Marcion of Sinope

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Marcion of Sinope (c. 85 – c. 160) was a Christian teacher, active in Rome in the 140s, who taught that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Father revealed by Jesus were two different beings — and who, on that conviction, produced the first known fixed canon of Christian Scripture. The church that took his name spread quickly across the empire and survived for centuries. Almost nothing he wrote survives; he is known chiefly through the men who set out to refute him.

He came from Sinope, a port on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, and tradition makes him a wealthy shipowner. Arriving in Rome, he joined the church there and gave it a large sum of money; when his teaching was judged unacceptable he was expelled — by Tertullian’s later reckoning in 144, the date conventionally given — and the money returned. The reading he brought turned on a single distinction. The Creator of Genesis — the god who made the material world, gave the Law, and dealt in justice and wrath — was real, but he was not the highest God. Above and beyond him stood a God until then unknown, a God of pure goodness and mercy, who had no part in making this world and who sent Jesus to rescue humanity from the Creator’s grip.

From this followed Marcion’s most consequential act. Holding the Hebrew Scriptures to be the record of the lower god and binding on no Christian, he rejected them entirely, and assembled in their place a body of authentically Christian writings: a single gospel, an edited version of Luke, and ten letters of Paul, whom he regarded as the one apostle to have grasped the gospel uncorrupted. To these he prefixed his own Antitheses, a catalogue of contradictions between the two Testaments meant to prove the two gods. Scholarship has long debated whether his canon prompted the wider church to fix its own — the chronology is genuinely contested — but that his list is the earliest such collection on record is not.

His opponents are the reason any of this is known in detail. Tertullian devoted five books to refuting him; Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and later Epiphanius wrote against him as well, and their summaries, however hostile, preserve the outline of a system otherwise lost. They also fixed his reputation as the arch-heretic of the early church.

The resemblance to the Gnostic teachers of the same period is real and was noted at once: the demotion of the Creator, the alien high God, a Christ who only seemed to take flesh. It is not identity. Marcion built no elaborate hierarchy of emanations and taught no secret saving knowledge; his appeal was to the plain antithesis of Law and gospel, and his church was an open, ascetic, Scripture-reading body, not an initiated elite. The distinction matters to how the dualism of the second century is mapped, and it is one modern scholarship has worked to keep clear.

→ Related: Tertullian · Irenaeus · Gnosticism · Paul The Apostle · Docetism · Dualism