who sent Jesus, and another who is just and cruel, who created the world, and who is described in the Old Testament.  To his credit, Marcion recognized that the Bible didn't support his theology in the least, but instead of concluding his theology was wrong, he concluded the Bible was wrong!  He promptly threw out the entire Old Testament, all of the Gospels except for portions of Luke, and a large part of the remainder of the New Testament.  He only kept 10 of Paul's epistles, and freely modified them when they didn't suit his purposes.

While he taught that Jesus was only spirit and not human (hence the need to get rid of the Christmas story in Luke), Marcion did not seem to share any other gnostic doctrines that were causing problems for the early church.  His particular brand of heresy was unique.

Despite Marcion's shameless arrogance in molding Scripture and God to meet his preconceived ideas, he did help speed up a process in the orthodox churches that had already begun:  the establishment of a canon of authentic and accepted books.  As Marcion rejected various books, churches clarified which books they accepted as authoritative.  As Marcion edited and modified books, churches preserved and reproduced the original versions of those books with greater urgency.  Marcion unknowingly helped establish and preserve the Bible that he so desperately tried to get rid of and modify.

While an ancient heresy like Marcion's may appear irrelevant to the church today, there are a few who are still drawn to his doctrines.  (See this website for one example, but don't believe everything you read there!)  The idea of creating God in one's own image is still very much in vogue.

As Broadbent states (p. 38), "Any error may be founded on parts of Scripture; the truth alone in based on the whole."