Marcion: The Man Who Invented the New Testament
Flip to the front of almost any Bible and you’ll find a table of contents split into two halves. Old Testament, New Testament. Most of us never ask who decided there should be a second list at all, or why the first one stayed. The answer runs through a rich shipowner from the Black Sea coast named Marcion. In the second century he drew up the first Christian canon we know of, a short list of books he considered authentic. He left out the entire Jewish scripture on purpose, because he’d concluded it was the word of a different God. ...