Like gnostics, with whom he has often been wrongly identified, he was determined to pull Christianity away from its Jewish roots. He saw the writings of Paul as his chief weapon, but moving on from Paul’s own conflicted relationship with Judaism, he came to the same conclusion as gnostics in saying that the created world must be a worthless sham and Jesus’s flesh an illusion; his Passion and death should be blamed on the Creator Demiurge. In characteristically Greek fashion, Marcion found the Tanakh in its Greek form crude and offensive – ‘Jewish myths’, in a phrase of the Epistle to Titus,
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