Aug 20, 2026 · 45 min · 10 segments
The Keleuthos Divinity School has just published a new academic paper on St. Marcion in the Journal of Pre-Nicene Christian Studies - and it changes everything you've been told about the most maligned…
Darren KelamaHostCo-HostHost
The year is 144 A.D. We are in the city of Rome, which is obviously the absolute epicenter of the empire.
Right.
And for anyone familiar with the era, you probably know the broad strokes of his biography.
Yeah, an enormous fortune.
And then eventually he gets excommunicated.
But the true catalyst for this rupture wasn't his money and it wasn't his personality.
was the archive.
You had various communities relying on oral traditions or, you know, fragmented sayings of Jesus, localized letters.
But Marcion presents something revolutionary, a closed two-part collection of sacred texts.
And the second part was the Apostolicon, a collection of 10 epistles written by the Apostle Paul.
Exactly.
And this is where Mitchell's thesis makes its first major pivot.
The standard historical narrative usually frames Marcion as like sitting in a room, cutting up existing texts with a pair of scissors and inventing a new religion from scratch to suit his own biases.
The year is 144 A.D. We are in the city of Rome, which is obviously the absolute epicenter of the empire.
Right.
And for anyone familiar with the era, you probably know the broad strokes of his biography.
Yeah, an enormous fortune.
And then eventually he gets excommunicated.
But the true catalyst for this rupture wasn't his money and it wasn't his personality.
was the archive.
You had various communities relying on oral traditions or, you know, fragmented sayings of Jesus, localized letters.
But Marcion presents something revolutionary, a closed two-part collection of sacred texts.
And the second part was the Apostolicon, a collection of 10 epistles written by the Apostle Paul.
Exactly.
And this is where Mitchell's thesis makes its first major pivot.
The standard historical narrative usually frames Marcion as like sitting in a room, cutting up existing texts with a pair of scissors and inventing a new religion from scratch to suit his own biases.
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