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Thus Hermas’s comparatively mild censures on Gnostic teachers in Sim. ix. suggest that the greater systems, like the Valentinian and Marcionite, had not yet made an impression there, as Harnack argues that they must have done by c.

Was there not Antioch, the great central see of busy, intellectual Syria, the see of St. Theophilus, wherein saintly bishops on the one hand, and Marcionite heresy and Paschal schism on the other, kept the traditions of the faith bright and polished?

The Marcionite churches did away with the public reading of the Law and the Prophets, and could only put in their place "Gospel" and "Apostle."

When Adimantius asked his Marcionite opponent, how he was a Christian who did not even bear that name, but was called from Marcion, he retorts, "And you are called from the Catholic Church, therefore ye are not Christians either;" Adimantius answers, "Did we profess man's name, you would have spoken to the point; but if we are called from being all over the world, what is there bad in this?"

In the same way Marcion, although he made unscrupulous alterations in Luke in order to prove that it was really Marcionite, obviously accepted it as a genuine work of the apostolic age.