mankind nor was known by them, until, taking compassion on the misery to which they had been brought by disobedience to their Creator who was casting them into his hell, He interfered for their redemption. The Marcionite denial of the unity of the first principle was variously modified. Some counted three first principles instead of two: a good Being who rules over the Christians, a just one over the Jews, a wicked one over the heathen. Others, since the world was supposed to be made out of previously existent matter, held that matter was a fourth self-originated principle. Marcion himself only counted two ἀρχαί, but used the word in the sense of ruling powers, for it does not appear that he regarded matter as the creation either of his good or his just God, and therefore it should rightly have been reckoned as an independent principle. Tertullian, indeed, argues that Marcion, to be consistent, should count as many as nine gods. In all these systems the good Being was acknowledged to be superior to the others, so it was not a violent change to assume that from this principle the others were derived; and Apelles and his school drew near the orthodox and taught that there was but one self-originated principle. The ascription of creation and redemption to different beings enabled the church writers to convict the Marcionite deity of unwarrantable interference with what did not belong to him. This interference was the more startling from its suddenness, for Marcion's rejection of O.T. obliged him to deny that there had been any intimation of the coming redemption, or any sign that it had been contemplated beforehand. His God then suddenly wakes up to trouble himself about this earth; stoops down from his third heaven into a world about which, for thousands of years, he had given himself no concern; there kidnaps the sons and servants of another, and teaches them to hate and despise their father and their king, on whose gifts they must still depend for sustenance, and who furnishes the very ground on which this new God's worshippers are to kneel, the heaven to which they are to stretch out their hands, the water in which they are baptized, the very eucharistic food for which a God must be thanked to whom it had never belonged.
Marcion's rejection of O.T. prophecy did not involve a denial that the prophets had foretold the coming of a Christ; but the Christ of the prophets could not be our Christ. The former was to come for the deliverance of the Jewish people; the latter for that of the whole human race. The former was to be a warrior—Christ was a man of peace; Christ suffered on the cross—the law pronounced accursed him that hangeth on a tree; the Christ of the prophets is to rule the nations with a rod of iron, kings are to set themselves against Him, He is to have the heathen for His inheritance and to set up a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. Jesus did none of these things, therefore the Christ of the prophets is still to come. Tertullian successfully shews that if Jesus was not the Christ of the prophets, He must have wished to personate Him, coming as He did at the time and in the place which the prophets had foretold, and fulfilling so many of the indications they had given. What Marcion supposed his own Christ to be has been disputed. Some have supposed that he did not distinguish him from his good God, for Marcion's Gospel was said to have commenced: "In the 15th year of Tiberius God came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and taught on the Sabbath days" (Tert. adv. Marc. iv. 7); but we believe the true reading here is "eum," not "deum," and that Marcion held his Christ to be a saving Spirit (i. 19), but did not confound him with the Supreme. Marcion's Gospel told nothing of the birth of Christ, and Marcion's "came down" has a very different meaning from what it has in the original passage (Luke vi. 31), in Marcion's use meaning "came down from heaven." In fact, the story of Christ's birth would represent Him as a born subject of the Demiurge, deriving from his bounty the very body in which He came; so it was preferred to tell the improbable tale of a divine teacher unheard-of before making a sudden appearance in the synagogue. That Christ had a real earthly body Marcion of course could not admit. See DOCETISM for an account of Marcion's doctrine on this subject, and that of his disciple Apelles, who on this point as on others approached more nearly to the orthodox. It was an obvious argument against the Docetic theory that if our Lord's body were not real we could have no faith that His miracles were real, nor in the reality of His sufferings and death, which Marcion was willing to regard as an exhibition of redeeming love; nor in the reality of His resurrection. Marcion, like the orthodox, taught that the death of our Lord was followed by a "descent into hell"; but Irenaeus tells us that he taught that there Cain, the people of Sodom, and others condemned in O.T. as wicked, received Christ's preaching and were taken up by Him into His kingdom; but that Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, the prophets, and other righteous men imagined that the Demiurge was tempting them as on other occasions, and so, being afraid to join themselves to Christ and accept deliverance from Him, were left in the underworld. Christ's salvation, according to Marcion, affected the soul only, and did not affect the body, of which he held there would be no resurrection. Indeed, none of those who regarded matter as essentially evil could believe that evil would be made eternal by a material resurrection. Tertullian points out that sin originates with the soul, not the body, and pronounces it unfair that the sinful soul should be redeemed and the less guilty body punished. On unredeemed souls no punishment would be inflicted by Marcion's good God—he would merely abandon them to the vengeance of the Demiurge; but Tertullian shewed that if direct punishment were inconsistent with perfect goodness, such abandonment must be equally so.
The Marcionite system as described by Esnig has more of a mythic than of a rationalistic character, and if we accept this as the original form of Marcionism, Marcion owed more to the older Gnostics than we should otherwise have supposed. Marcion is said by Esnig to have taught that there were three heavens: in the highest dwelt the good God,
