Chapter 2 Summary

"I believe in One God, Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth." This is the Christian creed, which some say was created to exclude Marcion (c. 140 A.D.) and his followers from participating in the orthodox church.

Offended by the brutality of the God of Genesis in the Old Testament and attracted by the compassionate God of the New Testament, Marcion, a Gnostic teacher, concluded that there were actually two different and separate gods. Accordingly, Iranaeus accused Marcion of dualism.

Marcion wasn't alone in his disdain for the God of Genesis. This Gnostic tendency to disparagingly describe the God of Genesis is substantiated by some recently discovered texts- like Hypostasis of the Archons, which characterizes the "Creator," called Samael, as a "god of the blind" and places the weight of the Absolute in the true God, the "Entirety." A Nag Hammadi text, On...