Introduction: Marcion was one of the early heretics in Church history. He thought that the God of the OT was different to the God of the NT. He saw the God of the OT as one of law and anger, but the God of the NT as one of love and grace. He took a pair of scissors to the Bible and came up with a Bible that only had a butchered copy of Luke’s gospel and 10 of Paul’s letters. He could not see the unity of the OT with the NT, he could not see the compatibility of love and wrath, and so he created his own Canon. This instinct to attempt to divide and conquer the word of God is a recurring one and raises its head in various disguises in every generation. It comes in the form of uniformed prejudice from those who have never read the Bible who merely repeat the opinions they have heard, that the bible is just a disparate and jumbled collection of books written by men. The theory has popular versions like in Dan Brown conspiratorial The Da Vinci Code that claims that Constantine forced certain books of the Bible to be accepted and other rejected in order to control the religion that controlled the masses. And it can also come from people with PhDs in the form of what is called redaction criticism and form criticism. The assumption behind these views is that the various authors of the Bible where plagiarists who borrowed everything they said from their contexts and, that what they produced was not the work of the Spirit of God and inspiration but was merely a product of the times they lived in. Redaction criticism comes in very unbelieving forms saying that the gospels for example were...

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