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By the year 150, the Christian church exhibited many features that would mark it for centuries: Christians baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; they celebrated the Lord's Supper weekly; they were governed by a bishop, presbyters, and deacons. But they still lacked one thing that would become central to Christian identity: a New Testament. Their only Holy Scripture was that collection of sacred writings later called the Old Testament, which they generally read in the "Septuagint" version—a Greek translation pre-dating Jesus by over a century.

Of course, the documents now found in our New Testament had already been written: Paul's letters between 50 and 65, the four Gospels and Acts by 90 or 100, and the other books by that time or a little later. Paul's letters had gradually been collected and circulated; by 96, for example, the church at Rome had a copy of 1 Corinthians.

For the earliest Christians, who were Jews, the Sacred Scriptures were the fixed authority, and they were used to demonstrate that Jesus was Messiah and Lord. About a century later, the situation changed. Converts to Christianity, who now came from among the pagans, readily accepted Jesus as the Christ and the Son of God, but they often found the Scriptures a stumbling block.

These strange writings portrayed God in highly anthropomorphic terms: with hands, feet, arms, and eyes—and passionate emotions. God could be talked out of a decision he had made by Abraham or Moses. The Hebrew preference for the concrete over the abstract led to unsettling expressions like "circumcise your hearts."

These fell with a clang on the ears and minds of educated Greeks who, following their philosophers, held a highly abstract idea of God. God was the supreme One, Being itself, far above the world of human beings and their troubles, "Thought Thinking Itself," as Aristotle wrote. In comparison, the God of the Jewish Scriptures was an embarrassment, even a scandal.

Unless, of course, one knew how to interpret those Scriptures correctly.

Around the year 140, two teachers put forth their own unique solutions to this problem of interpretation. Ultimately, the church rejected both—and in doing so, it clarified its own orthodox position.

The first of these teachers, Marcion of Sinope, came from a city on the Black Sea and made a fortune as a ship owner. Around 140 he went to Rome and joined the church there, to which he made a large donation. Four years later, he was excommunicated, and his money was returned to him. Thereupon he founded his own church.

Marcion read the Old Testament intently. He interpreted it literally, and only literally, and concluded that the god of the Old Testament was an inferior god, the creator and judge, distinct from the God of love who was the Father of Jesus Christ. This creator god was ignorant (he had to ask Adam where he was); he contradicted himself (first forbidding Moses to make graven images, then ordering him to make the image of a serpent); and he commanded dreadful slaughters, even of women and children. This reading led Marcion to a radical decision: these Jewish Scriptures must be thrown out of the church.

But Marcion did not leave the church without a Bible; he created the first known New Testament "canon," or list of authoritative books. Marcion's hero was Paul, who had rejected the power of the Law to save. Paul had also written of "my gospel" (Rom. 2:16), which must be the Gospel according to Luke, since Luke was Paul's companion. But both Paul's letters and Luke's Gospel contained quotations from the Old Testament that, Marcion believed, had been inserted into the authentic documents by Judaizing Christians. So he purged these books of Jewish influence.

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