Son of the Bishop of Pontus, Saint Marcion was born 85 A.D. in the city of Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in his early life commanded a large fleet of merchant ships.
Among his many achievements is the compilation of the first Christian bible in 144 A.D. which contained the Gospel of the Lord (the revelation received by the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus in 34 A.D.) and the original ten epistles. To achieve this, Marcion and his fleet retraced the routes of Paul's journeys throughout the Roman Empire and revisited all of the Pre-Nicene churches he established, collecting Paul's original Greek writings and letters which he transcribed and put into codex (book) format for the first time in 144 A.D.
This would be the first and only bible used by Christians until 382 A.D. when the (now) Roman Catholic Church would print its own version of a bible using edited portions of the first and adding various Hebrew Torah books - renaming them to the 'Old Testament.'
Although details of many of his accomplishments and achievements were suppressed and erased by a damnatio memoriae issued by Roman Emperor Constantine shortly after the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., biblical scholars and theologians recognize Saint Marcion as one of the most important fathers of early Christianity.
Shortly after gathering Paul's epistles and Gospel, Marcion compared our Christian God as revealed to us only through Jesus Christ with the barbaric carnal deity Yahweh portrayed in the 'Old Testament.' He came to the inescapable conclusion that these were not the same God and wrote a book detailing his comparisons and conclusions titled, 'Antithesis.' The book and its findings led to a schism among the early church leaders in which the two sides branded the other as heretics.
Marcion would go on to establish a church in 144 A.D. based on that first bible and it would become the largest Christian denomination in the Roman Empire at one point. As a result of the damnatio memoriae, there is no official accounting of St. Marcion's death but like so many Christians of his era he likely died a martyr under Judeo-Roman persecution.
His life and contributions are celebrated on the Holy Day of July 15th, the Ides of July, which reflect the date found in the old Marcionite phrase, "115 years and six and a half months between Christ and Marcion." This phrase is also quoted by Tertullian. It is the span of time beginning when Jesus descended to earth in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (29 A.D.) and the compilation of the first Christian bible in 144 A.D.
Now we know it as St. Marcion Day.
