The Old Testament he rejected into since it seemed to him, as it has seemed to many Christians since, to be talking of a quite different God: monstrous, evil-creating, bloody, the patron of ruffians like David. His textual analysis and the process by which he arrived at the first ‘canon’, thus had a unity: the breach with Judaism, initiated by Paul, had to be complete, and Christian texts with Judaizing tendencies or compromises expurgated or scrapped. No book of Marcion's has survived. He quarreled with the Roman Christian authorities in AD 144 and went east. Later he was denounced as a heretic by Tertullian, earliest and noisiest of the Christian witchhunters. This means his works have not survived, except in extracts quoted in books attacking him. Preservation of an ancient author required positive effort over a long period. Early Christian writings were produced in very small quantities on highly perishable papyrus. Unless they were constantly re-transcribed they did not survive at all. There was no need of a censor, unless a heresiarch had followers over successive generations to keep his work alive. So we do not know the details of Marcion' s system. His God was the Pauline God of love. He rejected fear as a force God would employ to compel obedience. This reliance on love alone as the mechanism underpinning ethics was the main burden of Tertullian's complaint against Marcion and his sympathizers. For them, he sneered, ‘God is purely and simply good. He indeed forbids all sin, but only in word. . . for your fear he does not want. . . they have no fear of their God at all. They say it is only an evil being who will be feared, a good one will be loved. Foolish Man! Do you say that he whom you call Lord ought not to be feared, whilst the very title you give him indicates a power which must be feared?’ Without fear, men would ‘boil over into lust,’ frequent games, circuses, theatres - all forbidden to Christians - and submit instantly to persecution. Marcion's controversy with Tertullian gives us a glimpse, perhaps for the first time, of two basic types of Christian: the rational optimist who believes that the love-principle is sufficient, man having an essential desire to do good, and the pessimist, convinced of the essential corruptibility of human creatures and the need for the mechanism of damnation. Successful Christianity is essentially a coalition of views and spiritualities: it needs to contain both types even when they produce a certain conflict and friction. In this case it was unable to accommodate either, at any rate in Rome. Rome was universalist and Marcion's ruthless pruning of the Christian texts would have narrowed the limits of its appeal. And then, he did not believe in marriage, believing that procreation was an invention of the evil Old Testament God - or so Tertullian reported. Marcion was a flawed character: his biblical exegesis reveals a superlative mind, his doctrine of Pauline charity an admirable character, but his views on sex set him down as an eccentric. They were compatible with belief in an imminent parousia but by the 140s the Church had settled down to the long haul, and procreation had to be carried on. Marcion's departure was a heavy financial blow to the Rome Church and his money enabled him to attract a huge following in the east. But belief in celibacy necessarily proves fatal to a heretical movement. Tertullian and Marcion never met: they were of quite different generations and Tertullian was attacking an attitude of mind rather than a real personality. Both had powerful intellects. Tertullian, in addition, was a master of prose, the prose of the rhetorician and the controversialist. He was at home in both Latin and Greek but he usually employed Latin - the first Christian theologian to do so. His influence, indeed, was enormous precisely because he created ecclesiastical Latinity, hammered out its linguistic concepts and formulations and, thanks to his eloquence, endowed it with unforgettable and influential phrases: ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’ ; 'The unity of the heretics is schism’: 'I believe because it is absurd.' The last indicates the distance which separates him from the rationalist Marcion. Tertullian came from Carthage where, even in the closing decades of the second century, a distinctive regional Church had emerged: enthusiastic, immensely courageous, utterly defiant of the secular authorities, much persecuted, narrow-minded, intolerant, venomous and indeed violent in controversy. There is some 27