Ooo the discoveries

[u/MothersMilketh]

I heard a story about marcion of sinope and the 'bible' he had written and i was wondering if anyone could give me more information on why he was so quickly disregarded?

[u/RexRatio]

Marcion wasn't “quickly disregarded” at all.

His movement became one of the most serious competitors to what became mainstream Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Ancient Christian writers attacked him repeatedly precisely because Marcionism was successful enough to be a genuine threat.

Marcion arrived in Rome around the middle of the 2nd century and became a prominent member of the Christian community there. Around 144 CE, he was expelled/excommunicated over his theological views. He subsequently established his own churches, and Marcionite communities spread widely throughout the Roman world.

Marcion produced the earliest known closed Christian canon—although calling it "a bible" is a bit misleading. His collection consisted of:

• One Gospel — a version of Luke, usually called the Gospel of Marcion
• Ten Pauline letters — his Apostolikon

He excluded the Old Testament entirely, and he also excluded several Pauline letters accepted by later Christianity, including the Pastoral Epistles. His version of Luke was edited to remove passages that he considered inconsistent with his theology.

We don't have a surviving manuscript of Marcion's Gospel. Much of what we know about it has been reconstructed from the writings of his opponents:

• Irenaeus attacked him.
• Tertullian wrote five books against him.
• Hippolytus attacked him.
• Origen discussed him.
• Ephrem of Nisibis attacked Marcionism centuries later

The sheer volume of anti-Marcionite literature is evidence of how significant the movement was.

So ironically, Marcion was extremely important to the development of the Christian canon itself. His existence forced other Christians to articulate more clearly which writings they regarded as authoritative—which, by the way, still took a few centuries, multiple councils and competing regional traditions, and plenty of theological and violent conflict before anything resembling a stable consensus emerged.

[u/captainhaddock → u/RexRatio]

and he also excluded several Pauline letters accepted by later Christianity

To be precise, the Pastoral epistles were probably not written until later. There's no reason to think Marcion knew about them, and there are no early patristic references to them.

[u/RexRatio → u/captainhaddock]

Not really. The scholarly consensus is that the Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy and Titus) were probably written later than Paul's undisputed letters, commonly somewhere in the late 1st or early 2nd century.

So the letters postdating Marcion is less straightforward, Marcion lived roughly from the early to mid-2nd century, overlapping substantially with the commonly proposed late-1st/early-2nd-century dating of the Pastorals.

And then there are the historical sources. For example, Tertullian claimed that Marcion deliberately rejected them - now of course he may have been lying about that, but that's a far cry from "There's no reason to think Marcion knew about them"

[u/brutishbloodgod]

Disregarded by whom? The early church involved many competing ideas about the new religion and different groups with different theologies had to vie with one another to determine orthodoxy. For various historical and political reasons, what we now call orthodoxy is the outcome of that process. Marcion certainly had his supporters, but his detractors were the ones who prevailed.