A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes--Marcion.[377] He saw in Paul’s creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ--namely, the _Jewish_ canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century--but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real “conspiracy against the truth” and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded--Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[378] Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the “Just” _and therefore the Evil_: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil creation is the “alien”--that is, the good Principle.[379] The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithradatic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated. But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The “Law and Prophets” which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom was the _Bible of the Jewish God_, and in fact it had just been given final shape as such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil’s book that the Christian had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the Redeemer-God--likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had hitherto been current in the community[380] as simple edification-books without canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the--_one and true_--Gospel, which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, corrupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the Epistles of the _one prophet of Jesus_, who was Paul.