Marcion's Gospel Today

Previous Page: Tertullian and Epiphanius

In 2015, in ‘Marcion’s Gospel and the Beginnings of Early Christianity,’ Markus Vinzent wrote:

… why has Marcion’s Gospel remained obscure for such a long time? If I am not mistaken, it is due not to the fact that this Gospel is more diffcult to unearth from its sources as has been done with other Gospels, but it is due to the negative judgement of scholars about its non-originality, its plagiarising character and, perhaps even more impacting, because of the label ‘heretic’ that Marcion was given in later times.49 In rejecting the critical appreciation of Marcion’s Gospel during the enlightenment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, most scholars (including D. Roth) based their views on Irenaeus of Lyon’s anti-Marcionite claims that Marcion did not write his own text, but made use of the existing Gospel of Luke which he only circumcised…

According to Irenaeus, whom Tertullian follows, Marcion used Luke together with Paul’s letters and corrected both on the basis of his theology… When in 1921, the over 70 year old and highly respected Adolf von Harnack published his last big monograph, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, he rejected any criticism of Irenaeus’ judgement: “That the Gospel of Marcion is nothing else than what the primitive church judged it to be, namely a falsified Luke, there is no need to spend one word on it.” Harnack closed the vital debate of the 18th and 19th centuries and provided the Patristic basis that cemented New Testament Studies.

The most common view regarding the origin of Marcion’s Gospel of the Lord (Mcg) is that aMarcion himself created it, sometime around 140 AD, by cutting out of canonical Luke those parts that went against his theology. However, with aMarcion’s theology in mind, many reconstructions of Mcg cut out more text than is warranted by a strict interpretation of the statements of Tertullian and Epiphanius regarding Mcg. It is true that where at least one of them comments on a passage it is generally possible to determine with a reasonable degree of accuracy whether or not the passage (possibly with variants not currently seen in Luke) is present in Mcg. However, if it is thought that a passage went against aMarcion’s belief system, but neither Tertullian nor Epiphanius mention it in any way, it is not uncommon for a reconstruction to omit the text, even though the only thing supporting the belief that the text was actually missing from Mcg is the lack of any evidence to the contrary.

Of course, an omission on such grounds is only supportable if we already know that Mcg was created by aMarcion editing canonical Luke, and the evidence for this cannot be found in the opinions of those who regarded Marcion as a heretic. Hence, before determining what aMarcion may or may not have done, it is important to know as much as possible regarding the content of Mcg itself, from descriptions of WHAT the content was, while ignoring any opinions as to WHY it came to be that way. Unfortunately, some previous studies of Mcg have taken as read ‘facts’ that are not actually in evidence. For example, in the summary of ‘The Foreign God and the Sudden Christ,' Peter Head writes:

This article seeks to establish the extent to which Marcion's Christology influenced the formation of his gospel canon, the Euaggelion. Marcion's Christology, as seen in statements preserved in Irenaeus, Tertullian and Epiphanius, has features that can be described as both docetic and modalist. These christological beliefs effect Marcion's redaction of the Pauline epistles and his omission of material from Luke's Gospel. In particular the omission of the birth narratives and notices relating to the humanity of Jesus suggest the appropriateness of Tertullian's slogan: 'the sudden Christ.'

Here Head assumes that aMarcion’s Christology preceded his gospel, and his article is predicated on this assumption. However, we have no direct evidence that this was the case, and therefore any examination of Mcg must allow for the opposite position: that aMarcion’s Christology was based on pre-existing documents that differed significantly from those in our current Christian canon.

It is important to note that neither Tertullian nor Epiphanius supply any evidence that aMarcion actually created 'his' gospel by editing canonical Luke. Instead, they assume it, based on what he wrote in his Antithesis, the changes they believe he made to the Pauline epistles, and their beliefs regarding the origins of the other gospels. Tertullian writes:

Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instil faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards. These all start with the same principles of the faith, so far as [it] relates to the one only God the Creator and His Christ, how that He was born of the Virgin, and came to fulfil the law and the prophets. Never mind if there does occur some variation in the order of their narratives, provided that there be agreement in the essential matter of the faith, in which there is disagreement with Marcion.

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 fullness of its title and the just profession of its author.

The fact that Mcg has no title, and that aMarcion “ascribes no author” to it, seems to weigh heavily with Tertullian. Even more so does his test of time:

I say that my Gospel is the true one; Marcion, that his is. I affirm that Marcion’s Gospel is adulterated; Marcion, that mine is. Now what is to settle the point for us, except it be that principle of time, which rules that the authority lies with that which shall be found to be more ancient; and assumes as an elemental truth, that corruption (of doctrine) belongs to the side which shall be convicted of comparative lateness in its origin.

In other words, Tertullian’s position is simply that Mcg is later than the text he knows as Luke, therefore it is the one that is ‘corrupt.’ However, although Mcg certainly made its public entrance later than Luke (noting that this may not have been what we know as canonical Luke), this does not prevent it having been created from something that lay gathering dust somewhere for many years prior to it having come to aMarcion’s attention, much as many early biblical mss lay undiscovered for many centuries before they came to our attention. This, essentially, is all the evidence presented by Tertullian, and in reality amounts to nothing more than Tertullian’s belief in the primacy of the four canonical gospels. Consequently, the only evidence we can rely on is the content of Mcg itself. After having discussed the sources for the view that Marcion edited Luke, Cassels summaries the evidence of the fathers:

The charge of mutilating and interpolating the Gospel of Luke is first brought against Marcion by Irenaeus, and it is repeated with still greater vehemence and fulness by Tertullian and Epiphanius; but the mere assertion by Fathers at the end of the second and in the third centuries, that a Gospel different from their own was one of the canonical Gospels falsified and mutilated, can have no weight in itself in the inquiry as to the real nature of that work. Their arbitrary assumption of exclusive originality and priority for the four Gospels of the Church led them, without any attempt at argument, to treat every other evangelical work as an offshoot or falsification of these. The arguments by which Tertullian endeavours to establish that the Gospels of Luke and the other canonical Evangelists were more ancient than that of Marcion show that he had no idea of historical or critical evidence. We are, however, driven back upon such actual data regarding the text and contents of Marcion's Gospel as are given by the Fathers, as the only basis, in the absence of the Gospel itself, upon which any hypothesis as to its real character can be built. The question therefore is: Are these data sufficiently ample and trustworthy for a decisive judgment from internal evidence -- if, indeed, internal evidence in such a case can be decisive at all.

Despite the common opinion that aMarcion created his gospel by editing canonical Luke, one of the strongest points that can be made against this view is that if so, then he appears to have made a remarkably bad job of creating a gospel to support his position. In comparison with canonical Luke, the text of Mcg (as typically accepted):

• Omits much that in no way contradicts Marcion’s views (and in places would have supported it);

• Includes much from Luke that goes against his views; and

• Very unusually for a document of this type, does not contain any additional material supporting Marcion’s theology.

In other words, although many people believe that Marcion edited Luke in order to create a gospel that supported his position, the really remarkable fact is that Mcg is so bad at supporting Marcion. Klinghardt agrees, putting it this way:

The main argument against the traditional view of Luke’s priority to Mcn [Marcion] relies on the lack of consequence of his redaction: Marcion presumably had theological reasons for the alterations in “his” gospel which implies that he pursued an editorial concept. This, however, cannot be detected. On the contrary, all the major ancient sources give an account of Marcion’s text, because they specifically intend to refute him on the ground of his own gospel.”

As a result, Tertullian (for example) was able to refute Marcion simply by using the words still in Mcg, and at the end of Adv. Marcion, Book IV write:

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. But he spares only such passages as he can subvert quite as well by explaining them away as by expunging them from the text … Marcion, I pity you; your labor has been in vain. For the Jesus Christ who appears in your Gospel is mine.

In other words, the gospel that Marcion supposedly used and promoted actually provides very poor support for his position, and in many places (gleefully pointed out by both Tertullian and Epiphanius) contradicts it. In particular, Tertullian points out that the actions and speech of Jesus Christ in Mcg are identical with those in Luke, i.e. that Christ in Mcg cannot be the son of the God of the New Testament as supposedly aMarcion believed. Lardner concurs, describing the differences between Marcion and Luke as follows:

Upon an impartial review of these alterations some appear to be trifling, others may arise from the various readings of different copies; but many of them are undoubtedly designed perversions, intended to countenance, or at least not directly contradict, those absurd principles which he and his followers espoused. There were however a sufficient number of passages left by them in their copies, as appears from the refutation of their doctrine by Epiphanius, to establish the reality of the flesh and blood of Christ, and to prove that the God of the Jews was his Father, and a being of consummate goodness. Tertullian indeed observes, that 'Marcion did purposely avoid erasing all those passages which made against him, that he might, with the greater confidence, deny his having erased any, or at least that what he had omitted was for very good reasons’.

Cassels points out that although the comments of Tertullian and Epiphanius are sufficient to show that Mcg does a very poor job of actually supporting Marcion, attempts at using those same comments to reconstruct the actual text of Mcg had had, at best, limited success:

We have said enough, we trust, to show that the sources for the reconstruction of a text of Marcion's Gospel are most unsatisfactory, and no one who attentively studies the analysis of Hahn, Ritschl, Volkmar, Hilgenfeld, and others, who have examined and systematised the data of the Fathers, can fail to be struck by the uncertainty which prevails throughout, the almost continuous vagueness and consequent opening, nay, necessity, for conjecture, and the absence of really sure indications.

The Fathers had no intention of showing what Marcion's text actually was, and, their object being solely dogmatic and not critical, their statements are very insufficient for the purpose. The materials have had to be ingeniously collected and sifted from polemical writings whose authors, so far from professing to furnish them, were only bent upon seeking in Marcion's Gospel such points as could legitimately, or by sophistical skill, be used against him.

Passing observations, general remarks, as well as direct statements, have too often been the only indications guiding the patient explorers, and in the absence of certain information the silence of the angry Fathers has been made the basis for important conclusions. It is evident that not only is such a procedure necessarily uncertain and insecure, but that it rests upon assumptions with regard to the intelligence, care, and accuracy of Tertullian and Epiphanius, which are not sufficiently justified by that part of their treatment of Marcion's text which we can examine and appreciate.

And when all these doubtful landmarks have failed, too many passages have been left to the mere judgment of critics, as to whether they were too opposed to Marcion's system to have been retained by him, or too favourable to have been omitted. The reconstructed texts, as might be expected, differ from each other, and one Editor finds the results of his predecessors incomplete or unsatisfactory, although naturally, at each successive attempt, the materials previously collected and adopted have contributed to an apparently more complete result.

From what has come before, it might be said that all I have achieved with this analysis is to present yet another dubious reconstruction of the text of Mcg, without adding anything significant to the discussion regarding the relative priority of canonical Luke and Mcg (For a more detailed history of the changing status of the discussion, see Chapter 2, History of Research, in The Text of Marcion’s Gospel, by Dieter T. Roth). Luckily, since Cassels time many additional important mss have been found and analyzed, which has greatly increased the confidence we have in many of the readings given by Epiphanius and also, in some cases, Tertullian. As a result, this verse-by-verse analysis has in fact provided a lot of background information that can be used to answer a number of questions about or relating to Mcg, for example:

• What were the differences between the texts of Luke seen by Tertullian and Epiphanius?

• What ms support is there for the readings in Mcg reported by Tertullian and Epiphanius?

• What can we say about Mcg in places where both Tertullian and Epiphanius are silent?

• Did Marcion or someone else create the gospel attributed to Marcion (Mcg)?

With regard to the first point, we are in a better position now to answer this question than the majority of people who have previously attempted to reconstruct Mcg. As a result of the discovery of P75 in 1952, and (to a lesser extent) P45 in 1930, we have direct evidence of the early existence in Luke of a number of passages that some (notably P. C. Sense) had previously suggested were not in Epiphanius’ copy of Luke, and consequently had felt free to assume were also not in Mcg. As it is, these early mss now leave little doubt that Epiphanius saw in his copy of Luke text that is very similar to what we see in canonical Luke, with the result that we now have no reason to exclude from Mcg several passages that in the 19th and early 20th centuries were commonly assumed to have been removed from Luke when Marcion wrote 'his' gospel..

Despite this, short of finding an actual ms of Mcg we are never going to be completely certain of its content. Careful analysis of the writings of Tertullian, Epiphanius and others can get us a long way towards re-constructing the text, but there will always be room for interpretation. However, if there is one thing that can be said with certainty about Mcg it is that it was shorter than canonical Luke. Some of the Lukan verses have shorter variants in Mcg, sometimes individual verses are not present in Mcg, and sometimes multiple verses in Luke correspond to a single verse in Mcg. In contrast, and rather oddly, Mcg contains almost nothing that is not also in canonical Luke. Overall, Mcg is about 25% shorter than Luke.

So, what is the relationship between Mcg and Luke? There is no doubt in this author's mind that if we did not know about Marcion, and a substantially complete copy of Mcg were found today (with evidence that it was a genuine ancient ms), it would be regarded as at least a very close relative of Luke, it not a version of Luke itself. It exhibits a clear literary relationship with all the synoptic gospels, and, although shorter, the text (as far as we know it) is so close to that of the longer Luke that it is highly unlikely that it would be mistaken for a variant of either Mark or Matthew, or a fourth synoptic gospel. The question would then arise as to its exact relationship with Luke. With no information to go on other than the text itself, we would have to decide if it was a later edited version of canonical Luke, an earlier version of Luke, or whether both canonical Luke and the new text were based on something earlier, and otherwise unknown. Even without any detailed analysis, the length alone would probably lead us to suspect that the new text was earlier than canonical Luke, but clearly we would need much more than this to be sure.

Although we do not have the exact text of Mcg we do nevertheless have enough to be able to pose the same questions regarding it as if we did. Also, unlike the hypothetical situation described above, we have additional information in that we know the person (Marcion) associated with the text, and the generally very biased view of him, based largely on the opinions of the two people who can tell us most about the actual text: Tertullian and Epiphanius. Unfortunately, their ‘establishment’ position of him as a heretic (Definition: someone who does or believes things that oppose the official principles of a religion) has led many people to prejudge Mcg as a corrupted version of Luke, and to analyze the relationship between the two with that preconception in mind.

We do not have definitive evidence to show us whether Mcg was a ‘cut down’ version of canonical Luke, whether it was created from an early and shorter version of what later became canonical Luke, or perhaps is an expanded version of Mark. The traditional belief is that Marcion removed text from Luke to support his theology, and this is certainly the view of Tertullian and Epiphanius. However, it should be remembered that ‘correlation is not causation,’ and in this instance just because the omissions in Mcg when compared with Luke can be viewed as being created by Marcion to support his theology, this does not prove that the reverse is not the case, or that Marcion was actually responsible for any of the differences. Instead, the same evidence can support the view that Marcion created his theology as a result of having access to a document already containing these same ‘omissions.’

One valid approach to determining whether Mcg or canonical Luke came first is to set up a thought experiment. For example: If Mcg was an early version of Luke, what unsolved problems might it solve? One such is the Synoptic Problem, and in a response to ‘The Case Against Q’ from Mark Goodacre, Klinghardt suggested that the problem of ‘alternating primitivity’ (in which Matthew appears to depend on Luke in some places, and Luke on Matthew in others) that Q is supposed to solve can instead be solved by adding Mcg to the MwQH [Mark without Q Hypothesis) synoptic diagram, with aMarcion knowing Mark, aMatthew knowing both Mark and Marcion, and aLuke primarily depending on Mcg but knowing Mark and Matthew as well (see Marcion's Gospel and the Synoptic Problem for more details).

In this suggestion Mcg could be regarded as a ‘Luke 1,’ with canonical Luke being ‘Luke 2,’ or even (according to some) ‘Luke 3,’ and (from its position in the synoptic diagram) it could obviate the need for Q by providing a means whereby some parts of Luke could be earlier than Matthew, whereas others would be later. It would also provide a mechanism by which variants in Luke that are generally considered to be ‘assimilation to Matthew’ (an unhelpful term that really explains nothing) can be seen to have arisen naturally by dint of there having been two transmission paths from Mcg to Luke (either directly, or via Matthew). See The MwEL Theory: A New Synoptic Solution for more details.

While this suggestion has significant appeal, and (at least at first sight) does appear to resolve what is perhaps the main problem with the MwQH, it does run into the problem that it requires Mcg to be earlier than canonical Luke, a possibility that many (perhaps most) people still reject. Given that the view that aMarcion removed text from Luke is much more palatable to many people than that Luke was created by adding to the text used by aMarcion, before anything can be resolved for certain it is necessary to show that Mcg (or perhaps whatever document was edited to create Mcg) is indeed earlier than canonical Luke. In ‘The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem’ Klinghardt makes the following point in support of this view:

… the most convincing argument for Mcn’s priority to Luke is, of course, the demonstration of the editorial process of Lukan redaction. In many individual instances the differences between Mcn and Luke are best understood as editorial additions in Luke rather than reductions by Mcn. The most obvious case is Luke’s re-editing of the beginning of Mcn (*3:1a) with its substantial additions and the editorial change of the sequence of *4:31-37 and *4:16-30.31. Mcn’s priority to Luke is even more convincing when the overall picture of Luke’s editorial changes comes into view because most of his editorial changes add up to an integral and consistent concept. The editorial concept that could not be detected in Marcion’s assumed editorial changes is apparent in Luke, thus confirming the view of Mcn being prior to Luke.

In order to determine if Klinghardt is right, to understand exactly how Mcg relates to canonical Luke, or to the synoptic problem in general, it is first necessary to reconstruct as far as is possible the text of Marcion. However, any attempt at reconstruction has several problems to overcome.

Next: Reconstructing Marcion's Gospel 

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. regarding Marcion or my analysis please email me at davidinglis2@comcast.net