JPCS Special Issue 2026

For two hundred years, the only Christianity that could legally exist inside the walls of Jerusalem was a faith that rejected the Old Testament, worshipped a God completely separate from Yahweh, and used a Bible without a single Jewish scripture. This isn't speculation - it's a structural consequence of Hadrian's ban on Judaism after the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 135, which made possessing the Torah a capital offense within Aelia Capitolina, the pagan city built on Jerusalem's ruins.

In this paper, A.W. Mitchell traces the untold story of Marcus, the first Gentile bishop of Jerusalem, who held the mother church's treasury and commissioned Marcion of Sinope as his personal emissary to Rome - armed with 200,000 sesterces and the unalloyed gospel of Paul. When Rome rejected the embassy and returned the money, the Yahwist temple-church alliance launched the greatest textual cover-up in Western history, erasing the true apostolic succession and replacing it with phantom bishops whose names appear in no records except Eusebius' carefully managed list. The forensic scars of that erasure - from Hegesippus' truncated succession to Epiphanius' conspicuous refusal to name Jerusalem - are still legible in the texts that survived.

Special Issue DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20481484 Vol. 2 Iss. 7

Listen to a panel discussion of the paper: https://rss.com/podcasts/marcionite-church/2878560/

Read the full paper: https://journal.pre-nicene.org/Special-Issue-2026

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