The Arch-heretic Marcion

Marcion is unanimously acknowledged to be one of the most important and most intriguing figures of the Early Church. In spite of this importance, there is no comprehensive up-to-date study on his life and thought. With the present work, Sebastian Moll attempts to fill this inconvenient gap. His main argument is that previous scholarship has turned Marcion's exegesis of Scripture upside down. He did not find the inspiration for his doctrine in the teachings of the Apostle Paul, it is the Old Testament and its portrait of an inconsistent, vengeful and cruel God which forms the centre of his theology. Marcion does not understand the Old Testament in the light of the New, he interprets the New Testament in the light of the Old. This insight casts a new light on Marcion's place within the history of the Church, as the initiator of a fundamental crisis of the Old Testament in the second century.