Who Was Marcion of Sinope?

Marcion was a Christian teacher from Sinope, a Greek port city on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, in what is now northern Turkey. He was born near the end of the first century and came to Rome around 140 AD, where he taught, gathered a following, and funded a rapidly growing network of assemblies. He broke with the Roman congregation in the mid-140s and continued teaching until his death sometime in the following decades. The year and circumstances of his death are not recorded by any surviving source.

What Marcion is remembered for is a book. He published the first Christian scripture ever assembled as a canon: a single gospel, the Evangelion, together with ten letters of Paul known collectively as the Apostolikon. Before Marcion, Christian communities read from an unsettled body of letters and oral tradition. After Marcion, the idea of a fixed Christian New Testament existed, and every canon that followed was assembled in response to his.

Marcionism is the reading of Paul that Marcion published. Its center is a distinction, not a mythology: the God who made this world and gave the Law is not the Father whom Jesus Christ revealed. The Creator is just, jealous, and bound to the order He built, an order of law, debt, and retribution. The Father is good, previously unknown, and outside that order entirely. Christ came from the Father into the Creator's world to rescue people out of it.

Everything else follows from that one distinction. Grace is not the Creator's reward for obedience, because it does not come from Him at all. The Law is not a preparation for the gospel, it is the thing the gospel breaks with. Rescue is not something the human being earns or chooses, it is the Father's invasion from outside.

No, and the category collapses when you press on it. Gnostic systems in the second century turned on secret knowledge, elaborate cosmic genealogies, and layers of emanated beings that the initiate learned to pass through. Marcion had none of that. He had no aeon-lists, no esoteric initiation, no hidden teaching reserved for an inner circle. He had a public book, given to anyone who would read it, and an argument about how to read Paul.

Marcionite faith asks for trust in the Father revealed by Christ, not for the acquisition of secret information. Adolf von Harnack made this case at length, and his 1923 supplement Neue Studien zu Marcion opens by taking up precisely this question. We publish the first complete English translation of that study.

Christ came from the Good Father, not from the Creator's promised lineage. He was not the Messiah the Hebrew scriptures were waiting for, and he did not come to fulfill the Law. He suffered a real death, staked by the powers of this world, and in doing so broke the Creator's claim on those the Father came for. The Creator did not recognize him, and acted against him out of a threat He could not identify.

Because he lost an institutional argument, not because he was refuted. The emerging orthodox hierarchy in Rome needed the Hebrew scriptures to be Christian scripture and needed the God of the Law to be the Father of Jesus Christ. Marcion's canon made that identification impossible. So he was condemned, his assemblies were pressured for centuries, and his own writings were destroyed.

What survives of his text survives inside the attacks written against him. Tertullian, Epiphanius, and the author of the Adamantius dialogue quoted his readings in order to refute them, and in doing so preserved them. Modern reconstruction works from those hostile witnesses.

That is the orthodox framing, and the manuscript evidence does not require it. The Evangelion is shorter than canonical Luke, and the traditional explanation is that Marcion took a knife to Luke. The alternative, argued in detail by Markus Vinzent and Matthias Klinghardt, is that the Evangelion is the earlier text and canonical Luke is an expansion of it. On that reading the additional material was added by later orthodox editors rather than removed by Marcion.

The True Testament works from the Marcionite text as the baseline and sets the later additions aside, marking where the witnesses are firm and where they are ambiguous. Our scholarly comparison pages show exactly where Klinghardt, Roth, BeDuhn, Bilby, and Litwa agree and differ, verse by verse.

Eleven books. The Evangelion, and ten letters of Paul: Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Laodiceans, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon. Galatians came first, which is itself an argument, since Galatians is where Paul is sharpest about the break with the Law.

The Pastoral letters, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are not in it. Neither is Acts. Neither are the Hebrew scriptures.

Yes. The True Testament Assembly is a living Marcionite ministry led by Elder W. C. Muenchow IV. We publish the restored canon in modern English along with commentary, sermons, courses, and study tools, and we hold services. Harnack closed his 1923 study with the wish that Marcionites would be found again among those who seek God. We are the answer to that wish.