Someone stole the body!

[Pat Mustard]

Dorfl,

Sort of. 

The Marcionites didn't think Yahweh was "evil" per se but rather an inferior and incompetent god. Jesus was not "sent" but rather WAS the higher and superior god who took pity on us one day and offered us a ticket out. 

Jesus, according to Marcion, was never a baby. There was no birth, virgin or otherwise. No Mary and Joseph. No nativity scene. All of that was tossed out along with the Old Testament and all things Jewish. Jesus appeared, as all gods do, on earth one day as a fully formed adult and that's where the story began. Marcionite Christianity fit in with the gnostic ideas that this was a flawed world and those who could learn certain secrets of salvation could escape to a better one. 

It was popular among early Christians and was a contender at Nicaea. Ultimately, it failed because it had no link with the past. It was a "new" religion, since it was tossing out everything from before. The Romans were suspicious of any religion that didn't have any bone fides with antiquity because of the reasoning, "If your religion is true, how come nobody's heard about it until now? Was God just watching us get it wrong all this time and suddenly now has decided to talk to one guy who will tell us what's what?" 

I'm looking at you Mohammed and Joseph Smith. 

So Christianity needed a link to the past. It needed the OT as a foundation and then build the yarn as if Christianity were the fulfillment of what the Jews had believed until that point. Hence, the Orthodox version, as clumsy as it is with it's Trinity, was triumphant at Nicaea.

Yeah the Romans were very conservative. Everything had to be linked to the past, when they gave sole rulership to Marius they dragged out the moth eaten title of Dictator to cloak it in legitimacy, they revived the dead title of Tribune when the plebs forced a measure of power from them. Of course the most conservative of all was Octavian, who cloaked his innovations in the mantle of the dead republic.