Ironically, the early Christian thinkers who put Paul on the map would later be condemned for heresy. Marcion, a well-educated, wealthy man who became a shipbuilder in Sinope, an important port on the Black Sea, believed that Paul had been the only apostle who had been true to Jesus’s teachings. His reform movement spread so rapidly that when he died in 160, “Marcionism” was in danger of eclipsing the mainstream church.
