51�Թ�

Christianity did not begin to decide which books would become the Bible until a century after Jesus Christ’s death when Marcion, a Christian leader, wanted the Bible to include just Luke’s gospel and Paul’s letters.

A fourth, newly arrived from some place where Tertullian had never been heard of, would appear with a bulky set of volumina, which Origen would find to his great disgust to be the New Testament "according to Marcion."

Marcion's exclusion of the three Pastorals had been forgotten.

It had thrown off as heretical upon the extreme left Marcion and the Gnostics, who either repudiated the Jewish scriptures altogether, or interpreted them with more than Pauline freedom.

Even Marcion himself looked to the past, however recent, as the source of light, and since some written standard must be found, it was he, the heretic, who gave to Christianity its first canon of Christian writings.