18 INTRODUCTION
text, and the Jesus Seminar in Santa Rosa, California, is discussing the possi-
bility of a new New Testament, a new Christian Bible.
Arguably the most influential person in the process of the formation of a
New Testament was a second-century Christian teacher, a dyed-in-the-wool
dualist named Marcion of Sinope. Marcion is sometimes included in discus-
sions of the gnostics because of his radical dualism, but his Christian religion
was a religion of faith rather than gnosis. In this volume we consider Marcion to
be an unrepentant Paulinist, with a literalistic way of reading the Bible, rather
than a gnostic. As one prominent scholar quipped, the only person in the sec-
ond century who understood Paul was Marcion, and he misunderstood him.
Marcion was a rich shipowner turned evangelist who went to Rome in the
middle of the second century in order to contribute his money and his teach-
ings to the Roman church. Both were returned to him. Marcion preached that
the good and loving god, revealed in Christ, must be distinguished from the
just and righteous god, who was the god of the Jewish people. Marcion's the-
ological dualism, with all its anti-Semitic implications, necessitated for him
the creation of a new Bible, a new authoritative book for the god newly re-
vealed in Christ. Marcion wrote a book, a rather simple-minded piece called
the Antitheses, with quotations from Jewish and Christian texts that seemed
to Marcion to show the striking contrasts between the Jewish god and the
Christian god. Marcion also formulated a Christian canon—as far as we can
tell, he was the first Christian to come up with the idea of a separate Christian
Bible. He knew of a series of letters of Paul, and he knew of the Gospel of Luke,
which he considered Paul's gospel, and he combined these into his New Testa-
ment. And when he read in Paul's letter to the Galatians that some trouble-
some people want to "pervert the gospel of Christ" (1:7), he took the words
seriously and literally. He assumed that lackeys of the Jewish god were per-
verting the written texts by penning in words favorable to the Jewish god and
the scriptures of the Jewish god. Marcion responded as a highly opinionated
textual critic by removing the sections of Paul's letters and Luke's gospel that
he thought needed to be erased in order to restore the texts to their original
form. For Marcion's misguided efforts his foe Tertullian chided him, "Shame
on Marcion's eraser!"
Marcion proved to be popular and influential as a leader of his church, but
only for a time. Eventually he was rejected by many Christians, including the
heresiologists, and declared a heretic. The Christians opposed to Marcion dis-
liked his insistence on two gods and his rejection of Judaism and the god of
the Hebrew Bible. Instead, such Christians looked for continuity in the history