Copyright © By Dr. Adel Elsaie, Book Title: "Please Revise the Bible, Again"

3.2 Marcionites

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Marcion (100-160) established a rival Christian sect in Rome about 140. He listed contradictions between the Old and New Testaments, and developed a sophisticated apologetic method for approaching the discrepancies in the Bible. He believed that unknown persons, such as the Ebionites, determined to keep Christianity Jewish had corrupted the Gospels. Marcion rejected the Old Testament and almost all of the New Testament, including the accounts of the incarnation and the resurrection. He based his teachings on ten of the Epistles of Paul and on an “altered version” of the Gospel of Luke. The existence of four versions of the Gospels was a troublesome mystery in itself.  He believed in a dualistic interpretation of God, whereby God is divided into the just God of Law, who was the Creator of the Old Testament, and the good God, the infinitely superior deity revealed by Jesus Christ. The popularity of his teachings showed that he had voiced a common anxiety due to public confusion. He had put his finger on something important in the Christian experience by rejecting the Jewish One God and introducing, instead, a dualistic God.

 

The Marcionites had a very attractive religion to many “civilized” pagan converts, as it cleared Christianity from the “uncivilized” Jewish religion. The Jewish God, the Jewish scriptures and Jewish customs were all rejected.

 

            Much of early Christian doctrine was formulated in reaction to this movement. Marcion represented a formidable challenge to the Church.  His exclusion of many of the apostolic writings provided a strong motive to the church’s need to classify which books did or did not rank as authoritative documents. In later Christian debate, the formation of the Biblical canon became a sensitive issue, were the books admitted to the Church’s canon because they were authentic? Or did the Church actively created the canon in response to Marcion’s “inspired” text? Christian historians believe that both questions have to receive affirmative answer. The criterion for admission of accepted books in the New Testament was governed by the Christian belief of the Fathers of the Church during the second and the third centuries.