Marcion of Sinope

A ship-owner from the Black Sea who arrived in Rome, endowed the church handsomely, and then proposed the sharpest scissors in Christian history: the God of the Hebrew Bible and the God Jesus spoke of are two different beings — the first just, jealous and world-making; the second stranger, higher, and previously unheard of. He built the first Christian canon by cutting: one gospel, ten letters, no Hebrew scriptures at all. His money was returned and he was expelled. Strictly he was not a Gnostic — no aeons, no spark-in-matter, no saving knowledge — but he is the reason the word "Gnostic" tends to arrive attached to the idea of a lesser creator, and the reason the church defined itself, in part, by keeping the Hebrew scriptures. The Kabbalah takes the exactly opposite road at this fork: it never splits the God of Genesis from the God beyond, it insists the severity and the mercy are two hands of one source — and it spends its whole literature on that insistence.