MARCION, mar'shi-On, founder of a Gnos tic sect, called Marcionites: b. Sinope about the beginning of the 2d century, A.D.; d. about 160. He became a wealthy shipowner, was very liberal, and went to Rome about 140 where he gave generously to the Church but his views were so unusual that he was not warmly re ceived. He attached himself while there to the Gnostic teacher Cerdo of Antioch, and founded a system antagonistic in many respects to Chris tianity. Its principal feature was the irreconcil able opposition which it supposed to exist be tween the Creator and the Christian God, and between the religious systems, the law and the gospel, which it believed they respectively founded The sect held the existence of three original principles — the supreme and invisible, whom Marcion called the Good; the visible God, the Creator; and the devil, or perhaps matter, the source of evil. Marcion could not
perceive in nature, or in the Old Testament, the same love which was in the gospel of Christ. He accordingly made the Creator, the God of the Old Testament, the author of suffering. Jesus was not the Messiah promised by this being, but the son of the unseen God, who took the form but not the substance of man. Marcion denied the resurrection of the body; he condemned marriage, thinking it wrong to increase a race born in subjection to the harsh rule of the Creator. He rejected the whole of the Old Testament, and of the New all except a few epistles and a mutilation of the Gospel of Luke. He lead quite a following, which is traced for 500 years, and then disappeared. Consult Tertullian, 'Contra Marcionem); Har nack, 'History of Dogma.'