Previous page: Two Gospels, or Two Versions?
Comments regarding 'Marcion's' Gospel of the Lord (The Evangelion, or Ev) generally assume that the author of Ev was Marcion, even though there is no evidence (for example from Tertullian and Epiphanius) that this was actually the case. From where do we get our information about the contents of Ev? Cassels has this to say about our sources
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… All that we know, then, of Marcion's Gospel is simply what Tertullian and Epiphanius have stated with regard to it.
Cassels mentions Irenaeus, Tertullian and Epiphanius as being sources for material about Marcion. Other information can be found in the works of Adamantius, but although many other church fathers did write about Marcion (the person), almost nothing of these other works has survived regarding the content of Ev, so we rely heavily on the two primary sources of information about the text of Ev: Tertullian and Epiphanius. Both compare the content of Ev with that of Luke, but do so in a way that makes it hard to identify the exact text:
Both generally only comment on differences between Luke and Ev, or where they can use text in Ev to refute Marcion himself. Therefore, much of the text of Ev is not quoted or otherwise specifically identified (But note that Epiphanius claims to have noted all the differences that he found between Luke and Ev);
Tertullian in particular concentrates on Jesus and his interactions with others in Ev in order to determine whether Jesus is the son of the New Testament God (per aMarcion), and hence is unconcerned with the words or actions of ‘bystanders’ (e.g. Pilate and the people in Lk 23:20-24), the details of Jesus' travels from place to place, and his disciples;
Where differences between Luke and Ev are reported, Tertullian and Epiphanius do not always agree on the exact text of the differences they report, and one may identify a difference that the other does not;
Even where a difference between Luke and Ev is identified, it is sometimes mentioned in a somewhat ‘general’ manner, without direct quotes, e.g. "he did not have the one about X," or some such;
Some differences are just variations in order, and are not always identified in detail. Tertullian acknowledges this in his chapter 2, where he discounts such differences as being unimportant: "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";
Not all ‘quotes’ are accurate, with sometimes only a part of a verse being actually quoted, and with only a general reference (if any) to what preceded or followed it;
Tertullian expends the majority of his effort on refuting Marcion’s ‘Antitheses,’ often by quoting from the Old Testament. As a result he requires 43 chapters of fairly impenetrable rhetoric to cover Luke’s 24 chapters, making it hard to identify exactly what he is saying about aMarcion other than his identification of Jesus as portrayed in Ev;
Both Tertullian and Epiphanius use quotes from Ev to show how Marcion supposedly destroyed his position by leaving the text in his gospel the same as they saw it in Luke, sometimes giving the impression that they saw a difference in Ev whereas in fact the text they quote is often as we see it in canonical Luke.
In The Lost and Hostile Gospels Baring-Gould describes the approaches of Tertullian and Epiphanius to Marcion in this manner:
Tertullian regarded Marcionism as the most dangerous heresy of his day. He wrote against it, and carefully went through the Marcionite Gospel to show that it maintained the Catholic faith, though it differed somewhat from the Gospel acknowledged by Tertullian, and that therefore Marcion's doctrine was untenable. He does not charge Marcion with having interpolated or curtailed a Canonical Gospel, for Marcion was ready to retort the charge against the Gospel used by Tertullian.
It is not probable that Tertullian passed over any passage in the ‘Gospel of the Lord’ which could by any means be made to serve against Marcion's system. This is the more probable, because Tertullian twists the texts to serve his purpose which in the smallest degree lend themselves to being so treated.
St. Epiphanius has gone over much the same ground as Tertullian, but in a different manner. He attempts to show how wickedly Marcion had corrupted the Word of God, and how ineffectual his attempt had been, inasmuch as passages in his corrupted Gospel served to destroy his system.
With these two purposes he went through the whole of the ‘Gospel of the Lord,’ and accompanied it with a string of notes, indicating all the alterations and omissions he found in it. Each text from Marcion’s gospel, or Scholion, is accompanied by a refutation [Elenchus]. Epiphanius is very particular. He professes to disclose ‘the fraud of Marcion from beginning to end.’ And the pains he took to do this thoroughly appear from the minute differences between the Gospels which he notices.
At the same time, he does not extract long passages entire from the Gospel, but indicates their subject, where they agreed exactly with the received text. It is possible, therefore, that other slight differences may have existed which escaped his eye, but the differences can only have been slight.
As well as not always being sure of the quotes, we run into the problem of bias, for examples that of Tertullian:
The longest criticism of Marcion's views is to be found in Tertullian's invective Adv. Marcion, written in 207 and the following years. This has always been regarded by the orthodox as a most brilliant piece of work; but by the light of the conclusions arrived at by the industry of modern criticism, and also to ordinary common sense, it appears but a sorry piece of angry rhetoric … But we can hardly expect a dispassionate treatment of a grave problem, which has only in the last few years reached a satisfactory solution in Christendom, from the violent Tertullian, whose temper may be gleaned from his angry address to the Marcionites: "Now then, ye dogs, whom the apostle puts outside, and who yelp at the God of truth, let us come to your various questions! These are the bones of contention, which ye are perpetually gnawing!" (Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten)
Baring-Gould refers to Tertullian's "string of notes." These highly opinionated notes, often accompanied by many rhetorical questions, in fact form the bulk of Tertullian's comments on Marcion and/or 'his' gospel, and it is these notes that are sometimes used by later commentators on Marcion, rather than the actual text from Ev quoted by or referred to by either Tertullian or Epiphanius. For example, Sense refers to the following statement by Westcott regarding the beginning of Ev:
I have already quoted the initial verse of the Marcionite Gospel (see p. 47) as given by Tertullian, but Bishop Westcott thus renders it: "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar [God] came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and was teaching on the Sabbath day." To the word in brackets he appends the following footnote: "The Marcionites maintained the notion of a sudden and unexpected (subitum ex inopinato, Tertull., /..) appearance of the good Deity, to frustrate the designs of the God of the Jews" (Introduction, Appendix D., No. iv. p. 476, 8th edition).
... The reference to Tertullian in Bishop Westcott's footnote leads me to conclude that the statement that God came down to Capernaum was derived by the bishop from Tertullian's writings. I have already quoted the initial verse of the Marcionite Gospel and Tertullian's comment thereon (p. 47). The Marcionite text is clearly there stated to be "that He came down," not God. The 'He' refers to Jesus, not to God. Epiphanius also thus gives the text of the Marcionite Gospel.
In addition to the above issues, as Tertullian points out, Marcion’s followers made (and when he wrote were still making) changes to Ev, making it uncertain which changes (if any) were made by Marcion, and which by his followers:
I will therefore advise his followers, that they either change these Gospels, however late to do so, into a conformity with their own, whereby they may seem to be in agreement with the apostolic writings (for they are daily retouching their work, as daily they are convicted by us)… (Adv. Marcion, Book IV, Chapter 5)
If all we had to rely on was Tertullian then we might have very little confidence in any reconstructed text of Ev, or rather, any text in Ev that did not directly refer to Jesus: his words; his actions; or his effect on other people. This is because Tertullian's whole aim in Adv Marcion, Books I-IV is not to compare the whole of Ev with Luke, but instead to determine whether the Jesus portrayed in Ev is the Jesus that Tertullian knows, or some other Jesus. Despite his comments (essentially against Marcion, not the text of Ev) we do know from Tertullian that the Jesus portrayed in Ev is the same as the Jesus that Tertullian knows from Luke and his other sources, because in the final sentence of Adv Marcion, Book IV, he writes:
Marcion, I pity you; your labour has been in vain. For the Jesus Christ who appears in your Gospel is mine.
From this and the comments throughout Adv Marcion IV we can tell that Tertullian had no interest in text in Ev that did not directly refer to Jesus, so that the fact that Tertullian does not comment on those portions of text does not allow us to infer anything from thm regarding Jesus. However, perhaps of more use regarding the differences between Ev and Luke is Panarion, section 42, by Epiphanius. This is a more-or-less explicit list of differences between whatever texts of Ev and Luke were used by Epiphanius, with very little of the embellishment that is common throughout Tertullian, and thus the text of Ev indicated by Panarion 42 is open to less interpretation than that in Adv. Marcion. In his introduction Epiphanius makes it plain what he is trying to do, and also makes plain his bias against Marcion, who he assumes wrote Ev:
Some years ago, to find what falsehood this Marcion had invented and what his silly teaching was, I took up his very books which he had <mutilated>, his so-called Gospel and Apostolic Canon. From these two books I made a series of <extracts> and selections of the material which would serve to refute him, and I wrote a sort of outline for a treatise, arranging the points in order, and numbering each saying one, two, three (and so on). And in this way I went through all of the passages in which it is apparent that, foolishly, he still retains against himself these leftover sayings of the Savior and the apostle.
For some of them had been falsely entered by himself, in an altered form and unlike the authentic copy of the Gospel and the meaning of the apostolic canon. But others were exactly like both the Gospel and Apostle, unchanged by Marcion but capable of completely demolishing him…
Whoever cares to understand the phony inventions of the deceiver Marcion thoroughly and perceive the false contrivances of this victim (of the devil), should not hesitate to read this compilation. I hasten to present the material from his own Gospel which is contradictory to his villainous tampering, so that those who are willing to read the work may have this as a training-ground in acuity, for the refutation of the strange doctrines of his invention.
In his translation of Panarion 42, David Williams confirms that Epiphanius also has his own "anti heresy" agenda:
Epiphanius’ intent then is to convert and to protect. His means of doing so is to identify wrong doctrines so that his fellow Christians can keep away from them, and to convince of the truth those who have stumbled into these doctrines. He has been called a “heresy hunter” but the term scarcely expresses what he meant to do. It has also been pointed out that he was following conventions which by his time had been fixed. While this is so, his vehemence makes it plain that he was not merely falling in with some established pattern; he meant every word of what he wrote.
Because Tertullian, Epiphanius and the (supposed) author of Ev all wrote in different centuries (Marcion around 140 AD, Tertullian nearly 70 years later at the beginning of the 3rd century, and Epiphanius approximately 170 years later still around 375 AD), we cannot be sure that the copies of Luke seen by Tertullian and Epiphanius contained the same text, nor can we be sure that their copies of Ev were exactly the same. As Sense wrote:
It should be borne in mind that the copies of the Canonical and Marcionite Gospels in Tertullian's hands were not the same as those that Epiphanius used; there was an interval of nigh two centuries between these writers, during which period considerable interpolations and changes were introduced into the Canonical Gospel, and some were doubtless made in the Marcionite Gospel also. This fact should be duly regarded in judging the few discrepancies found between the reports of the two writers… For instance, Tertullian is silent regarding the parable of the Prodigal Son; but Epiphanius tells us that Marcion cut out the parable.
(Note that here Sense had not realized that Tertullian only commented on text in Ev directly involving Jesus, and that therefore there is no reason that Tertullian would have commented on the text of the parable of the Prodigal Son.)
Possible evidence for other differences in Luke over time can be found in places where Epiphanius states that the author of Ev has changed the text of Luke, but where the text of Ev as given by Epiphanius is actually the same as that found in canonical Luke. On this point Lardner notes:
I would here observe, once for all, that there are many passages in Epiphanius which Marcion read the same as we do in our present copies; though perhaps upon a comparison with the present readings, some slight variation may appear, either in his making use of other words with the same meaning, or in placing them in a different order. This arose partly from Epiphanius quoting them by memory, and partly from his giving an abridgment of these passages. The reason of his introducing these, in which there is no variation from our present copies, was, as in the instance just produced, to found arguments on them against the tenets of the Marcionites.
Here Lardner is referring to the many places where Epiphanius quotes text in Ev that is the same as that in Luke (except perhaps for “some slight variation”), specifically for the purpose of calling out the author of Ev for having left in his gospel passages that attacked his own position. For example, Epiphanius reports several places in Ev where Jesus is touched, which would be impossible if (as supposed by Marcion) he did not have a physical body.
In the places where Lardner above notes “some slight variation,” it is possible that this was a small error by Epiphanius (a view held by Lardner and Peter M. Head), or the text of Luke as known to Epiphanius could have differed from that in canonical Luke. If so, evidence of any such differences might be found by looking for textual variations in known mss. However, we would need to bear in mind that Epiphanius, while appearing to quote directly, did not always do so:
In many instances, however, only that part of a verse is cited that is required for his immediate purpose, with merely the gist given of the remainder… It is not uncommon for him to adjust the beginning and/or ending of an otherwise verbally precise citation so as to make the reference fit his sentence structure. Occasionally, he transposed words or phrases, and in a few instances he even altered the order of verses. Simple allusions are commonplace in his writings. (Carroll D. Osburn: The text of the Apostolos in Epiphanius of Salamis)
It also appears that Epiphanius’ comments were dictated, as in the introduction to The Panarion of Epiphanius, Frank Williams points out that:
Most importantly the huge Panarion, begun and finished within three years, is for the most part oral Greek. It was chiefly dictated, we may suppose in haste, and taken down just as Epiphanius delivered it. His stenographer and scribe, the deacons Anatolius and Hypatius, sign their names at the end of De Fide. Presumably Epiphanius had notes before him, or copies of some of his sources, but much of his composition is plainly ad lib.
Therefore, where either Epiphanius or Tertullian appear to quote directly from Ev, we cannot be certain whether they are quoting, or paraphrasing, and need to take this into account when trying to determine exactly what they saw. For example, if a “quote” from Ev does not quite match what we see in Luke (e.g. missing or different words), and there are no known variants in other mss or Bible versions, then it is reasonable to assume that it may not be a direct quote after all. However, by the same token it is reasonable to assume that where there are known variants then a “quote” that agrees with a particular variant reading is most likely a direct quote. Even where a “quote” does not match any known variant reading, the mere existence of other variant readings makes it more likely that the “quote” is genuine, and is therefore a previously unknown reading.
It is also important to understand that when people comment on quotes of Ev’s text by Tertullian, Epiphanius, Irenaeus or any other church father, they may be doing so on the assumption 1) that it is known that Ev was written by Marcion, and 2) that Ev is an edited version of Luke as we know it today, and hence that anything that does not correspond to what we see today in the extant mss of Luke (i.e. that appears to be an unknown variant) is likely to be a mistake or error of one kind or another by the father. In particular, where the text of Ev as given by Tertullian, Epiphanius et al matches something we see in Mark or Matthew (but not Luke), it is assumed that this is due to assimilation to Mark or Matthew, or that the father had one of the other gospels in mind at the time. One particular aspect of this issue is discussed next.
Next: Matthew in Marcion's Gospel?
If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, etc. regarding this topic or this page please email me at davidinglis2@comcast.net