An Ai rendering of Marcion derived from a medieval wood-cut circa 1550s.

Henry's Blog - Newest posts first .. I post every Friday ..

2026-02-12 - Long Walk

There are people who are very amenable to Jesus' ways but believe he was just a very good and kind man. He existed they offer, but you have to remove all the supernatural elements to get to the likely reality, they say. Some of these who are more informed recognise the "dark years" of the scripture and into this void they propose that Jesus, in order to come up with his teachings of peace, love and understanding, very likely went off during his twenties to study with Buddhist monks, possibly in Afghanistan, or actually in India. It is true that by the time of Jesus, Buddhism had already been going for around 400 years and it is quite plausible that Jesus left the Holy Land and caught up with wandering ascetics--those ordained in Buddhist monasticism being known as bhikkhus. He might indeed have walked from the Holy Land as far as Afghanistan (at least three months journey on foot) and perhaps on into India itself. Now, from a Christian perspective, this idea that Jesus went about learning anything is absurd, but I do have a certain sympathy for such a perspective: there is a clear sense within this narrative that the message of Jesus had nothing really to do with Judaism, and has got much more in common with Buddhism a religion that places a great emphasis on peace, love, and understanding, as Jesus also did. So for me--apart from explaining to any such person that an omniscient and divine being cannot as such "learn" anything from other humans--the orientation of those who feel that Jesus got much of what he later preached from Buddhist monks is appealing to me because that proposition presents a clean-break with Judaism, a religion which Jesus had grown up with but was to repeatedly question and challenge during his ministry years. One might even offer that, perhaps yes, the divine Jesus might well have walked to Afghanistan and met with monks during his twenties, not to learn of their teachings but to experience the quality and structure of their approach for himself insofar as the intimate relaxed and reflective atmosphere often encouraged and engendered.

2026-02-06 - Rusty Saw

Here's one for y'all. Honestly, do you really think we Christians forgive paedos? No we don't. We don't forgive shit. We repeatedly lacerate their scrotums and then slowly decapitate them with a rusty saw bought for £3 in a junk shop. Does that actually sound like forgiving? To you? Nope, me not either. Church of England vicars and the weak wanker Justin Welby forgive paedos as far as I know, but that is because they are ignorant and ill-informed. Jesus did not go around forgiving people shit. He did say on the cross: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." And they didn't. The Romans tasked with executing Jesus genuinely thought he was just an obnoxious nut and we can assume that if they had realized he was actually the divine creator then they would have behaved differently. Not knowing is a mitigation that is what Jesus was saying. So, if for example, you caught a Nigerian man having sex with a 13 year-old you might have to forgive him if he said, "What is your problem? In my country 13 is the age of consent." Which is actually true. So in his own mind he was not doing anything wrong. Do you see the difference there? Subtle one I know. Seriously to all those C of E clergy and Justin the Wanker: FFS! We don't forgive paedos you morons.

2026-01-30 - Bad Romance

Watching the famous video clip of RedOne describing the creation of the indelible pop song Bad Romance one cannot help but see a parallel with Christianity: RedOne brings an unfinished song (that he had written for Lil Wayne but had been rejected) to Gaga. Gaga and RedOne worked on the song together "on the tourbus in Norway"--as every Little Monster knows as it is often referenced by Gaga in her spoken introduction to live solo-piano performances. Anyway, during the creation process, at one moment, the two imagined, and began to mime together, thousands of revellers with their hands in the air all losing it and dancing with abandon in near-unison to the very catchy big chorus. As RedOne later noted, "we imagined it and that is exactly what happened I mean you write the song but at some point it is not even yours anymore it belongs to the people."

2026-01-23 - Do you?

I was chatting to this girl by girl I mean a red-head of around forty-five. At a certain point in the conversation I told her I was Christian. There is often a few follow up questions as nominally most people in Britain do think they are Christian so much so that it often does not actually signify anything so people often like to check it out. And this girl, this woman, with her luscious-flirty smile and woolly hat, says: "Do you pray?" I said: "You cannot ask a Christian if they pray it is like asking if a car has an engine. Of course I pray." To which she began to dance a sort of slow jig on the spot: "do you, do you, do you really actually pray? I never would have thought that about you. Well I never. Do you really?"

I know, I know, I should really only be going on dates with "girls" I know to be sympathetic to Christianity that way such things as the above will not happen. Ok. Okay. Point taken.

2026-01-16 - Open Her Up

"Open her up!" That is what I say, or maybe even, "Open her up! Now!" So many churches one passes are locked. It is becoming a norm to only open one's church up on Sundays. To which I say: "How lazy actually are you?" or "Seriously?" or "I guess you have a lot of pressing things to do as a vicar besides saving souls, well I was sure of that." When I complained to HTB, they said: "Henry, there are thousands of pounds worth of A/V equipment in there for the live stream and surtitles on the hymns on Sunday and it will get nicked." What a joke. Tech is now the reason for not Opening Her Up. Whatever. It is sick. It should be made illegal. All churches are by definition a place of sanctuary. They must be kept open every day of the year at least 7AM to 7PM. It should be by Act of Parliament in my view. Some of these vicars and pastors and whatever-they-call-themselves-these-days are right bloody skivers, or, if you are in the USA: Some of these vicars and pastors and whatever-they-call-themselves-these-days are right bloody slackers.

2026-01-16 - Stoned Free

Why is Revelation included in the scripture when every student of theology knows it is complete bunk? We know, or we generally accept that, John was written centuries later than the Synoptics and that it was written by several small teams. In other words, John was written to some extent by committee. Revelation, by contrast, was written at a completely other time and place. We will never know for sure what that mad monk was smoking that night in his desolate shack to be hallucinating like that. Revelation, as you might have guessed, is really a piece of literature that foreshadows Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey and Naked Lunch. It was found and added to "The Bible" by Catholic clergy to scare the poor vulnerable worshippers in days of yore. It is in there to scare you into being good for fear of what would happen to you on Judgement Day if you don't play nice. The history of the editing of "The Bible" is profoundly political. That is what you learn on day one at seminary. So when you think about "the number of the beast will be 666," etc., all you Iron Maiden and Sabbath fans, you are just quoting from the phantasmagorical visions of a solo monk, stoned out of his gourd, somewhere in Egypt around the year 300. True dat.

2026-01-16 - Times Change

My Booky Wook is the most ungodly book I have ever read, more so than even Sade. At least in Sade there is a definite forward motion and commitment, or pledge. It is wonderful that Russell is saved now. It really is. I just hope that he becomes an amazing beacon of light through his Christian journey. I too, in the last years, have formerly been a sex-addict, a drug-addict, a coke-fiend, a ruthless womanizer, and a lover of low-life culture ... not quite on the near-demented scale of Russell's exploits. Personally, I look back on my adventures not through tears, but fondly, perhaps even very fondly. Just as Russell does much of the time in My Booky Wook. When I still lived in London in 2023, I arrived one evening, for cocktails at Groucho. As I approached the bar, the then head-barman looked at me, and, without any hint of a smile on his face, or initial greeting, simply enquired: "Where do you get them all from?" That stuck. I thought then: I bet one day I will look back on that and remember it as a marker of something. But as I say, I look back fondly. Why not? It's another life. A world away now.

2026-01-09 - Eat the Rich

Some people think the "eye of a needle" is a nickname given, thousands of years ago, to certain narrow entrance-ways into the walled city of Jerusalem. But this is not the case. It is an urban myth. No such slang actually existed. When Jesus said, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." He did mean a literal needle. Just as with his comment, "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" There is a play with scale and, to use a posh word, an incommensurability. So when Jesus says, "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God," he is making a definite point that being wealthy and being Godly don't go together. Not at all. They definitely don't go together. You do get wealthy people who think themselves to be Christians though. For sure. Lots of them. I have seen them in Milano and Paris and London dressed in Saint Laurent and Fendi and Loro Piana arriving ostentatiously into church for the Christmas Eve service, with their self-preoccupied elderly parents, and their many sniveling spoilt children. "Ah, look," we regulars think briefly to ourselves, "the upper-middle classes are arriving for their once-a-year trip to church."

2026-01-05 - When?

Following on from my last most recent post I would like to ask if anyone can tell me: why do some Christians study the Hebrew Scripture? Why do some Christian vicars give sermons about the Hebrew Scripture? Why do you have to study the Hebrew Scripture at seminary? Why does the C of E daily service include readings from Hebrew Scripture? Look, honestly, even ChatGPT says there is nothing in common between Judaism and Christianity. When am I going to be able to go to church and not have to listen to a sermon about Moses or Jonah, and all the rest? Actual question. Please do write in.

2026-01-02 - Differences

At the end of Chapter 9 of Romans, Paul gets really to a basic point, and it is one that Marcion tended to draw attention to:

What then shall we say? That the Gentiles [i.e., not Jewish people] who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith [i.e., God's grace]; but the people of Israel, who pursued the law as the way of righteousness, have not attained their goal. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were based on works.

Ok, so this is something that we see Jesus take up several times in Thomas also and of course in the parable of the Wineskins. God already knows what is in your heart--this is due to him being omniscient. So there really is no need to fill up your life with endless Godly rituals that demonstrate just how devout you actually are because these gestures are for whom? God already knows how much you do or don't trust in him, he does not need evidence. All the "observations" of Judaism will not get you to heaven, will not make you righteous. Will not stand in the way of God knowing what is in your heart. By contrast, Christians, who follow Jesus, believe that God's grace is freely given: the door is open, you only have to step inside and you shall be saved, if you believe. God does not play games. God does not need you to show him how pious you are by adhering to the 613 mitzvot, or commandments, that are in place for those who follow the Law of Moses. You do not buy or achieve God's grace only over time. No, God's grace is freely given to you. Whichever way you dice this down you will find that you come back to a difference in approach between Judaism and Christianity and this is where Marcion comes into the picture to point out the bleedin' obvious really. Two very different religions.

2025-12-31 - Docetic

Once one takes the plunge and embraces a Docetic position as regards Jesus, certain thrilling theories become not only plausible but highly likely. For example on the topic of "what did Jesus look like?" the Docetist is no longer limited by the supposed certainty of Jesus being the plain old carpenter's son from Natzeret. So, you get things like this quote from the Gospel of Philip, a text from around 150 CE: "[Jesus] did not appear as he was, but appeared so that he could be seen. He appeared to everyone. He appeared to the great as great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to angels as an angel, and to humans as a human ... some looked at him and thought they saw themselves." In other words, Jesus' omniscience enabled him to appear as a different person facially to each person who encountered him. In human terms he did not have any settled appearance at all. Jesus' appearance was in fact tailored for each person looking at him. With an emphasis on his being accepted, listened to, or at the very least being highly memorable to them. One could say, with this in mind, that every human who ever set eyes on Jesus, had created for them, their own "personal Jesus," one whom only they would ever see. And kudos to Martin Gore!

2025-12-29 - Radicalism

I think I will take an educated guess and assume that Tommy Robinson has not read Maududi, the Islamic scholar and philosopher whose book Let Us Be Muslims is one of the classic texts of Islamist radicalization. If Tommy did read it he would see that what he is espousing (A Christian country should be obliged to have a Christian leadership) is exactly what Maududi espouses in regard of the Muslim faith. Maududi's famous image is of a train hurtling along, running on rails, with the devout Muslims locked out of the driver's compartment, powerless to affect the train's route. Maududi's challenge is this: if a country is going to shit--rife with idolatry and fornication etc.--then for how long must good Muslims stay politely seated on the train doing nothing? Does it not, at a certain point, become part of their duty to affect a political change of direction? So, with this in mind, we might say that Tommy's recent conversion (has he actually been baptised yet?) heralds a new beginning for what is historically known as Christianist radicalism. The last time it was popular was during the 1960s counter-culture era with groups like Christian Socialist Movement and Jesus People Movement. The general issue with such groups achieving their aims was--in those days at any rate--lack of critical mass. The groups were vociferous and written about extensively by journalists, but the actual following was tiny. Remember, only 1% of the British public go to church each Sunday--according to the 2024 C of E stats. So any such movement is starting off a low base.

2025-12-26 - The Crisis

We can agree, perhaps, that we live in a world ruled by old-school despots including Trump, Xi, and Putin. Such rulers thrill for war, genocide, and patent cruelty. We are also ruled over simultaneously by a new format of de facto despots: Pichai, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Nadella. These despots thrill to an ever-increasing and oppressive control over our daily lives. Then too, there is the viciousness and relentless brutality of Twitter, TikTok, and Daily Mail. People everywhere ask what has gone wrong? What is happening to our world? And so we might, in search of an answer, turn to Paul's onslaught--a.k.a Romans--seeking guidance. And here we can see in the scripture a pretty clear position: "[Unbelievers] are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil, they disobey [or disrespect] their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy." Does that just about sum it up? Yep? Well there you have it. The world we live in today is like it is because it is under the control of unbelievers. Note: yes, I know, both Putin and Trump make sickening claims that they are earnestly practicing Christians. This is, for me, really only further evidence of how unbelievers do indeed "invent [new] ways of doing evil."

2025-12-24 - Koons

People sometimes ask me: what is my view now looking back at the art-world as a Christian? Well, I do have a clearly defined view. It is basically a super-charged version of the position Jean Baudrillard put forward in a Libération newspaper article in 1997. Namely, I believe that several of the leading contemporary artists are extremely toxic and dangerous to art, the future of art, and art appreciation in general. These artists are to my mind, either with awareness of it or not, vehicles of the devil--or evil--in a project to invert and undermine the joy and pleasure of visual art, and drive it towards cynical meaninglessness. These being Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, and to a lesser extent artists like, say, Michael Craig-Martin or Gilbert & George. I think to an unbeliever ("atheists") this would sound wild, but to other Christians it is pretty much a given, and not really a controversial position at all. My personal view is that the damage these three headliners have done to art will take maybe up to a century to repair. I don't think the healing will begin though until after they pass. One note: if you scrutinize interviews with any of the three you will find that on questions of meaning and purpose they very often offer a "wry smile", or look away, hesitate, become hostile, or (as Jeff does) begin to spout-off patent nonsense--often unconnected with the question. All of which are, to an interrogator, classical indicators of guilt.

2025-12-19 - The Real Lord's Prayer

There are two ways of looking at the Evangelion of Marcion: either it is a heavily edited version of familiar canonical Luke or it is much earlier than canonical Luke and different later editors added things to it to make it into the text that became canonical Luke. If for some reason you were to take the former view--Marcion "the butcher" as it were--then you would have to account for the below. Meaning, it is highly unlikely that a person editing a longer Lord's Prayer text would arrive at the below text. A very simple and beautiful prayer that Jesus asked those around him to use to invoke--not pray to--God. Jason BeDuhn's translation from 2013:

Father, let your sacred spirit come upon us.
Let your realm come.
Give us your sustaining bread day by day.
And dismiss for us our misdeeds.
And do not permit us to be brought to a trial.

As soon as one reads it through even for the first time the heavy-handedness of the Catholic bishops comes lumbering into view--well, for me it does. Like the Creed, the Lord's Prayer we know was patently written by committee (e.g., "...as we forgive those who trespass against us" etc.). Invoke is a lovely alternative to pray too. A big shout out to Jason!

2025-12-18 - Who is a Rich Fool?

Jesus repeatedly makes it clear that greediness--the excessive desire for more than one needs, whether that be wealth, power, or possessions--is intrinsically ungodly. One of the biggest jerks around is featured in Jesus' parable of The Rich Fool. The Rich Fool is a wealthy successful man who has specific outbuildings built to house his many possessions and stores of foodstuffs so that he can relax and enjoy a life of luxury long into old age. Just as The Rich Fool has finished all his many preparations, God speaks to him to tell him that that evening he will die. I don't read that as in any way a punishment for The Rich Fool as such. It is rather that the Rich Fool, because he lacks a relationship with God, has wrongly assumed he will live long into old age, in high style. On the other hand, and by contrast, it is very standard for Christians to wake each morning and give thanks for the new day they have been gifted. Each day is valued as a day bestowed by the Lord and there are no assumptions about old age or how long each would like to live. It is quite literally about being grateful for every day. One could remark that those wanting to live a long, long life are really involved in just another form of greediness. So, going back to the parable, it is a bit like when Dr Dre enquires: "Did you forget about Dre?" God speaks to The Rich Fool only to note to the man that in all his plans the one kinda important thing he forgot to factor in was God's will.

2025-12-17 - A.D.O.B.E

Adobe is a famous computer software company but it is also an acronym which encapsulates my house rule--one which must always be adhered to. All Devices Off By Eight. At eight o'clock dinner is served and after that there is only reading, quiet reflection, journaling (long-hand only) or sketchbook drawing. I personally think Jesus would be pretty pumped by this rule because it allows time for prayer and reflection on a daily basis. Just out of interest: yes indeed, a television is a device. Try it, you might like it. I can personally guarantee that your quality of life will improve. Mine sure did.

2025-12-16 - Baptisms

I used to sit in St. Mary Abbots watching baptisms sometimes: Mother Emma pouring a few dribbles of water from a dainty Wedgwood jug and think, well, it is all very British, yes, and I love it for that, but at least I did it the proper way and all thanks to the awesome Rich Powell. For my baptism at Christ Church, Rich took the executive decision to go for full immersion. Personally, due to the wonder of that experience, I now think all baptisms should always be full immersion with no option for a trickle out of a jug on offer. I want the symbolism of clean, fresh purifying water too so I would never go with the dirty-brown water of the Thames--as Russ did. Yes there is the rather compelling precedent of John the Baptist, baptising in the Jordan. But all that gunk. And the sea, that is a definite no. I mean it is not a thing is it anyway. Do you know what mine was? It was a home-birthing pool! Clever. As I said, Rich Powell is not just a pretty face.

2025-12-15 - Imagine No Possessions

Imagine no possessions. It is actually easy if you try. I myself am in the position of having had once upon a time many luxury possessions: the Rolexes the collection of designer leather jackets, and so forth. Now I can't be fagged and in any case I want to be more like Jesus. So I don't bother. I moved into my new flat in Brighton with one suitcase and that was it. That was easy and I liked it. I don't get involved in buying stuff anymore .. except art! I don't really think of my art collection as luxury goods though. I see my art collecting as my work or a job. The art I would not give up, no way José. So I am not very Christ like just yet. And if it means giving up my art collection then I am not sure I ever will be.

2025-12-14 - Put the Christ Back into Christmas

Obviously, turning Christmas into an orgy of consumerism--the frantic Xmas shopping and then .. The Sales... and then ... get-party-dress-and-Champagne for New Years Eve, etc.--is an appalling corruption of any Christian message. A properly Christian way to celebrate Christmas would be a stripping away of consumerism and culinary indulgence much closer in spirit and format to, say, Lent. Remember, the devil cannot innovate he can only invert and the inversion of Christmas is more or less done and entrenched at this point. What about the fight-back by actual Christians. Well, there is none. None whatsoever and there never will be because more than 99 percent of C of E and Catholic clergy are timid and complacent. Some of them are so thick it is toe-curling. For example, last year I was at HTH in Hastings on Christmas Day and the Vicar and his wife got up on stage and invited kids to come up one-by-one and show the congregation what presents they had got for Christmas--a plastic T.rex, etc.--with each getting a round of applause. As I tried to explain to Sarah and Simon not long after the service: going to church on Christmas Day is the one possible time these families might have engaged with the Christian message. The two both looked at me blankly ... and then proceeded to blank me every Sunday. That is to say, the one thing that often lacks in the C of E is any sort of dialogue about any theological matter. That is the sole main problem. The second problem is that many C of E clergy are, can I say, lazy dimwits? Which means that Tommy Robinson's campaign to Put the Christ Back into Christmas has a certain resonance when it should never even have gained any relevance at all. Tommy Robinson's campaign is a consequence of weak clergy and lazy clergy. You reap what you sow.

2025-12-12 - After Synagogue

I once went to Holland Park Synagogue for a service, not that long ago. Everyone in my Church of England congregation was invited as it goes. It was moving and wonderful. There is an MC guy with a top hat on! Women sit upstairs and they chat all together as a community of women. It was the most wild arcane thing ever. After the service I was invited to lunch and the table could not--after about ten minutes in--resist espousing their views. Jesus was a time-waster, a poser, a false prophet, a dingus. I was going to write "I was taken aback" but I avoid cliché where I can and in fact I was not taken aback at all. However, I did think to myself: Look, if you came over to my church and stayed after for refreshments there is no way me and my friends would sit there going "Moses was a major bellend." Or: "Still waiting for your prophet to come are we boys and girls? Good luck with that!" I mean that would never happen, but the other way is fine apparently.

2025-12-05 - Luke 4

In Luke 4 the devil comes to test Jesus' Faith by trying to tempt him over to the side of evil. In Luke 4 we learn a lot about the devil: the devil can invert but the devil cannot innovate. The devil is also an omniscient supernatural being like Jesus. And, if you don't like what the devil is proposing you can tell him you are not interested and eventually he will lose interest and fuck off to find someone more susceptible. These days people don't generally think about the devil as an entity literally tempting them into evil but they do assert that they have "guilty pleasures" or that they do things that "make your brain rot." Well, it's the same thing. Getting you sitting there scrolling through TikTok for hours on end is a quick win for the devil and he is pretty buzzed about it. He takes the wonder and beauty of human thought processes and creativity and tamps that down with mindless bullshit. Another hour that a person has wasted when they could have been soaring, dreaming, planning, building, evolving, etc. I know, I know, you thought the devil is just active for shite horror movies .. nope. He is there, omniscient, tempting you towards acts of egomania, self-aggrandisement, or activities that blunt-or-dull the mind. It's just that is his thing: he takes something wonderful and seeks to turn it to shit. But never forget, all you have to do is tell him you are not interested, and he will eventually lose interest and move on--as he does with Jesus in Luke 4. The devil is a bit like the oft-recalled playground bully: if he is getting no joy then he is apt to go and seek elsewhere. The devil gets bored when he gets nowhere.

2025-11-28 - Hippy chicks

The hippy-chick and hippy-dude Jesus lovers that one sometimes sees around at festivals, or in cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, or Brighton, are really--as Bart Ehrman and others have pointed out before me--Marcionites by any other name. They pursue a life of peace and love. They love Jesus and they know that Jesus is the way of love. They are not in the slightest interested in the vicious god of the Jews. They don't study "The Bible" but they do read the Gospels. Their relationship with Moses and Judaism is non-existent and they like it that way. When I see the wonder of a group of hippy-chick and hippy dude Jesus lovers gathered I often feel the urge to go over and say: "Hey guys there once was this man called Marcion and he espoused exactly what you seem to know quite instinctively: the way of Jesus is the way of LOVE. That is what this fellow Marcion was saying too."

2025-11-21 - St Mellitus

Some people think I was asked to leave St Mellitus for the reason of being a heretic. This is not really accurate. The picture is this: as I continued my studies at St Mellitus, a Church of England training college, I became first enamored by, and then committed to, a Marcionist position. It was I suppose a downer for all concerned as it meant that I would have to leave--which I did without requesting any refund on fees--and not be able to continue at the wonderful loving, supportive environment that the St Mellitus staff create so brilliantly. "It is weird being a heretic, but there you have it," was my reaction. The main debate was all about the curriculum. Every Monday I sat there in these vastly long lectures on the Torah ("Good morning everyone and welcome to lecture nine in our fifteen week series on the book of Exodus"). After a while I began to voice the obvious: "Look, I came here to study Christianity not Judaism dude." The fact is that at St Mellitus, and I suppose at pretty much all Episcopalian seminaries, the sacred texts of Judaism are taught completely uncritically as if a natural part of Christianity. It is odd because a Christian is a follower of Jesus--nothing more nothing less. And Jesus very definitely rejected orthodox Judaism. If he hadn't then he would not have had something completely new to offer, rather he would just have been a very lovely Rabbi teaching Jewish Law. My position is this: it is well worth reading the Hebrew Scripture (we don't call it the Old Testament any more as it is patronising and tends to cultural appropriation) for context, sure, but to think the Hebrew Scripture forms a part of Christianity is absurd and is utterly without foundation. For example, if a Christian concerns himself with the Ten Commandments, he is not involved with anything that Jesus ever discussed or really commented on except in passing. The Law of Moses is just that: The Law of Moses. It's a different religion! The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus trying to explain how his thinking differs very definitely from the Law of Moses. As for the 613 prohibitions, or obligations, of the "observing" Jew, Jesus was repeatedly scathing and contemptuous of these endless rituals. Yes indeed. And don't take my word for it. Check out the Gospels. (Academic theologians use the NRSV translation as standard, but the NIV is pretty good too.)

2025-11-14 - The First Gospel

A commonly held Marcionite position is that the first Gospel was the Gospel of Luke and that the original version of Luke is indeed the much-debated "Q" source. When discussing such matters it is important to accept that no living authority--e.g. Bart Ehrman or anyone else--has really got enough evidence to argue a definitive position. We just don't know for sure and we probably can't ever know beyond all doubt. But that is not to say that making propositions and theorizing is not relevant. Me personally, I have always, quite instinctively, felt that the first Gospel was not the earliest version of Luke but rather the Gospel of Thomas. Why? Because if one is remembering a person's wisdom like say Bowie, or Burroughs, or Morrissey--to note a few that come to mind--one tends to just get stuck into quotes: the things that the person said. Exactly where they were and where they travelled around is somewhat secondary especially when the person concerned here never travelled more than a hundred miles or so from his "hometown." This "just the quotes" approach is what the Gospel of Thomas consists of: 114 things Jesus said as written down sometime soon after his disappearance from Earth. The Nag Hammadi copy of Thomas was written out around 350 CE copied into Coptic from a Greek manuscript that seemingly dates from around 160 CE but we really have no way of knowing when or where the urtext emerged. Perhaps the absolute urtext was begun just days after Jesus left Earth, i.e., about one month after the crucifixion. It stands to reason that the first thing that the initial followers of Jesus (likely about 200-300 persons only) would have wanted to do was get down on paper (as it were) his commentary, or if you like, his philosophy. Exactly where and when Jesus travelled around during his ministry would have surely been secondary at that point. About 70 percent of Thomas appears in Luke often with very similar turns of phrase. One crucial aspect of Thomas is that Jesus' contempt for orthodox Judaism is even more pronounced. Particularly on things like the tradition of infant ritual mutilation that Judaism insists upon. In Thomas when Jesus is asked about the value of circumcision he answers only to assert: "If God wanted little boys circumcised they would be born circumcised."

Quick Q+A on Marcionism

What are the core values of a Marcionite?

- Trusting in God as Jesus described him to be: loving and benevolent always.

- Following Jesus through Luke.

- Abandoning the study of the Hebrew Scripture ("Old Testament").

Who was Marcion?

- Marcion was a follower of Jesus who lived from the year 85 CE to about the year 160 CE. At a time when Jesus' epoch on earth was still within living memory for some.

What do Marcionites believe?

- Marcion and his followers held that the vengeful, spiteful, and often aggressive God--commonly known as Yahweh--as described in Hebrew scripture ("Old Testament") could not possibly be the same God of Love that Jesus described during his three-year-long ministry.

- Marcion proposed and expounded a complete clean-break with Judaism as had been indicated by Jesus. For example in Luke 5: "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins and will spill out, and the skins will be ruined. New wine must be put into fresh wineskins."

- Marcion held what became known as a Docetic Christology. Marcion and his followers did not accept that Jesus was "fully divine and yet also fully human" i.e. the hypostatic union that was foundational to Catholicism and then later the Church of England. Marcionites believe that Jesus was always-and-only divine and merely took on a human-like form in order to interact with humans.

What happened to Marcion?

- During his lifetime in the period of the Early Church there were numerous competing nascent formats of Christianity, of which Marcionism was just one. However, in 325 CE the views of Marcionites were definitively declared to be heresy by the dominant Catholic Church.

Do Marcionites study the scripture?

- The Marcionite scripture is a precursor of canonical Luke. Marcionites also study ten of Paul's letters: Galatians, I Corinthians, II Corinthians, Romans, I and II Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon.

Key Resources

- Reconstruction of the Gospel of Marcion by Jason BeDuhn, 2013 pdf.

- Reconstruction of the Gospel of Marcion by Dieter Roth, 2015 pdf.

- Ben Smith's English schematized version synthesized from BeDuhn and Roth, 2015 pdf.

- Tertullian: Five Books Against Marcion (Trans: Peter Holmes) facsimile of 1868 edition pdf.

Further Resources

- Marcionite Bible published by the Marcionite Christian Church (USA), 2020 pdf.

- The Complete Writings of Tertullian (ed. Philip Schaff) pdf.

- Biographical article on Marcion by Julian Spriggs link.

- Gospel of Marcion Wikipedia article.

- Priority of the Gospel of Marcion Wikipedia article.

- A Bart Ehrman blogpost from 2021 link.

The author of this website is Dr Henry Bond. For enquiries please use this email.