Didn't Nero launch Christianity?

[The Grand Nudger]

What on earth are you talking about?  No one's excluding the comments of his critics, I'm simply noting that no one (including you, you...nutter....) has actually read marcions gospel, as it didn't survive, and all we have are the comments of his critics.  It may be, as is so often the case, that they got this or that wrong for convenience, but assuming that they didn't...we can state with certainty that marcion rejected the notion of a historical jesus in favor of a mythical christ.

Believing that a god walked the earth and believing in the historical jesus are not the same thing, Acro.  Do you understand?

DO you understand that you can believe both? That you can believe Jesus was a God, and that he was historical? 

Ish.  OFC you can believe the mythos and also believe that it was based on a flesh and blood man who had a mommy and a daddy and who grew up and had a life and a death.  It takes significant contortions of a christian faith, but we're nothing if not clever at compartmentalization. That's the historicists position.  Marcion rejected this in preference for a mythical christ, explicitly.  

You keep appealing to Marcion God beliefs as if they negate his historical beliefs about Jesus, when the don't. You're operating on a false dichotomy. 

And we don't just have comments, we have direct quotations from the Marcion's Gospel, so much so, that nearly all of his Gospel was able to be reconstructed. If anything the quotations are a far more certain, than anything else you can say of Marcion's beliefs, because they don't rely on his critics interpretations of them. 

I keep telling you that believing that a god walked the earth and believing in a historical jesus are not the same thing.  I also keep telling you that you could look this up for yourself.

we can state with certainty that marcion rejected the notion of a historical jesus in favor of a mythical christ.

No, we can state with as much certainty as anything can be said of Marcion, that he believed in a historical Jesus, but he held supernatural beliefs, regarding the compensation of his fleshly appearance, him being divine, resurrected etc.... This is evident in  Marcion's Gospel.

Believing that a god walked the earth in the guise of a man and believing in the historical jesus are not the same thing.  You can look this up for yourself.

Bodily resurrection, along with the notion of continuity of faith between the ot and the nt and the idea that there was a historical jesus, was another thing that Marcion rejected, in point of fact. For Marcion, there was never a body to be missing or resurrected in the first place.

Rehabilitating heretics through historical revisionism is as pointless an endeavor as can be imagined. Marcion did not believe what you believe, he did not believe what the church authorities believed. This is what made his beliefs heresy. He believed that a divine agent of the all was sent to save us from yahweh. Not in a man. Not in any historical jesus. He believed in the mythical christ, an appearance like any other pagan gods appearance. They were not men, though they could seem to be so if they wished.

If you refuse to operate on a basis of common and easily researched facts there can be no productive discussion on the development of christianity between us. Were there christians who did not believe in a historical jesus? Yes, demonstrably so. Marcion was one of them, but not the only one. Paul, whomever he was, may have been such a christian himself, his "authentic" work certainly seemed amenable to the viewpoint in Marcions opinion. He'd realized earlier than most that even in the body of work available to him at the time, serious additions, revisions, and alterations had been made - even if he suspected as much for less than sane reasons, or due to the ideological commitments that his now heretical beliefs contained.