the room. But then Marcion went on to claim that Jesus was not the God they all knew as Yahweh. Rather, he was a completely different, and hitherto unknown, God who had only just been revealed to humanity. The very purpose of Christ’s descent to earth, he told them, was to set humanity free from the evil creator God of the Bible. This meant the religion formed in Jesus’s name, Christianity, could no longer be linked to the Judaism out of which it emerged. The Hebrew scriptures were obsolete; what was needed was a new Bible. And, as luck would
