Caleb on Nostr: The “Church Fathers” who trash Marcion weren’t neutral historians — they were ...

The “Church Fathers” who trash Marcion weren’t neutral historians — they were later polemicists writing decades (sometimes over a century) after the earliest sources.

Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius and the rest had their own agendas such as building institutional power, defining orthodoxy, and smearing rivals. Their accounts of Marcion are full of distortion, exaggeration and outright invention.

Many of these same Fathers had serious issues themselves — theological backflips, poor historical accuracy, and in some cases their own later “heresies.”

If you actually want to understand early Christianity, stop treating the victors’ propaganda as reliable history. Go back to the earliest Gospel layer we can reconstruct. The picture looks very different.