He called the Old Testament God a monster, tossed half the Bible, and forced the Church to clean up its mess.
Jesus wasn’t the only spiritual voice in first-century Judea.
He wasn’t even the most coherent.
Back then, prophets and preachers were everywhere — wandering the deserts, claiming visions from God, healing the sick, calling out corrupt priests, and gathering followers.
Some fizzled out. Some got crucified.
One became a god — or at least was turned into one.
But history had options.
One of the best?
Marcion of Sinope.
A man who didn’t just ask tough questions — he blew a hole through early Christianity so massive, the Church has spent 2,000 years trying to seal the cracks.
Who the Hell Was Marcion?
Marcion was born around 85 CE in Sinope (modern-day Turkey), the son of a bishop. He grew up loaded — his dad was a wealthy shipping merchant — but unlike most spoiled kids, Marcion had a brain. He also had the guts to say what everyone else whispered: The God of the Old Testament was a bloodthirsty lunatic.
And he wasn’t saying this for shock value. He read the scriptures and took them at face value. Yahweh (Old Testament God) tells people to bash babies against rocks (Psalm 137:9). He orders genocide (1 Samuel 15:3), kills everyone on Earth in a flood (Genesis 6–8), and gets angry constantly. And then Jesus shows up preaching love, forgiveness, turning the other cheek, and treating outsiders with kindness.
Marcion looked at that and said: These can’t be the same guy.
Two Holy Books — Two Gods
So Marcion made his move. He drew a clear line:
- Yahweh (Old Testament): The “Demiurge,” a lower, flawed creator obsessed with law, vengeance, and punishment.
- The Father of Jesus (New Testament): A higher, true God full of love, mercy, and spiritual liberation.
He wasn’t making this up out of nowhere. In fact, Paul — the apostle the Church loves to quote — hints at this split. In Galatians 3:13, Paul says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law.” In 2 Corinthians 3:6, he calls the Law “a ministry of death.” And in Romans, he says we are “not under the law but under grace” (6:14).
Paul was clearly distancing Jesus’ message from the wrathful legalism of the Jewish scriptures. Marcion just took it to the logical conclusion. And instead of twisting Jesus into a Jewish prophecy fulfillment machine like the Church did, Marcion declared the Old Testament irrelevant.
The early church leaders, of course, shit their robes.
Marcion’s Bible Came First
It might surprise you, but Marcion was actually the first person in history to put together a “Christian Bible.” Before him, there was no agreed-upon list of books. People were still passing letters and stories around. Marcion chose what he believed were the only genuine writings:
- An edited version of Luke’s Gospel
- Ten of Paul’s epistles (excluding Hebrews, the Pastorals, and anything that sounded too Jewish)
That was it. No Old Testament. No Matthew or Mark. No Revelation. No Leviticus horror show.
He called his collection the Evangelion and circulated it among growing Christian communities.
Church fathers panicked. Why? Because Marcion’s ideas were gaining popularity. Regular people read his Bible and thought, Yeah, this makes more sense than the violent Old Testament God turning into Mr. Rogers overnight.
So what did the Church do?
They scrambled to assemble their own Bible — the version we know today — specifically to counter Marcion. Church father Tertullian, writing in Adversus Marcionem (Against Marcion), spends five whole books trying to dismantle Marcion’s theology. If Marcion was just a crank, why waste thousands of words on him?
Because he was right, that’s why. And they knew it.
Marcion Was Too Dangerous
Marcion’s version of Christianity didn’t need a priesthood. It didn’t need the Old Testament. It didn’t need a God who threatened you with hellfire. It didn’t demand tithes or temple taxes. It was spiritual, ethical, and radically free.
That scared the Church to death.
Control depends on guilt, fear, and authority. If you remove the angry lawgiver and replace him with a God who simply loves you, you don’t need the middlemen anymore. You don’t need bishops and popes acting like divine accountants.
So the Church did what all fragile institutions do when threatened:
They labeled him a heretic.
They excommunicated him.
They rewrote history.
And they buried Marcion under 2,000 years of slander.
He Saw What Christians Still Can’t Admit
Here’s the big, burning point that makes Marcion matter today:
You cannot glue Jesus onto the Old Testament without looking like a hypocrite.
You can’t say Jesus loves the poor, then quote Deuteronomy to justify hate.
You can’t say God never changes — and then explain how He went from genocidal maniac to peace-preaching hippie in one generation.
The Church wants it both ways: they want Jesus’ kindness and the Old Testament’s brutality. They want to cherry-pick compassion from Jesus and power from Moses. But Marcion was brave enough to say, “Pick one.”
And guess what? The Church picked the bloody one.
What If Marcion Had Won?
Imagine a world where Christianity wasn’t built on fear, hell, or tribalism.
- No justification for colonialism via the “Promised Land.”
- No divine support for slavery or misogyny in the name of Levitical law.
- No Bible verses to beat LGBTQ kids over the head.
- No “Christian nationalism” claiming God wrote the Constitution.
That’s what Marcion wanted.
A religion without Yahweh.
A faith based on love — not control.
Instead, we got centuries of inquisitions, crusades, witch burnings, and megachurch preachers in gold sneakers.
Why? Because the Church killed the rebel and crowned the manipulator.
Marcion was no saint. He had his flaws. He took Paul too literally. He cut too much from the gospel. But he had one thing most Christians still lack — the courage to call out the madness in their holy book.
He saw through the contradiction. He tried to fix it. And the Church buried him for it.
He could’ve replaced Jesus.
Instead, he became the ghost that haunts Christianity — a reminder that someone once told the truth about their God and paid the price.
Got thoughts? Don’t let the bishops have the last word.
Sources and Further Reading
- Marcion of Sinope
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcion_of_Sinope - Marcionism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism - What is Marcionism?
https://www.gotquestions.org/marcionism.html - Marcion, the Canon, the Law, and the Historical Jesus
https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/info/marcion-layman.html - Modern Christians Who Follow Marcion
https://ehrmanblog.org/modern-christians-who-follow-marcion-unawares/ - The Ancient Heresy of Marcionism and its Modern Influence
https://dukecrux.org/2022/07/15/the-ancient-heresy-of-marcionism-and-its-modern-influence/ - Marcion and Getting Unhitched from the Old Testament
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevin-deyoung/marcion-getting-unhitched-old-testament/ - Marcion — The Development of the Canon of the New Testament
https://www.ntcanon.org/Marcion.shtml - Marcion (and Marcionism): The Untold Story of a Christian Heresy
https://www.bartehrman.com/marcion/ - Marcion and the Formation of the New Testament Canon
https://biblicalfaith.online/2022/12/22/marcion-and-the-formation-of-the-new-testament-canon/
Comments:
Dana Cochrane
“Control depends on guilt, fear, and authority. If you remove the angry lawgiver and replace him with a God who simply loves you, you don’t need the middlemen anymore. You don’t need bis…”
Wow, that nails it, right there, in one short paragraph!
Robert
Having multiple Gods was definitely a show stopper for Christian ultimate causality. He would have been better off declaring the OT to be flawed and no longer relevant.
Judith Mirville
The problem is not even the Ancient Testament but Saint Paul, the one and only one real founder of the religion called Christianity, which should be called Paulinism. Jesus founded no new religion. Even within the religion he was heir to he invented nothing. Even the renowned quotes ascribed to him as revolutionary and original were part and parcel of the Israelite oral tradition that was still alive and understood by all around him as he preached. They could seem original and revolutionary only when taught top-down by Paul’s authority to a Greek language only audience, where they would sound as novelties, as Paul was a marketer of the first order. Paul’s pretence was far madder than you can imagine : according to his own theology he was through his own vision the first and only person to have heard Jesus’ words directly from the source of heavens as no one could have done up to then and no other one could do thereafter. According to his trinitarian theology any of those who had known Jesus in the flesh were thereby prevented to know him in the spirit perfectly, as even Jesus himself by accepting the trial of human incarnation had renounced to much of divine knowledge including the content of the revelation only through his crucifixion and ascension he could recover. Only after the Pentecost could the spirit flow and bring about its spiritual fruits and gifts but among all those gifts the only one who had had the privilege of one to one direct vision and hearing was Paul, God’s only true pen. Indeed Paul was the first Christian writer to ever write. But after Paul’s death the gift of prophecy was considered to be closed as obsolete as the truth one needed for one’s salvation was to be heard through absolute renouncement any whiff of freedom of personal thought is favour to totalitarian obedience to church authorities. Jesus never talked a single word about original sin. He talked about personal sin only. The Jewish world had never used any theology of the original sin as any kind of lesson to derive from Genesis. For Paul the original sin was free thought derived from personal inner research outside obedience to ideological authority, most contrary to Jesus who clearly stated that tireless personal pursuit of truth was the precondition to accessing the narrow gate. In some senses of the word but not all Jesus was clearly a gnostic. For Jesus, the hallmark of a Satanic preacher was self-justification and that is all Paul’s epistles are about.
W A Bud Elsaesser
In the beginning man created god to subjugate and control their peons. It’s as simple as that. Many christian beliefs have their roots in the Egyptian gods and beliefs in reincarnation. The Hebrews messed with the Egyptian beliefs in many gods explaining that which they did not understand into this monotheistic creature to gain control and build a business model to rule by.
Len Rosen
I always thought that the roots of Manicheism date back to the theology of Marcion. Dualism was widely worshipped in a number of cultures, a God of good and one of evil. One could speculate that taking Marcion to his ultimate conclusion, that the concept of Satan fulfills God the Monster.
The Old Testament is filled with contradictions. The God of the Hebrew tribes and the acts performed fit with the times. This was a god of a nomadic tribe with no land roots and subject to the whims of the empire builders that surrounded the region at the time. It is no surprise that this god demanded absolute devotion and in its absence lashed out.
Thanks for sharing the Marcion story.
