Conclusions
The analysis of Marcion's Gospel of the Lord (Mcg) in this website begins by looking at Marcion (the person) himself in Who Was Marcion?, then continues with:
A detailed analysis of the content of Mcg in Marcion’s Gospel, Compared Verse by Verse With Luke;
A side-by-side listing of Mcg and Luke in the Marcion Luke Parallel;
An overall look at the comments of Tertullian and Epiphanius in the Summary.
For more detail on the issues mentioned below in the conclusions, see:
Different Copies of Luke? - Why do Tertullian and Epiphanius differ so much in their comparisons of Mcg with Luke?
The Text of Epiphanius' Copy of Luke - How much of Epiphanius' copy of Luke can be determined from his comments on Mcg?
The Text of Tertullian's Copy of Luke - How much of Tertullian's copy of Luke can be determined from both his and Epiphanius' comments?
In addition, to see how Marcion may impact the Synoptic Problem see Marcion's Gospel and the Synoptic Problem.
Conclusions
The ‘majority view’ of Marcion is that he created his Evangelion (his ‘Gospel of the Lord’) by editing Luke, and his Apostolikon by editing ten of the Pauline epistles (see Marcion's Apostolicon: The Pauline Epistles), in order to ‘promote’ and support his theology. It is assumed that he rejected (i.e. by a positive act on his behalf) all other books of the Bible although there is no evidence that, for example, he even knew of the remaining Pauline or other epistles. Despite the strong condemnation of Marcion by Tertullian, Epiphanius, and many others who regarded him as a heretic who rejected the Old Testament and manipulated the New Testament to his own ends, what evidence there is of the text (as opposed to mere opinion) can just as readily support the view that Marcion tried to promote an earlier form of Christianity, at a time when the power of the ‘orthodox’ Church was growing to the point where it was able to wage war against believers who did not follow the ‘party line,’ by labeling them as heretics of one kind or another.
It requires no stretch of the imagination to believe that in the 100 or so years following Jesus’ death Christianity would develop along different lines in different areas. Indeed, we know from the Bible itself that this was the case quite early on, and, given the geography of the eastern Mediterranean region, it would be very strange if it had not. For example, Paul clearly disagreed with James, as he did with some of the apostles (see Galatians), and he takes pains in his epistles to ‘correct’ the teachings being spread by others. This fragmentation would have continued until such time as one Christian sect became large enough or powerful enough to begin ‘correcting’ or ‘suppressing’ the others, and from what information we have it seems that the Marcionite form of Christianity was perhaps the largest thorn in the side of this sect, and so subject to the strongest condemnation by what became the Roman Catholic Church.
From this beginning, how did it come to be that the prevailing view was that Marcion himself edited Luke? Marcion certainly didn't claim authorship, as Cassels indicates:
The testimony of Marcion does not throw any light upon the authorship or origin of the Gospel of which he made use. Its superscription was simply "The Gospel," or "The Gospel of the Lord" (to euangelion, or euangelion tou Kuriou), and no author's name was attached to it. The Heresiarch did not pretend to have written it himself, nor did he ascribe it to any other person.
In Adv. Marcion IV Tertullian himself confirms Cassels' point:
Marcion, on the other hand, you must know, ascribes no author to his Gospel, as if it could not be allowed him to affix a title to that from which it was no crime (in his eyes) to subvert the very body. And here I might now make a stand, and contend that a work ought not to be recognised, which holds not its head erect, which exhibits no consistency, which gives no promise of credibility from the fulness [sic] of its title and the just profession of its author.
If even Tertullian agrees that Marcion did not claim authorship of the gospel ascribed to him, and in fact did not identify anyone as author, then why did Tertullian assume that Marcion himself wrote it? The mere fact that Mcg had no named author appears to have prejudiced Tertullian against it right from the start, and so Tertullian (with apparently no evidence to go on other than his opinion of Marcion) decided that: “Marcion seems to have singled out Luke for his mutilating process.” Tertullian then analyses and comments on the text of the gospel with this "mutilating process" clearly in mind, despite the difficulties this later gives him when trying to explain the 'edits' that go against Marcion's supposed agenda. It is quite likely that in this belief Tertullian was influenced by Irenaeus, who preceded Tertullian and believed that that there were (and could only be) four gospels, writing:
... But Marcion, mutilating that according to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God, from those [passages] which he still retains.
There are four gospels and only four, neither more nor less: four like the points of the compass, four like the chief directions of the wind. The Church, spread all over the world, has in the gospels four pillars and four winds blowing wherever people live. These four gospels are in actual fact one single Gospel, a fourfold Gospel inspired by the one Spirit, a Gospel which has four aspects representing the work of the Son of God. (Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 11)
From this dubious beginning others followed Tertullian's lead, and consequently the opinions of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius, et al. as to the character, motivation, etc. of Marcion should be taken with a very large pinch of salt, and instead, we must rely on whatever factual information we can extract from reviews of Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord and Apostolikon.
Perhaps the most well known attribute of Mcg is that it was significantly shorter than canonical Luke, and most people who have pronounced on the matter agree that the difference was approximately 25%. However, in most cases this is where the comparisons stop, with very little, if any, attempt to identify which parts of Luke were either present or not present in Mcg. Tertullian states that Mcg began with what we see as Lk 3:1a followed by Lk 4:31a:
"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius (for such is Marcion’s proposition) he 'came down to the Galilean city of Capernaum'"
Surprisingly few point out that just this one small piece of information tells us that the first 11.5% of Luke was not present in Mcg. Both Tertullian and Epiphanius then tell us that most of Luke 3-4 did not exist in Mcg, but again, it is not often pointed out that from this we know that nearly two-thirds of the text of Luke that was not present in Mcg was concentrated in the first four chapters of Luke, with the remaining one-third of the 'missing' text spread across the other twenty chapters.
However, this is still only a small part of the story. Assuming that we believe the comments of Tertullian and Epiphanius (and we have no apriori reason not to), then their differences tell us that this was either because their copies of Luke were significantly different (which appears unlikely) or that they were commenting on different aspects of the text of Mcg. Tertullian’s comments are almost all regarding differences in text found in Luke 1-4, while Epiphanius noted not only these but many other small differences between Mcg and the rest of the text we see as unique to Luke (Sondergut Luke) that Tertullian did not mention (see Epiphanius: Omissions After Lk 5:13 and Epiphanius: Differences After Lk 5:13). In total Mcg was approximately 190 verses shorter than Luke.
However, Mcg was not simply a 'cut down' version of Luke. The impression we get from most people who comment on Marcion is that he went through the whole of what we know as Luke and removed everything that went against his theology, and, more specifically, his Christology. This view is based on the view of the motivation of Marcion from people who branded him as a heretic, but nevertheless were able to refute him many times over from words of Luke left in his gospel that (they assume) he failed to remove, and not from the words of Luke that were not present (or supposedly not present) in Mcg.
For example, Epiphanius wrote 78 scholia, in each of which he commented on text in Mcg, and in only 25 of these did he specifically identify portions of text that he saw in Luke that were not in Mcg. There are 12 more scholia in which he comments on differences between the two, while in the rest (the majority) he saw the same text in Mcg as in Luke, but deduces that by leaving this text unchanged Marcion had destroyed his own position, for example as in Scholion and Elenchus 78:
Scholion 78. “Why are ye troubled? Behold my hands and my feet, for a spirit hath not bones as ye see me have.”
(a) Elenchus 78. Who can fail to laugh at the driveler who has foolishly dragged himself and the souls of others down to hell? If he had not acknowledged these words his imposture would be plausible, and his dupes would be pardonable.
(b) But now, since he acknowledged these texts and did not take them out, and his followers read them too, his sin and theirs remains and the fire is inescapable for him and them, since they have no excuse. For the Savior has clearly taught that <even after> his resurrection he has bones and flesh, as he testified himself with the words, “as ye see me have.”
Epiphanius closes his comparison of Mcg and Luke with this statement:
This is the publication of the treatise against Marcion based on the remains of the Gospel he preserves, which I have composed on his account and which, in my opinion, is adequate to expose his deceit.
Tertullian has similar comments on pieces of text, many the same as those reported by Epiphanius, that Marcion (according to them) did not remove, to the great detriment of their own arguments. For example, Tertullian also comments on v. 24:39 as he saw it in Mcg. Although he saw the same text as Epiphanius, he has to twist those words to suggest that Marcion really meant the opposite, a meaning for which there is no evidence:
Thus, in the passage before us, he would have the words, "A spirit hath not bones, as ye see me have," so transposed, as to mean, "A spirit, such as ye see me to be, hath not bones;" that is to say, it is not the nature of a spirit to have bones. But what need of so tortuous a construction, when He might have simply said, "A spirit hath not bones, even as you observe that I have not?"
Like Epiphanius, Tertullian concludes by stating that Marcion has failed in his task (a task which, it should be noted, Marcion did not claim he was undertaking) of promoting a gospel to support his theology. However, it is important to note that, unlike Epiphanius, Tertullian makes no claim suggesting he was commenting on all of Mcg. Instead, at the end of Chapter 6 of Adv Marcion, Book IV (immediately prior to commenting on Mcg), he writes:
Hence will arise also our rule, by which we determine that there ought to be nothing in common between the Christ of the rival god and the Creator; but that (Christ) must be pronounced to belong to the Creator, if He has administered His dispensations, fulfilled His prophecies, promoted His laws, given reality to His promises, revived His mighty power, remoulded His determinations expressed His attributes, His properties. This law and this rule I earnestly request the reader to have ever in his mind, and so let him begin to investigate whether Christ be Marcion’s or the Creator's.
Here Tertullian points out that his interest is in determining whether or not Christ in Mcg is the same as his Christ, or not. Consequently, he has no interest in commenting on text in Mcg that does not directly involve Jesus, and hence we should not expect him to comment on the presence or absence in Mcg of text that simply 'moves the action from one scene to another,' nor to directly refer to the actions of or quote others, but instead to provide just enough background to 'set the scene' for actions or speech by Jesus himself. Then, as his parting shot at the end of Adv Marcion IV, he sums up what he has just presented:
I have, I think, fulfilled my promise. I have set before you Jesus as the Christ of the prophets in his doctrines, his judgements, his affections, his feelings, his miracles, his sufferings, as also in his resurrection, none other than the Christ of the Creator. And so again, when sending forth his apostles to preach to all the nations, he fulfilled the psalm by his instruction that their sound must go out into all the world and their words unto the ends of the earth. I am sorry for you, Marcion: your labour has been in vain. Even in your gospel Christ Jesus is mine.
However, although Tertullian appears to find no difference between Marcion's Jesus and the Jesus portrayed in Luke, it appears that it was not enough for him to point out all the places in Mcg that supposedly refuted Marcion's own theology or Christology, or that Marcion had simply failed in his supposed task. Instead, he also supplies an extraordinary explanation as to why Marcion (on the assumption that he had edited Luke) left so many pieces of text in his gospel that refuted his own theology. Tertullian wrote:
Now Marcion was unwilling to expunge from his Gospel some statements which even made against him – I suspect, on purpose, to have it in his power from the passages which he did not suppress, when he could have done so, either to deny that he had expunged anything, or else to justify his suppressions, if he made any.
In other words, Marcion deliberately did a ‘bad job’ so that he could claim that he was not the one who created the differences between Mcg and Luke! As both Tertullian and Epiphanius find so many ‘mistakes’ in Marcion’s editing, it seems strange that they did not consider that their initial assumption (that Marcion had edited what they saw as Luke) might have been wrong, and instead that Mcg might have actually been (or at least been based on) an earlier version of what we now see as Luke. There is no hint in Epiphanius’ writings that he might have even considered this possibility, and instead he states:
But I shall come to his writings, or rather, to his tamperings. This man has only Luke as a Gospel, mutilated at the beginning because of the Savior’s conception and his incarnation. But this person who harmed himself <rather> than the Gospel did not cut just the beginning off. He also cut off many words of the truth both at the end and in the middle, and he has added other things besides, beyond what had been written. And he uses only this (Gospel) canon, the Gospel according to Luke.
Not only does Epiphanius not see anything other than Mcg being a ‘mutilated’ version of Luke, but he gives no hint that Luke itself shows signs that at some point it was shorter than he (Epiphanius) saw it, in particular that what became Luke may have once begun at v. 3:1. It is possible that here Epiphanius was following the lead of Tertullian, who certainly believed that Luke had remained ‘untouched’ until Marcion edited it:
For if the (Gospels) of the apostles have come down to us in their integrity, whilst Luke’s, which is received amongst us, so far accords with their rule as to be on a par with them in permanency of reception in the churches, it clearly follows that Luke’s Gospel also has come down to us in like integrity until the sacrilegious treatment of Marcion.
Of course, we should perhaps not be surprised if Tertullian and Epiphanius could not conceive of the idea that any of the gospels had gone through some kind of developmental process, and that some at least had existed in more than version, as this is still the view of the majority of Christians. However, even if Tertullian and Epiphanius could not admit to this possibility, it is very odd that they fail to see the much greater similarity between Mcg and Mark than between Mcg and Luke, and that from a synoptic point of view the text of Mcg fits more neatly before both Matthew and Luke (see Marcion's Gospel and the Synoptic Problem for details), and instead they only compare it to Luke.
Both Tertullian and Epiphanius seem to go to great lengths to avoid drawing the very clear logical conclusion that one gets when directly comparing Mcg with Luke. If Mcg was created by Marcion editing canonical Luke, then it is clear that his ‘editing’ was very strange indeed, as close to two-thirds of the text he supposedly omitted is concentrated in the first four chapters of Luke (of which only 10% was present in Mcg). If Marcion had intended to remove from Luke everything that went against him (a task at which both Tertullian and Epiphanius state on multiple occasions that he had failed badly) then he apparently almost gave up after having completed less than one-fifth of the editing task he had presumably set himself.
It is just possible to imagine Marcion making such a bad editing job under extreme circumstances, and it has been suggested that similar (but less extreme) examples of the 'tailing off' of a writer's edits to a pre-existing work exist in the synoptics. Mark Goodacre coined the term "Editorial fatigue" to describe such behavior:
Editorial fatigue is a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another's work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout. Like continuity errors in film and television, examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. They are interesting because they can betray an author's hand, most particularly in revealing to us the identity of his sources.
However, "small errors of detail" cannot begin to describe the failure of Marcion to complete his supposed task, and so we need seek some other explanation for this phenomenon. As noted at the beginning of this analysis, Tyson wrote the following:
But Irenaeus knew his own times better than he knew those of formative Marcionism. Indeed it is the challenge of Marcionism and other heresies that led Irenaeus to his convictions about the need for a definite church structure and canon. But Marcion himself must have lived at a more fluid time. Walter Bauer has convincingly shown that the early part of the second century was a time of great diversity in terms of Christian thought and practice. He observed that heterodoxy probably preceded orthodoxy in many locations and that, particularly in the East, Marcionism, or something closely resembling it, was the original form of Christianity.
Despite the belief of both Tertullian and Epiphanius that Marcion 'corrupted’ Luke to support his theology, the evidence that in large part they themselves provide strongly suggests that Marcion found much, if not all, of his gospel in an existing document already in the form described by his detractors (and the same applies to Marcion's Apostolicon: The Pauline Epistles). Consequently, when all the textual evidence is taken into account, it is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that Marcion did not craft his gospel to suit his theology, but, as some scholars have suggested, he crafted his theology around an existing document, one that did not include much of the additional non-Markan text found in canonical Luke, and perhaps, as suggested by Klinghardt, provides all the explanatory power of (and so could take the place of) ‘Q’ in the synoptic problem. However, where that document came from, how it was created, and how Marcion got access to it, is another matter entirely. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that it did happen.