(died AD 160?), Christian heretic and founder of a sect bearing his name, born at Sinope on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey; his father, probably a bishop, excommunicated him from the church; settled in Rome, where he gathered a following; expelled from Rome AD 144 and founded his own sect; claimed that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures could not be the God of the New Testament; he became an ascetic, renouncing marriage; opposed legalism of Judaism; his major writing, ‘Antitheses', has been lost; Marcionite groups lasted until the 5th c. before dying out.