The prophets as thieves and robbers: John 10:8

[Giuseppe]

All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them.

(John 10:8)

This is the confirmation that the Gnostics hated the OT scriptures and their god, since the Prophets are called ''thieves and robbers''.

Note that according to Marcion, the Prophets were only just, not thieves and robbers:

. Salvation will be the attainment only of those souls which had learned his doctrine; while the body, as having been taken from the earth, is incapable of sharing in salvation. In addition to his blasphemy against God Himself, he advanced this also, truly speaking as with the mouth of the devil, and saying all things in direct opposition to the truth,--that Cain, and those like him, and the Sodomites, and the Egyptians, and others like them, and, in fine, all the nations who walked in all sorts of abomination, were saved by the Lord, on His descending into Hades, and on their running unto Him, and that they welcomed Him into their kingdom. But the serpent(3) which was in Marcion declared that Abel, and Enoch, and Noah, and those other righteous men who sprang(4) from the patriarch Abraham, with all the prophets, and those who were pleasing to God, did not partake in salvation. For since these men, he says, knew that their God was constantly tempting them, so now they suspected that He was tempting them, and did not run to Jesus, or believe His announcement: and for this reason he declared that their souls remained in Hades.

http://gnosis.org/library/advh1.htm

So Secret Alias has to explain: why was Marcion so moderate about the Prophets (calling them only ''those who were pleasing to God'') while the Gnostic author of Proto-John hated them so strongly?

[lsayre]

I thought that the Marcionites in general rejected the Gospel of John. Also, it is rare to see Marcion counted among the Gnostics, at least in this day and age.

[Giuseppe]

But this distinction of the marcionites from the Gnostics talks only in support of the precedence of the latter in comparison to Marcion.

As prof Price observed in "The Amazing Colossal Apostle", Marcion was paradoxically a proto-Catholic (!) insofar he was the first who started a Catholic way of "institutional" compromise between radical Christian gnosticism and Jewish Christian communities. So the Demiurge has to be neither Satan nor the highest god.