http://www.gnosis.org/thomasbook/ch9.html
Quote:Marcion wished to purge Christianity of its pervasive Jewish influence and took Paul's somewhat ambivalent rejection of "the law" to a logical conclusion. The Jews' sacred books, he taught, were of no concern to Christians. If the Jews wished to worship their ancient tribal god, that was their affair. But the God who smote and slaughtered Israel's enemies, threatened his own worshipers with dire punishment if they were disobedient, prescribed circumcision for males and odd laws for the governance of daily life, and described himself as jealous, could not be the God of Christians. (Harnack himself came to the view that, whatever practical reasons Christians might have had for retaining the Old Testament in the second century, and again at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth, by the nineteenth century they ought not to regard it as part of their own holy writ: its continuance in the Christian bible could lead to an emphasis on "righteousness" and rigorous legalism instead of mercy and love.)
According to Irenaeus, Marcion called the Old Testament God "the creator of evils, lustful for war, inconstant in his attitude, and self-contradictory." Irenaeus exaggerated; Marcion apparently accepted that Jews had spiritually benefited as dutiful children of the lesser God, but reproved them for being deaf to the new Christian dispensation.
Marcion taught that the creator-lawgiver archon or demiurge who had created this world was a far lesser power than the true God, the Father of Truth, the ineffable, unknowable Stranger God who had sent Christ as a spiritual messenger to show humankind the path back to its true spiritual home through love. Jesus was a man like any other, who was endowed with the Spirit by the true Father when John baptized him in the River Jordan. Tertullian, the second-century Roman lawyer-theologian from Carthage, wrote that in Marcion's view the real Christ could not have taken on a material body and become a human being in the created world, for such a body would have been "stuffed with excrement."
