God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

The only answer that made sense to Marcion was that there must be two gods: the cruel creator God of the Hebrew Bible known as Yahweh, the God of Israel, and the loving, merciful God, who had always existed as the Logos but who was revealed to the world for the first time in the form of Jesus the Christ. Marcion was by no means alone among early Christians in coming to this conclusion. A large number of Greek-speaking Christians, whom we today refer to loosely as Gnostics (from the Greek word gnosis, or “knowledge”), also differentiated between the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of Jesus, though, unlike Marcion, most Gnostics refused to acknowledge Yahweh as the creator of the world. They believed creation was the work of a lesser god called the Demiurge, or “fashioner,” a deformed and imperfect deity who foolishly believed himself to be the only god in the universe.