I finished up yesterday’s post by explaining how over time parts of the Gospels and Paul’s Epistles began to be read out loud alongside the traditional Torah portions at traditional messianic synagogue services and this is why the NT eventually began to be looked at as just as authoritative of the Hebrew Bible.
Remember, at this early stage, what the early church practiced was just another form of Judaism and the majority of its members were Jewish.
In fact, the early church was so Jewish, its members didn’t even know how to handle a gentile when he joined them for worship services for fear of being rendered unclean.
That will be a different discussion for a different time.
Moving on, today I need to introduce another key historical figure who not only played a formative role in promoting the heresy that the New Testament is God-breathed Scripture but the person who one could say is also responsible for much of the anti-Semitism in the church today.
Who in the world might I be talking about?
I’m talking about a man named Marcion.
He was a super rich and powerful gentile businessman who earned his fortune in the shipping industry.
Marcion considered himself to be a “Christian” but his theology was a bit skewed to say the least.
He believed that the god who sent Jesus into the world was a different and higher deity than the creator God of Judaism.
Read that last sentence again to really get what I’m saying.
He believed there was one God who was responsible for Judaism upon which the Law and the Prophets were built and then there was another higher god above the god of Judaism who sent Jesus into the world.
He also believed that the only true apostle of Jesus Christ was the Apostle Paul.
You’re probably thinking….
…are you frickin’ kidding me?!
Well, it gets worse.
Around 144 A.D., he published a book called Antithesis that in many ways one could say was quite similar to Hitler’s MEIN KAMPH.
In his book, he proposed that all things of Jewish origin and flavor had to be eliminated from the church.
That’s right.
He then went on to propose the creation of a whole new Christian Bible that would completely eliminate the TANAKH (the Hebrew Bible) and include only the Gospel of Luke and some of Paul’s Epistles.
In fact, he went beyond just proposing such an abomination.
This homeboy went hogwild and published his own ridiculous version of the “Scriptures” which consisted of ten Pauline epistles and a shortened version of the Gospel of Luke.
The Book of Acts and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John were conspicuously omitted from the Marcion Bible
Why?
Because they were just too darn Jewish.
And the reason the entire Gospel of Luke couldn’t be included was because those parts dealing with the genealogy of Yeshua had to be eliminated.
“We can’t have anything that would show Jesus is Jewish now, can we?”…was Marcion’s perverted reasoning.
How did the church fathers respond?
Right off the bat he was widely denounced and excommunicated from the church of Rome around 144 AD.
Yet he did gain a substantial following and it is because of this following that Marcion became a catalyst in the process of the development of the New Testament canon by forcing the Orthodox Church to respond to his canon.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that most Christian churches today practically NEVER study, read or even understand the so-called “Old” Testament and that everything they base their doctrines on comes from Paul’s writings?
If they ever do open up their Hebrew Bibles, it’s just to pull one isolated verse out of context to support their doctrinal abominations.
Also, where do you think folks come up with this idea that the Old Testament God is different than the New Testament God?
That’s exactly what Marcion taught.
His influence was HUGE!
In fact, the church he started expanded so greatly that within his lifetime it was a major rival to the emerging Catholic Church at the time.
I’m frickin’ serious!
We’ll continue this discussion the next time we meet.
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