Marcion

Marcion, the founder of the Marcionites, a rigorously ascetic sect which attained a great importance between the years 150 and 250 A.D. He was a native of Sinope in Pontus, became wealthy as a shipowner, and about 140 repaired to Rome. There he laboured to correct the prevailing views of Christianity, which he considered to be a corruption of Jewish errors with the gospel of Christ as expounded by Paul, its best interpreter. The opposition which he encountered drove him to found a new community about 144, and he laboured earnestly propagating his theology until his death about 165. Marcion was hardly a Gnostic, although he had been intimate with Cerdo, and Gnostic speculations certainly influenced the development of the Marcionite theology. Failing to recognise the New Testament God of love in the Old Testament, and profoundly influenced by the radical Pauline antithesis of law and gospel, he constructed an ethico-dualistic philosophy of religion, and proceeded to cosmological speculations which are not free from contradictions. He set aside as spurious all the gospels save Luke, and it, as well as the Pauline epistles, he purged of Judaizing interpolations. He was thus the earliest to make a canonical collection of New Testament writings. From about the beginning of the 4th century the Marcionites began to be absorbed in the Manichæans. Marcion's doctrines can be discovered from the controversial writings of Fathers, as Tertullian, Hippolytus, Epiphanius, &c. See works of Baur, Möller, Lipsius, and Harnack quoted under GNOSTICISM.