The distinctive teaching of Marcion originated in a comparison of the Old Testament with the gospel of Christ and the theology of the apostle Paul. Its motive was not cosmological or metaphysical, but religious and historical. In the gospel he found a God revealed who is goodness and love, and who desires faith and love from men. This God he could not discover in the Old Testament; on the contrary, he saw there the revelation of a just, stern, jealous, wrathful and variable God, who requires from his servants blind obedience, fear and outward righteousness. Overpowered by the majesty and novelty of the Christian message of salvation, too conscientious to rest satisfied with the ordinary attempts at the solution of difficulties, while prevented by the limitations of his time from reaching an historical insight into the relation of Christianity to the Old Testament and to Judaism, he believed that he expressed Paul's view by the hypothesis of two Gods: the just God of the law (the God of the Jews, who is also the Creator of the world), and the good God, the Father of Jesus Christ. Paradoxes in the history of religion and revelation which Paul draws out, and which Marcion's contemporaries passed by as utterly incomprehensible, are here made the foundation of an ethico-dualistic conception of history and of religion. It may be said that in the 2nd century only one Christian--Marcion--took the trouble to understand Paul; but it must be added that he misunderstood him. The profound reflections of the apostle on the radical antithesis of law and gospel, works and faith, were not appreciated in the 2nd century. Marcion alone perceived their decisive religious importance, and with them confronted the legalizing, and in this sense judaizing, tendencies of his Christian contemporaries. But the Pauline ideas lost their truth under his treatment; for, when it is denied that the God of redemption is at the same time the almighty Lord of heaven and earth, the gospel is turned upside down.