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MARCION*, Gospel of
Heretical gospel of the early second century.
Marcion was a native of the Roman province of Pontus who went to Rome about AD 138 and became the founder of a sect called the Marcionites. He seems to have been a member of the Roman church for a time before he went off into heresy. The basic tenet of this later heretical position was that there existed a radical difference between the Old Testament and the New, between the law of the Old and the love and grace of the New, and between the creator God of the Old and the Christian God of the New. For him the God of the Old Testament was the author of evil, which he associated with matter and the world in general, while the God of the New was our Father and the giver of everything good.
This being his belief, Marcion set out to establish for himself a canon of Scripture to support it. This canon included his gospel, which was the Gospel according to Luke, purified of anything connected with the Old Testament, the Jews, the creation of this sinful material world, and anything that related to a true humanity for our Lord. As Irenaeus writes in Against Heresies (1.17.2), “Besides this, he [Marcion] mutilates the Gospel which is according to Luke, removing all that is written respecting the generation of the Lord, and setting aside a great deal of the teaching of the Lord, in which the Lord is recorded as most clearly confessing that the Maker of this universe is His Father.” Irenaeus goes on to say, “In like manner, too, he dismembered the Epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and also those passages from the prophetical writings which the apostle quotes, in order to teach us that they announced beforehand the coming of the Lord.” In summary, Marcion’s canon consisted of his gospel, which was a mutilated copy of Luke, and 10 of the Pauline epistles (excluding the Pastoral Epistles).