MARCIONITES, a religious sect of the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our nra, so called from their teacher Marcion, a native of Sinope and a priest, who adopted the old Oriental belief, in which he had been preceded by Cerdo at Rome, of two independent, eternal, co-existing principles, one evil and the other good, introducing also a third inter mediate being neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil, the creator of the inferior world and the legislator of the Jewish people. He endeavoured to apply this doctrine to Christianity, asserting that our souls are emanations of this third principle. The Jews were subject to this being, while all those nations who worshipped a variety of deities were subject to the evil principle. But the good principle, in order to dissipate these delusions, sent Jesus Christ, a pure emanation of itself, giving him a corporeal appearance and semblance of bodily form, in order to remind men of their intellectual nature, and that they cannot expect to find happiness until they are reunited to the principle of good from which they are derived. Mareiou and his
disciples condemned all pleasures which are not spiritual they taught that it was necessary to combat every impulse that attaches us to the visible world ; they condemned marriage, and some of them even regretted the necessity of eating of the fruits of the earth, which they believed to have been created by the evil 'principle. The Marcionites spread far in the East, and especially in I'ersia. The opponent of Marcion was Tertullianus, who wrote a book to refute his doctrines. (Tertullianus, Adversus Marcionem ; Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, cent. ii., part ii. ; Neander, Church Ilistory, vol. Beausobre, Kist. de Mani& I. iv, ch. 5, &c.)