For a couple days I've been afraid we might come around to this.

In short, anti-Christian partisans have invented dozens, if not hundreds, of revisionist scenarios of Christian origins, and they become increasingly bizarre.

The simplest story takes the texts at face value, the consensus history at face value, and deals with it.

Marcion's "ghost" god — recall, he began as a bishop — was the heresy that first set him off from the rest of the church.  So, there was a church from which he could be set off.  There was a god-concept that was regarded as right by Christians — IOW, there were Christians — and this other god-concept that the same folk regarded as wrong.

To get a grasp of where all this came from, gnosticism was a pre-existing movement throughout the known world at the time.  It predates the Common Era, and had adherents across various other boundaries.  There were gnostic heathens and gnostic Jews.  So naturally, when some heathens and some Jews became Christians, there became gnostic Christians as well.  But gnosticism is ultimately incompatible with Christianity; it winds up forcing a solution like the religion Marcion invented.  This had already become problemmatic prior to the composition of the Gospels; these are the "false teachers" variously warned about in the GT.  Marcion provided a lightning rod, or figurehead.

P.

“What I admire is honesty and truth, no matter who, or what, the sources are.”
— Uri Yosef
Last Edited By: Proteus Fri, 19-Aug-11 12:08:21. Edited 1 times.