Meet Marcion: The First Great Christian Heretic (vIDEO)

Welcome to the home of Episode 157 of the Misquoting Jesus Podcast with Bart Ehrman. Below, you can watch the entire episode, read its description, and see links to related resources.

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episode description

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In Episode 157 of Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman and Megan Lewis explore Marcion, one of the earliest—and most influential—Christian figures to be condemned as a heretic. Active in the second century, Marcion believed that Paul had correctly understood the fundamental difference between Jewish law and the gospel of Christ, but he took that distinction much further than Paul himself would have accepted. Marcion argued that the God who created the world and gave the Jewish law was different from the previously unknown God revealed by Jesus.

Ehrman explains Marcion’s unusual view of Jesus: because the material world belonged to the creator God, Jesus could not have been a genuine human being. Instead, he appeared human while remaining divine, a position associated with docetism. Marcion nevertheless maintained that Jesus’ crucifixion somehow brought salvation.

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The discussion then turns to Marcion’s Gospel, a version apparently related to Luke that Marcion edited according to his theology, as well as his lost work Antitheses, which contrasted passages from Jewish Scripture with Jesus’ teachings to demonstrate what Marcion saw as two fundamentally different gods. The irony, Ehrman argues, is that some modern Christians still express ideas resembling Marcion’s—particularly the tendency to emphasize Jesus’ divinity while minimizing his humanity or to contrast an Old Testament God of wrath with a New Testament God of love.

The episode closes by considering Marcion’s relationship to Paul and why he remains a landmark figure in the development of Christian orthodoxy.