The myth of marcion as redactor: The evidence of "Marcion's" Gospel against an assumed marcionite redaction

Marcion's appeal to text, and the canonization process he advanced as part of his bid to define the Christian movement, must be accounted one of the key turning points of Christian history. In many comers of the tradition, it took quite a while for this development to catch on. When it did, the terms had been largely set already by Marcion. Even the Christian adoption of a fairly non-standard medium for text - the codex - appears around the time of Marcion's canonization project, and therefore it is worth pondering the role Marcion played in this development, since Marcion's canonical revolution depended upon binding together Paul's letters in a single, ordered volume, the Apostolikon. But most of all, Marcion's textual and canonical turn enabled a disembedding of Christian religious authority from an environment of traditional paradosis in which the assumptions of Jewish religious culture quite naturally prevailed.