the distinction
between the good God and Christ, which according to the Pauline
Epistles, could not be denied. To him Christ is the manifestation of the
good God himself.[390] But Marcion taught that Christ assumed absolutely
nothing from the creation of the Demiurge, but came down from heaven in
the 15th year of the Emperor Tiberius, and after the assumption of an
apparent body, began his preaching in the synagogue of Capernaum.[391]
This pronounced docetism which denies that Jesus was born, or subjected
to any human process of development,[392] is the strongest expression of
Marcion's abhorrence of the world. This aversion may have sprung from
the severe attitude of the early Christians toward the world, but the
inference which Marcion here draws, shews, that this feeling was, in his
case, united with the Greek estimate of spirit and matter. But Marcion's
docetism is all the more remarkable that, under Paul's guidance, he put
a high value on the fact of Christ's death upon the cross. Here also is
a glaring contradiction which his later disciples laboured to remove.
This much, however, is unmistakable, that Marcion succeeded in placing
the greatness and uniqueness of redemption through Christ in the
clearest light and in beholding this redemption in the person of Christ,
but chiefly in his death upon the cross.

5. Marcion's eschatology is also quite rudimentary. Yet be assumed with
Paul that violent attacks were yet in store for the Church of the good
God on the part of the Jewish Christ of the future, the Antichrist. He
does not seem to have taught a visible return of Christ, but, in spite
of the omnipotence and goodness of God, he did teach a twofold issue of
history. The idea of a deliverance of all men, which seems to follow
from his doctrine of boundless grace, was quite foreign to him. For this
very reason, he could not help actually making the good God the judge,
though in theory he rejected the idea, in order not to measure the will
and acts of God by a human standard. Along with the fundamental
proposition of Marcion, that God should be conceived only as goodness
and grace, we must take into account the strict asceticism which he
prescribed for the Christian communities, in order to see that that idea
of God was not obtained from antinomianism. We know of no Christian
community in the second century which insisted so strictly on
renunciation of the world as the Marcionites. No union of the sexes was
permitted