The general outlines of his teaching are as follows. Man is, in spirit, soul and body, a creature of the just and wrathful god. This god created man from i5Xn (matter), and imposed on him a strict law. Since no one could keep this law, the whole human race fell under the curse, temporal and eternal, of the Demiurge. Then a higher God, hitherto unknown, and concealed even from the Demiurge, took pity on the wretched, condemned race of men.
He sent his Son (whom Marcion probably regarded as a manifesta tion of the supreme God Himself) down to this earth in order to redeem men. Clothed in a visionary body, in the likeness of a man of thirty years old, the Son made his appearance in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and preached in the synagogue at Capernaum. But none of the Jewish people understood him. Even the disciples whom he chose did not recognize his true nature, but mistook him for the Messiah promised by the Demiurge through the prophets, who as warrior and king was to come and set up the Jewish em pire. The Demiurge himself did not suspect who the stranger was; nevertheless he became angry with him, and, although Jesus had punctually fulfilled his law, caused him to be nailed to the cross. By that act, however, he pronounced his own doom. For the risen Christ appeared before him in his glory, and charged him with having acted contrary to his own law. To make amends for this crime, the Demiurge had now to deliver up to the good God the souls of those who were to be redeemed; they are, as it were, purchased from him by the death of Christ. Christ then proceeded to the underworld to deliver the spirits of the departed. Then, to gain the living, Christ raised up Paul as his apostle. He alone understood the gospel, and recognized the difference between the just God and the good. Accordingly, he opposed the original apostles with their Judaistic doctrines, and founded small congregations of true Christians. But the preaching of the false Jewish Christians gained the upper hand ; nay, they even falsified the evangelical oracles and the letters of Paul. Marcion himself was the next raised up by the good God, to proclaim once more the true gospel. This he did by setting aside the spurious gospels, purging the real gospel (the Gospel of Luke) from supposed judaizing interpolations, and restoring the true text of the Pauline epistles. Marcion was the earliest critical student of the New Testament canon and text. It is noteworthy that he refused to
admit the genuineness of the Pastoral Epistles and said that the letter to the Ephesians was really addressed to the Laodiceans.
On the basis of these writings Marcion proclaimed the true Christianity, and founded churches. He taught that all who put their trust in the good God, and his crucified Son, renounce their allegiance to the Demiurge, and approve themselves by good works of love, shall be saved. But he taught further—and here we trace the influence of the current gnosticism on Marcion—that only the spirit of man is saved by the good God; the body, because material, perishes. Accordingly his ethics also were thoroughly dualistic. By the "works of the Demiurge," which the Christian is to flee, he meant the whole "service of the perishable." The Christian must shun everything sensual, and especially marriage, and free himself from the body by strict asceticism. The golden age of the Marcionite churches falls between the years 15o and 25o. During that time they were really dangerous to the great Church ; for in fact they maintained certain genuine Christian ideas, which the Catholic Church had forgotten. The earliest inscription (A.D. 318) on a Christian place of worship is Marcion ite, and was found on a stone which had stood over the doorway of a house in a Syrian village. From the beginning of the 4th century they began to die out in the West, or rather they fell a prey to Manichaeism. In the East also many Marcionites went over to the Manichaeans; but there they survived much longer. They can be traced down to the 7th century, and then they seem to vanish. But it was unquestionably from Marcionite impulses that the new sects of the Paulicians and Bogomils arose; and in so far as the western Cathari, and the antinomian and anticlerical sects of the 13th century are connected with these, they also may be included in the history of Marcionitism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—See A. Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 266, 286; F. Loofs, Dogmengeschichte pp. III-114; N. McLean, art. "Marcionism" in Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics; G. Kruger, Early Christian Literature, and art. in Herzog-Hauck's Realencyklopddie fur Prot. Theol. and Kirche, xii.; F. J. Foakes Jackson's Christian Difficul ties of the Second and Twentieth Centuries, is a study of Marcion and his relation to modern thought.