Justified True Belief

(●) The shipowner who tried to cut the Old Testament out of Christianity, and forced the church to say out loud which books were its own. + Somewhere around the year 140 a wealthy man from the Black Sea coast joined the church at Rome, handed over a fortune, and began pressing on the presbyters, the elders who governed the congregation there, a question that a great many ordinary readers have felt and never said out loud. The God who commands the slaughter of the Canaanites, who sends bears to maul jeering boys, who says through Isaiah that he creates calamity: is that really the Father whom Jesus told people to call their own? Marcion decided the answer was no, and he did not mean it as a mood. He meant that there are two different Gods, and that Christianity had been reading the wrong book about the wrong one. He matters to Christian readers because the church’s answer to him is a great deal of what Christians now take for granted. Before Marcion, believers had apostolic writings they read in worship and no list of them. Marcion published a list. He is the first person known to have fixed a set of Christian books, closed it, and said that everything outside it was not Scripture. The church did not accept his list, but it could no longer avoid the question, and the century that followed him is when the shape of the New Testament came into focus. Here is the fact to keep hold of while reading anything about him. Not one sentence Marcion wrote survives in a copy made by his own people. Every word of his that we still have reaches us through men who were trying to destroy his movement, chiefly Tertullian, whose five books Against Marcion quote him in order to take him apart. Reading Marcion is like reconstructing a demolished building from the reports of the demolition crew, and the honest thing is to say so at the start.

(●) c. 85 AD: Born at Sinope, a Black Sea port, into the shipping trade that made him rich. + Sinope sat on the southern shore of the Black Sea, in the region the Romans called Pontus, and it lived on grain, timber and freight. Marcion made his money there as a nauclerus, a shipowner, the man who owned the vessel and carried other people’s cargo for a fee. Tertullian, writing roughly half a century after Marcion’s death, never lets the reader forget it, calling him "that shipmaster of Pontus" and working the region over for insults. The climate there is grim, he says, and the natives are savage, and then come the two jokes he was plainly pleased with. Pliny had reported, and later writers kept repeating, that the beaver of Pontus escaped the hunters by castrating itself, knowing that those parts were what it was hunted for, which made the animal a byword for self-mutilation; so what beaver, Tertullian asks, ever unmanned itself as thoroughly as the man who abolished marriage? And what Pontic mouse ever gnawed like the man who gnawed the Gospels to pieces? The first jibe was not an exaggeration, as it happens: Marcion’s church really did require its members to give up marriage (T5). The birth date is arithmetic rather than record. Nobody wrote down when Marcion was born. Around 85 is what you get by working backwards from a man established in business, prosperous enough to give a fortune away, and active in Rome by about 140, who was still alive and teaching when Justin Martyr wrote in the mid 150s. Treat it as a reasonable guess with a decade of room in it. There is one story about his youth and it is late and doubtful. Epiphanius, a bishop of Cyprus writing in the 370s, more than two centuries after the events, says Marcion was the son of a bishop of Sinope, that he lived at first as an ascetic, denying himself food, comfort and marriage, that he seduced a consecrated virgin, and that his own father excommunicated him for it. Most historians decline to believe it. Epiphanius is far too late to know, and the charge sits badly against everything else on record, since the one thing Marcion’s bitterest enemies never accused him of was loose living; his sect demanded celibacy of its own members. Some scholars suspect the story is a slander, and others that it began as a picture of Marcion corrupting the church, spoken of as a pure virgin, and hardened into biography along the way.

(●) c. 139 AD: He came to Rome, joined the church there, and made it a gift nobody afterwards forgot. + Rome under the emperor Antoninus Pius was the place to go if you had money and something to say, and Marcion arrived with both. Tertullian is emphatic that he came as a believer and not as an infiltrator: Marcion and Valentinus, he writes, "at first were believers in the doctrine of the Catholic Church, in the church of Rome," and a letter in Marcion’s own hand, which Tertullian had read and we have lost, proved that his first faith was the ordinary one. Whatever else he was, he was a Christian before he was a heretic. The gift became famous. Tertullian’s Latin says Marcion came in cum ducentis sestertiis, and the Victorian translators rendered that "two hundred sesterces." The phrase is ambiguous in Latin, where one and the same word ending does duty for a count of single coins and for a count of thousands, and historians generally read the figure as two hundred thousand, which is the only reading that makes sense of a gift anyone bothered to remember. To feel the size of it, take the pay of an ordinary soldier. A legionary under Antoninus Pius drew three hundred denarii a year, and four sesterces made a denarius, so his wage for a year came to twelve hundred sesterces. Marcion’s gift was well over a century of that, handed across in one motion. It was also in Rome that he met the man who gave his idea its first shape. Irenaeus reports that a teacher named Cerdo had come to Rome a few years earlier teaching "that the God proclaimed by the law and the prophets was not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," the one known and the other unknown, the one righteous and the other kind. Marcion, Irenaeus says, "succeeded him, and developed his doctrine." What Cerdo left as a suggestion, Marcion turned into a church.

(●) 144 AD: The presbyters of Rome heard his case, rejected it, and gave the money back. + The hearing is the hinge of his life, and we know the substance of his case because Tertullian names the two texts it rested on. The first was a line of Jesus about trees. "For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit" (Luke 6:43). Marcion read that as a rule about causes, not about people: if the fruit is bad, the tree is bad, and a world with maggots and earthquakes and dying children in it cannot have come from the Father of Jesus Christ. The second was a sentence from Isaiah in which the God of Israel says of himself, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things" (Isaiah 45:7). Tertullian says Marcion had been brooding on the origin of evil, and that when he found the Creator saying this in so many words, his mind was made up. Two texts, one from the Lord and one from the prophets, and out of them a second God. The Roman church refused, and the refusal was final. Tertullian says he was expelled after more than one warning, and that he went out taking the money he had brought with him. There is something bracing in that detail: they gave the fortune back rather than keep an endowment from a man whose teaching they had just condemned. The year deserves a word, because it is stated with more confidence than the evidence supports. Tertullian never gives a date. What he gives is a calculation, that "from Tiberius to Antoninus Pius, there are about 115 years and 6-1/2 months," and that Marcion’s own followers put the same interval between Christ and their teacher. The fifteenth year of Tiberius is the point Luke uses to date the start of the preaching that opens the gospel story (Luke 3:1), and it falls in AD 28 or 29. Add Tertullian’s span to that and you land in the middle of 144, which is where the July 144 date found in reference books comes from. The precision is ours. Tertullian said "about."

(●) c. 144 AD: He answered by building a rival church, with its own clergy, its own discipline, and its own Bible. + This is what makes Marcion different from every other heretic of his century, and it is easy to miss. Valentinus and the Gnostic teachers ran schools. Gnostic comes from the Greek gnosis, knowledge, and it covers a family of second-century teachers who held that a chosen few are rescued by a secret knowledge handed from master to pupil, so what they built were circles of initiates gathered around a teacher, meeting inside or alongside the ordinary congregations. Marcion built a church. It had bishops and presbyters, it baptized, it broke bread, it sent out missionaries, and it had a fixed book to read from, which no other Christian body yet did. A traveller in the eastern provinces a generation later could walk into a town and find two congregations, both calling themselves Christian, and have to ask which one was meant. The discipline was severe, and the severity followed from the doctrine. If the God who made bodies is not the God who saves, then bodily life is at best a distraction, and Marcion drew the line where it hurt: baptism was for the celibate, and married converts were expected to separate. Tertullian’s sneer about the man "who has abolished the nuptial bond" is a fair summary of the rule, whatever one makes of the tone. Epiphanius adds that Marcionites used water rather than wine at the Lord’s Supper and fasted on the Sabbath, keeping the creator’s day as a day of mourning. And it worked. Within a decade Justin Martyr, writing to a Roman emperor, had to explain that this man was persuading "many of every nation," which is not a thing an apologist volunteers about a rival unless everyone already knows it.

(●) c. 154 AD: Polycarp met him in Rome and would not so much as greet him. + Polycarp of Smyrna came to Rome in the time of Anicetus, disagreed with its bishop about the date of Easter, and while he was there he did some other business. Irenaeus, who had heard Polycarp preach as a boy, tells the story: Marcion met him on one occasion and asked whether he was known, and Polycarp answered that he knew him perfectly well, as the firstborn of Satan. Read it slowly and it is more than a good line. Polycarp was somewhere past eighty. He had listened to men who had listened to the apostles, and Irenaeus is telling the story precisely to make that point: here is a living chain, and here is a man who has stepped out of it. The old bishop was not refusing to argue. Irenaeus says in the same passage that Polycarp’s visit turned many people back from Marcion and Valentinus to the church. He was refusing the ordinary courtesies of shared faith to a man who had unmade the faith they would have been sharing. The year is an inference and not a record. Irenaeus fixes the visit only by saying that it fell while Anicetus was bishop of Rome, and the beginning of Anicetus’ term is itself an estimate rather than a recorded date, so c. 154 is the earliest point at which the meeting will sit. A year or so after it, on the reckoning most historians accept, Polycarp was burned in the stadium at Smyrna; the older tradition preserved by Eusebius puts that death a decade or more later. Either way, Marcion had another five or six years to run.

(●) c. 160 AD: He died outside the church he had tried to correct, and nobody recorded the day. + There is no account of Marcion’s death, no martyrdom, no deathbed. Justin says he was still alive when the First Apology was written, in the mid 150s; after that the sources go quiet about the man and loud about the movement. Around 160 is the usual estimate and it is only that. Tertullian preserves one last story, and it is worth handling carefully because of who is telling it. Marcion, he says, "professed repentance, and agreed to the conditions granted to him," namely that he would be received back if he brought with him the people he had led away, "he was prevented, however, by death." That is a hostile writer, in a different province, more than forty years after the fact, reporting exactly the ending his side would want. It may be true. It is not the kind of claim a careful reader treats as settled. What is certain is that the movement did not need him. It had bishops of its own to consecrate the next generation, a Bible of its own to read, and by then a foothold from Rome to the Euphrates.

What He Taught

(T1) The God who made this world is not the Father of Jesus Christ. + Everything else in Marcion follows from this one move, so it is worth stating it the way he would have. There is a God who made the world, gave the Law to Israel, and runs the universe by strict justice. He is not evil. He is not a villain. He is exactly what he says he is: righteous, jealous, severe, a giver of rules and a keeper of accounts. Marcion had no wish to deny that this God exists; Tertullian’s complaint is never that Marcion denied the Creator but that he demoted him. Then, in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, a second God appeared. Nobody had heard of him. He had made nothing, promised nothing, and was owed nothing, and he came out of sheer kindness to rescue people who were not his, from a world he had not built. Marcion’s enemies called this being the alien God or the stranger God, and it was not really a jibe, because strangeness was the point. Grace that comes from your creator is a father settling his accounts. Grace that comes from a total stranger is pure gift. Think of a man who takes in a child from another family’s house, owing nothing, gaining nothing, and simply pays. That is Marcion’s gospel, and once it is put that way the appeal of it is obvious, which is why the church answered him at such length instead of ignoring him. The cost is what the church could not accept. Two Gods means the world and its maker are no part of salvation, the Old Testament belongs to somebody else, and the Christ who saves has no connection to the God who made the person he is saving.

(Q) "Marcion makes his gods unequal: one judicial, harsh, mighty in war; the other mild, placid, and simply good and excellent." + Source: Tertullian, Against Marcion I.6 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Peter Holmes translation). Tertullian has just spent five chapters arguing that two supreme beings cannot both be supreme, and here he turns to how Marcion actually described them. The phrase "mighty in war" is a swipe at the battle scenes of the Old Testament, and it is Marcion’s own picture of the Creator being reported back to him.

(T2) The Law and the Gospel contradict each other, and the contradictions are the proof. + Marcion did not simply assert two Gods, he tried to demonstrate them, and the demonstration was a book called the Antitheses. An antithesis is just a pair set against each other, one statement facing its opposite, and Marcion filled a volume with them: a column of what the God of Israel had said and done, and beside it a column of what Jesus said and did. The pairs were chosen to sting. The Law says an eye for an eye; Jesus says turn the other cheek. Elisha calls bears out of the woods to maul the boys who mocked him; Jesus tells his disciples to let the children come. Elisha needs river water and seven dippings to clean the leprosy off Naaman; Christ says one word, once, and the leper is clean. Tertullian reports that last pair as an antithesis in so many words, and works over the first two at length, which is how we know they are Marcion’s and not a later writer’s illustration. Read a hundred of them in a row and the effect is cumulative and physical, which is what a good polemicist wants. Marcion’s argument was not that the Old Testament is false. It is that it is true, and about somebody else. The church’s reply, then and since, is that Marcion had mistaken a story for a contradiction. A father speaks differently to a five-year-old and to a grown son, and the difference is not two fathers but one relationship at two stages. Tertullian works through the Antitheses case by case in his fourth book on exactly that principle, and Jesus himself had refused the choice Marcion insists on: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them" (Matthew 5:17).

(Q) "Marcion’s special and principal work is the separation of the law and the gospel." + Source: Tertullian, Against Marcion I.19 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Peter Holmes translation). Tertullian adds that Marcion’s own disciples would not deny it, since the separation was the doorway through which they had entered his teaching. He names the Antitheses in the next breath as the book that does the work (T2).

(T3) Christ was never born, never grew, and never belonged to this world at all. + A God with no stake in the material world cannot very well have a son who is knitted together in a woman’s body out of the material world’s ingredients, and Marcion followed that logic without flinching. His gospel had no genealogy, no annunciation, no shepherds, no childhood in Nazareth. It opened in the fifteenth year of Tiberius with a grown man appearing at Capernaum, and that appearance was the beginning of the story in the strict sense: there had been nothing before it. The technical name for this is docetism, from the Greek dokein, "to seem." A docetic Christ seems to have a body without having one, the way a person in a dream can be seen and heard and touch nothing. Marcion’s Christ suffered, but as an actor suffers, in a body that was appearance rather than flesh, which conveniently kept the Redeemer clear of the Creator’s handiwork from beginning to end. Christians had been fencing this off since before Marcion was grown. The letters of John make confessing the real flesh of Jesus the test of a true spirit: "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to the arena around the time Marcion was a young man, hammered at the same point, insisting that Jesus was truly born, truly ate and drank, truly was nailed up. The reason the church would not let this go is that a Christ who only seemed to have a body only seemed to die, and a death that only seemed to happen saves nobody.

(Q) "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (for such is Marcion’s proposition) he ‘came down to the Galilean city of Capernaum.’" + Source: Tertullian, Against Marcion IV.7 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Peter Holmes translation). This is the opening line of Marcion’s gospel, quoted by the man refuting it, and it is the closest thing we have to holding his Bible in our hands. Tertullian spends the rest of the chapter asking the obvious question: come down from where, and through whose sky (T3)?

(T4) Only one gospel and ten letters of Paul are Scripture, and even those need editing. + Marcion’s Bible had two parts and no Old Testament. The first part he called simply the Evangelion, the Gospel, a version of Luke with no author’s name attached and the birth stories gone. The second, the Apostolikon, held ten letters of Paul: Galatians first, then the two to Corinth, Romans, the two to Thessalonica, a letter he called Laodiceans that the church knows as Ephesians, then Colossians, Philippians and Philemon. The three Pastoral letters, the ones addressed to Timothy and Titus, were not in it. Paul is the key to the whole design. Marcion read Galatians, where Paul rebukes Peter to his face and insists that his gospel came by revelation and not from the men in Jerusalem, and concluded that Paul alone had understood, that the other apostles had dragged the Law back into the church, and that the Gospels circulating under their names were contaminated. So the texts had to be cleaned: anything that tied Jesus to the Creator, quoted a prophet, or spoke well of the Law came out. His critics were unanimous about what this was. Irenaeus said he mutilated Luke and dismembered Paul; Tertullian said he ascribed no author to his gospel because a man who feels free to cut up a body will hardly bother to label it. Modern scholars are more careful, and a minority have argued that Marcion’s shorter Luke might preserve an earlier form of the text rather than a censored one, but the consensus after two centuries of work still runs with the fathers: he cut. What nobody disputes is the effect. Marcion is the first Christian we know of who drew a boundary around a set of books and called everything outside it something other than Scripture.

(Q) "Besides this, he mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord." + Source: Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.27.2 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Roberts and Donaldson translation). "The generation of the Lord" means his birth and human descent. Irenaeus goes on in the same paragraph to say that Marcion did the same to Paul, cutting out whatever named the maker of the world as the Father of Jesus Christ, along with the prophetic passages Paul quotes (T4).

(T5) The body will not be saved, so it should be starved of everything in this life. + Marcion’s ethics are the part most often skipped, and skipping them makes him look like a man with a theory rather than a man with a following. Souls that learn the true gospel go to the good God. Bodies, being lumps of the Creator’s material, stay behind for good. There is no resurrection of the flesh in his system, and no Christian hope for the world as a place. Live inside that and the rules write themselves. Marriage produces more bodies for the Creator, so his baptized did not marry. Fasting is a standing refusal of the Creator’s provisions, so Marcionites fasted hard, and Epiphanius says they chose the Sabbath for it, turning the day the Creator blessed into a day of mourning. This was not decadence and their enemies never pretended otherwise; Marcionites went to the arena and died well, and their reputation for austerity is one reason the movement kept growing. He also drew a conclusion that his opponents found unbearable and that shows how completely he had inverted the Old Testament. If the Creator’s favourites were his dupes, then the people the Creator condemned were the ones with the sense to run to a better God. Irenaeus reports Marcion teaching that when Christ descended to the dead, Cain and the Sodomites came to him and were saved, while Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and the prophets, still trusting their own God, held back and stayed where they were.

(Q) "Salvation will be the attainment only of those souls which had learned his doctrine; while the body, as having been taken from the earth, is incapable of sharing in salvation." + Source: Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.27.3 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Roberts and Donaldson translation). Irenaeus states the doctrine flatly before going on to the story of Cain and the Sodomites in Hades, which he introduces with real anger (T5). "Taken from the earth" is a deliberate echo of Genesis: the body is the Creator’s dust, and on Marcion’s terms it stays his.

(Q) "And there is Marcion, a man of Pontus, who is even at this day alive, and teaching his disciples to believe in some other god greater than the Creator." + Source: Justin Martyr, First Apology 26 (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Roberts and Donaldson translation). Justin is writing to the emperor Antoninus Pius in the mid 150s, and this is the earliest surviving mention of Marcion by anyone. It is a contemporary notice rather than a later verdict: the two men were alive at the same time, in the same city, and Justin adds that Marcion has persuaded people "of every nation." He mentions in the same chapter that he has already written a treatise against all the heresies, which would have been the first book on the subject and is now lost.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He drew more return fire than any other teacher of the second century, and Christian theology grew in the arguing. + Count the names. Justin wrote against him while he was still alive, in a book now lost. Polycarp refused to greet him. Irenaeus, who normally treats a heresy in a paragraph, singled him out for a promised full-length refutation. Then a second wave: Rhodo, Theophilus of Antioch and Philip of Gortyna all wrote against him. Tertullian wrote five books, rewriting the whole thing twice, and the third edition of Against Marcion is the longest work he ever produced. Hippolytus answered him at Rome. Nor did it stop when the Greek and Latin writers had said their piece. In Syria, Ephrem was still composing hymns and prose refutations against Marcionites in the fourth century, two hundred years on. In Armenia, Eznik of Kolb was answering them in the fifth. That volume of writing is not just noise, because arguing changes the arguer. Tertullian’s fourth book, written to prove that Marcion’s own gospel testifies to the Creator, walks through Luke passage by passage and reads like the earliest running commentary on a Gospel that survives in Latin. The doctrine of God as one Creator, the case for reading the two Testaments as a single story, and the very idea of testing a new teaching against a rule of faith, the short summary of what the apostles had handed down that a congregation could recite and measure a novelty against, all got their working shape while Christians were answering this man. A church that had never met Marcion would have believed the same things and would have been much slower to learn how to say them.

(†) He forced the church to name its own books, though he did not hand it the New Testament. + Of everything said about Marcion, the claim a reader is most likely to meet in a sermon or a documentary is that he gave the church its New Testament. Part of that is agreed by everyone who works on the period, and part of it is still argued about, and the two are worth keeping apart. What is agreed is this. He is the first person known to have published a closed Christian collection, and once he had done it the question could not be un-asked. A congregation that had simply read whichever apostolic writings it possessed now had to answer a man who could name his and reject theirs. What is argued is whether the church’s canon is a reaction to his. A canon is a settled list of books a church receives as Scripture and reads as authoritative in worship, with the edges fixed and everything else outside them, which is precisely what nobody is known to have written down before he did. Adolf von Harnack, the German historian whose 1921 study made Marcion a famous figure again, held that the Christian Bible as an idea was substantially Marcion’s doing, and Hans von Campenhausen later put the case even more strongly. Against them, historians including Bruce Metzger, John Barton and Judith Lieu have pointed out what the church already had before 144: Gospels read side by side in worship, a collection of Paul’s letters circulating as a unit, and writers quoting both as authoritative. On that reading Marcion sped up and sharpened a process he did not start, which also explains why the church’s eventual list looks nothing like his. One thing his opponents said about him is worth keeping in view whichever way that argument goes. The fathers never answered Marcion by producing a canon list. They answered him by appealing to what the churches founded by apostles had always taught and read, and the list came into focus as a description of that, not as a weapon invented for the fight.

(†) His church outlived him by three hundred years, and it left buildings behind. + It is tempting to picture a heresy as a bad idea that gets refuted and evaporates. Marcionism did not evaporate. In a village called Lebaba, about twenty-five kilometres south of Damascus, a stone was found carrying a dedication for a Marcionite meeting house, put up by a presbyter named Paul and dated by the Seleucid calendar, the era the Syrian countryside had counted its years from since the wars of Alexander’s successors, to the year 630, which works out to 318 or 319 AD. The Greek word it uses for the building is synagoge, a gathering place, which is what Marcion’s congregations called their own. It is a plain, ordinary parish inscription, of the sort any congregation might set over a door, cut more than a century and a half after Marcion died and a few years before the Council of Nicaea. The written record matches the stone. Cyril of Jerusalem, teaching catechumens (converts under instruction, not yet baptized) at Jerusalem around 350, told them not to ask simply where the Lord’s house was, since the sects called their own buildings that, but to ask where the catholic church was. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in the province of Euphratensis in the fifth century, told the consul Nomus that he had brought eight Marcionite villages and the country around them back to the faith, and had been stoned for his trouble; writing to Leo of Rome he counted more than a thousand souls rescued from Marcion. For Christian readers there is a warning in that longevity. Marcionism was not stopped by refutation alone. It was stopped, slowly and locally, by pastors who out-argued and outlasted it village by village, and in the East that took three centuries.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: one Maker who called the world good, a Christ truly born, and a Bible with two Testaments. + Marcion was a man whose question was real and whose answer the church judged fatal. The question is the one every honest reader of the Old Testament eventually asks. The answer breaks at four points, and each of them is worth stating at full strength rather than waved at. - The Maker. Marcion needed the material world to belong to somebody other than the Father. Scripture will not divide them. The world is God’s own work and he pronounced a verdict on it: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). The New Testament keeps the same line, crediting all creation to the Son through whom it came (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16). Take the Creator away from the Father and you have not solved the problem of evil, you have only moved it into a universe with two rival powers in it. - The Law. Marcion’s Antitheses assumed that a severe command and a gracious one cannot come from the same mouth. Paul, the one apostle Marcion trusted, had already ruled otherwise about the very Law in question: "So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good" (Romans 7:12). Marcion had to cut Paul to keep Paul. - The flesh. A Christ who only appeared to have a body is a Christ who only appeared to die, and John made the confession of real flesh the dividing line: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14; 1 John 4:2). The Christian hope is not escape from the body but the raising of it, which is precisely the hope Marcion denied his own converts. - The two Testaments. On the road to Emmaus the risen Christ did not set the Hebrew Scriptures aside; he explained himself out of them, and told his disciples that what was written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled (Luke 24:27; Luke 24:44). A gospel with the Old Testament removed is not a purer gospel. It is a gospel with its promises cut off from their fulfilment. The impulse behind Marcion is not extinct, and it does not usually arrive as heresy. It arrives as an embarrassed silence about the harder parts of the Old Testament, or as a suggestion that Christians might travel lighter without them. Marcion is the man who followed that impulse all the way down, wrote out the consequences, and showed the church what was at the bottom.