A Petition To Remove the Marcionite Canon From the Christian Bible
In the second century AD there was a man named Marcion who called himself a disciple of Paul and taught something similar to Gnosticism. He created one of the first recorded Bible canons in history, which consisted of ten of Paul's letters and a variation of the Gospel of Luke.
The Marcionite Canon
- Luke (with slight variations)
- Galatians
- 1 Corinthians
- 2 Corinthians
- Romans
- 1 Thessalonians
- 2 Thessalonians
- Laodiceans (possibly Ephesians)
- Colossians
- Philemon
- Philippians
The teaching of Marcion seems to have been similar to other Gnostic teaching that the God of Jesus and the God of the Old Testament are not the same, and that the physical world and the physical body are inherently evil. The reality is that Jesus confirmed the law and the prophets and the scriptures repeatedly, and He came in a physical body to the physical world and healed many physical bodies from physical diseases and even raised physical bodies from physical death (including His own). The Bible teaches that the negative aspects of the physical world such as death and disease are not part of the original creation, but are products of the curse incurred by sin, which began in the paradise God planted in Eden and continues to the present day.
For what it is worth, Marcion was vigorously opposed by the prominent figures of early Christianity, in particular Tertullian, who wrote a five book treatise called "Against Marcion", and Polycarp who, according to Irenaus, called Marcion the "first-born of Satan".
One cannot help but wonder, over a thousand years later, how Marcion's bible canon became the centerpiece of all modern Christian Bible canons. Not only are they included, but these ten letters of Paul are featured more prominently in the ordering of the New Testament than those attributed to Jesus' own disciples, including one of near certain authenticity, 1 John. Luke, while not being the first of the gospels by order, is arguably first in its influence on Christian tradition.
If these ten letters of Paul and the Gospel of Luke are sufficiently compatible with the heretical teaching of Marcion to comprise the entirety of his own personal gnostic bible, they have no business being in the Christian Bible. The teaching of Jesus is incompatible with that of Marcion and the rest of Gnosticism, which maligns the God of Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel as an evil and inferior god they call the demiurge. When God made the world He saw that it was good, but Marcion and Gnosticism portray the physical world as evil. Jesus was born as a physical human in the physical world through the physical womb of a woman who was still a virgin. He lived a physical life and died a physical death and rose from the dead in a physical body. Jesus taught and quoted from the law and the prophets all the way back to the creation in Genesis, never saying or even suggesting that God or the creation or the law or the human body are evil, but rather that sin is evil and the devil is evil.
Somehow the poisonous false teaching of Marcion and Gnosticism has been allowed to permeate Christianity over the centuries inconspicuously through its prominent placement in our Bibles. It is my suggestion that at a minimum we stop reading and teaching these eleven books, and I petition Christian religious leaders and Bible publishers to revise the New Testament canon in light of this information. Acts and the other four letters of Paul should probably also be removed.
Perhaps an appropriate minimum standard for the inclusion of a book in the New Testament would be that the author must have actually met Jesus in person during His lifetime.