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Marcion invented a Western Christianity, one without a Jewish past. He rejected the midrashim of the Nazarene and Elchasaite Churches, the elements of which would much later enter into the Greek Gospels attributed to Matthew, Thomas, Jacob, Andre and Philippe. According to Joseph Turmel,[205] Marcion — using the short notes by Saul — gave to his churches, which were “Catholic” before the advent of Catholicism, a Roman master, a citizen of the town of Tarse, which was Romanized in 140 or 150.

His ascetic renunciation did not contravene the morality of Christianity in its entirety (except for the sects in which Naassene or Barbelite syncretism dominated). The New Prophecy, still hostile to Marcionism, abounded in the same practice, if not the same meaning. Marcion refused sexuality, pleasure and even marriage, which was judged propitious for the work of the Demiurge. The New Prophecy limited itself to encouraging detachment from the body to the profit of the spirit.

In its violent rejection of Judaism, this same dualism did not yet assume the scandalous character that State Catholic monotheism would imprint upon it. Does one need an example? In his Dialogue with Tryphon, Justin the Apologist — a determined anti-Marcionite — gave to his interlocutor a remark that evoked the trouble that the belief in a Good God aroused:

We know your opinion on these subjects, but it seems that what you say is a kind of absolutely unprovable paradox; because your assertion that the Christ was God, preexisting all of the centuries, and condescending to become a man and to be born, not as a man from a man, seems to me not only a paradox but an absurdity. Respond to me at first how you could prove that there is another God alongside he who is the Creator of all things and then show me how this God also condescended to be born from a virgin.[206]

Marcion’s missionary activity and his determination to implant non-Jewish and unified churches everywhere did not in itself offer any reason for reprobation because, under the cover of a special effect [trucage] proper to the Catholic Church, and to all power, the glory taken away from Marcion would be reflected upon the personage of Paul, the sacred “apostle to the Gentiles.”

Marcion’s activity displayed such efficacity that in 400 there still existed Marcionite churches in Rome, in all of Italy, in Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Armenia, Chypre and even Persia, where Manicheanism developed. He propagated the unique Gospel inspired by Paul as well as the appellation adopted by Catholicism: the Old Testament, to which he opposed the New Testament, translating in this fashion the expression New Alliance, which, according to the manuscripts of Qumran, defined the Church of the Master of Justice.

Leisegang summarizes the conceptions of Marcion as follows:[207]

The Gospel of the Christ teaches merciful love, while the Old Testament teaches a malevolent punitive justice. The Christ is the Son of a God of love and the faith in this God is the essence of Christianity. The history of the whole world, described in the Old Testament, from Adam to Christ, forms an immoral and repulsive drama, staged by a God who created this world, who is as bad as possible and who, consequently, cannot be better than his lamentable creation. Thus it is impossible that the Christ is the Son of the Creator revealed in the Old Testament. This creator is just and cruel, whereas Jesus is love and kindness personified. Therefore, Jesus is, by his own avowal, the Son of God. He thus can only be the Son of a God completely different from that of the Old Testament. He is the Son of a Good God, residing until now unknown to man and a stranger to this universe, because he had absolutely nothing in common with it. This God is the Unknown God that Saint Paul announced at the agora of Athens. The Christ is his Son.

The Old Testament lost its quality as the Holy Scriptures of Christianity. It did not know the True God and did not know anything about Jesus. The words of the prophets and the psalms, until then considered to be prophecies relative to the Christ, must now submit to a literal reinterpretation, after which they no longer apply to Jesus. The Law and the prophets ended with John the Baptist. John was the last Jewish prophet; like his predecessors, he preached a Demiurge of cruel justice, he knew nothing of the Good God, who remained foreign to all the Jews. That he was also good, Jesus himself confirmed it. He [Jesus] did not cease, in his language as well as in his conduct, to violate the Law of the Old Testament, to disobey the God who instituted it. He declared an open war on the Law, the scribes and the Pharisians. Jesus welcomed the sinners insofar as they had corrupted themselves with those who passed for just in the sense of the Old Testament. Jesus had seen in the last prophet of the Old Testament, John the Baptist, an ignoramus and an subject of scandal. John himself had said that the Son was the only one to know the Father and that, by consequence, all of those who had come before him had known nothing of him, but had preached another God [...]

When Jesus spoke of the bad tree that could only bear bad fruit and the good tree and its good fruit, he understood the bad tree to be the God of the Old Testament, which had only created and could only create what is bad. The good tree, on the other hand, is the Father of the Christ, who only produced good things. And, by defending the stitching of a new piece into an old frock and putting new wine into old bottles, Jesus expressly prohibited the establishment of any kind of connection between his Gospel and the religion of the Old Testament, with its God.

And when Marcion wrote, “O marvel of marvels, rapture and subject of amazement, one can absolutely not say nor think what surpasses the Gospel, there is nothing to which one can compare it,” he provided the tone for generations of historians for whom Christianity was the product of the Greek civilization and had nothing to do with the Jews.

Nevertheless, Marcion stirred up a lively reprobation in his lifetime. Is it necessary to incriminate his authoritarianism, his extreme rigor, the envy of the other church leaders, the hatred of the Judeo-Christians for whom anti-Judaism did not imply the rejection of the Bible?

The response resided in the reactions and polemics engendered by his theses. Against him were drafted Gospels and Acts that reported that Jesus was a Jewish agitator, put to death by the Jews, certainly, but nourished by the milk of biblical wisdom. The Gospel placed under the name of Luke details the childhood of the Christ, a man born from a woman, even if the sperma was called pneuma, “Spirit.”

Paul, the Marcionite apostle, penetrated into the anti-Marcionite texts in which his “veritable existence” was attested to. Thus, the Acts of the Apostles, a novel that presented itself as a historical chronicle, reconciled the apostles Simon-Peter and Paul.[208]

Other texts by Paul were written: the so-called “pastorals.” Joseph Turmel has established that the letters of Ignacius of Antioch — the same ones that the tradition cite as the [first] appearance of the word “catholic” — reveal the existence of a Marcionite version (135, at the earliest); before being revised, around 190–210, by another bishop of Antioch, Theophile, who, despite his hostility to Marcion, complacently based himself upon the inspiration of the Novum Testamentum.[209] This Theophile did not hesitate to speak of the letters of Paul as the “holy and divine Word [Verbe],” not without ridding them of the Marconite word [parole]. He also borrowed from Theodotus the notion of the trinity and he would undertake the “harmonization of the Gospels, which thus appeared to him nearly deprived of harmony,” Deschner remarks.[210]

So as to demolish Marcion, Theophile was joined by Denyse of Corinth, Philippe of Gortyne, Hippolyte of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus of Lyon, Justin the Apologist, Bardensane of Edessa, Tertullien, Rhodon and Modestus; these were mostly men who enjoyed a certain power as leaders of Christian communities.

But the worst enemy of Marcion was Marcion himself. How did a founder of churches, engaged in politics and temporal and spiritual affairs, hope to build the power of God upon the assises of a world that he condemned because it was the work of a Demiurge, a bloody and pernicious God? How could he succeed in planting a Universal Church in an odious society, which simple faith invited one to renounce right away? And to which authority could a bishop refer to durably legitimate a Jesus who had not lived the life of the humble people whom he ruled?

By breaking with Jewish mythology, did Marcion not remove his credit from a Christianity that was completely borrowed from biblical exegeses? Justin understood quite well who condemned Marcion and explained to Tryphon that — the Jews having lost the key to its interpretation — the Bible thenceforth belonged to the Christians, who were the only ones in a position to confer upon it its true meaning.

Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, was no longer in sympathy with the inventor of Paul, because the Epideixis explained Christian doctrine by speaking of the biblical prophecies. Neither was Tertullien, however close he was to he who called marriage filth and an obscenity. Because, if Marcion, despite his dualism, was not a Gnostic — for him, faith (pistsis) excelled over gnosis, and the adhesion to the Christ was not founded upon knowledge (gnosis) — nevertheless he stripped the marytrdom of Jesus of its penitential meaning, because he separated it from the tradition of Esaie and the biblical prophets. Therefore, deprived of the sacrificial model of the man dead upon the cross, the Church lost meaning and usefulness.