His body was a phantom
to reveal the good God, and his death was an illusion. This Christ was
not the Messiah predicted in the Old Testament; he was a totally new and unforeseen manifestation of the
good God of Greek
dualism. Because the rest of the apostles were Judaizing corrupters of
pure Christianity, Christ called Paul as the apostle to preach the truth
of Marcion's extreme antinomianism and anti-Judaism.
Marcion
was the first one to create a “New” Testament. He believed that the “Old”
Testament should be discarded, and his influence is with us to this day.
How could this have happened? Didn’t the Jewish believers try to guide and
influence the Gentile “converts”? One reason for this “oversight” is that
the great increase of Gentiles into the sect happened at the same time
that Roman oppression was growing. Within a few short years most of the
Jewish leaders of the sect were no longer around.
The Changing of the Guard
Fox’s
Book of Martyrs, The First Persecution, Under Nero, A.D. 67
This
was the occasion of the first persecution; and the barbarities exercised
on the Christians were such as even excited the commiseration of the
Romans themselves.
Nero
even refined upon cruelty, and contrived all manner of punishments for the
Christians that the most infernal imagination could design. In
particular, he had some sewed up in skins of wild beasts, and then
worried by dogs until they expired; and others dressed in shirts made
stiff with wax, fixed to axletrees, and set on fire in his gardens, in
order to
illuminate them.