Marcion's Bible: The First Christian Canon

Marcion's Bible is the first Christian canon ever published: one gospel, called the Evangelion, and ten letters of Paul, called the Apostolikon. Marcion issued it in Rome around 140 AD. Before it, Christian assemblies read from an unsettled body of letters and oral tradition with no fixed list. After it, the idea of a Christian New Testament existed, and every later canon was assembled in answer to his.

It contains no Hebrew scriptures, no Acts, no Pastoral letters, no Revelation, and no gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, or John. It is eleven books, and it is organized to be read as one argument.

The Evangelion comes first. Then ten letters of Paul, in Marcion's order: Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians, Laodiceans, Colossians, Philippians, and Philemon.

Galatians standing first is itself a claim. Galatians is where Paul is sharpest about the break with the Law and about receiving his gospel from no human authority. Put it at the front and the whole collection is read through that break. Put Romans first, as later canons do, and the same letters can be made to sound like a continuation of the Law.

The Evangelion is the single gospel in Marcion's canon. It is shorter than canonical Luke and overlaps it heavily. It has no birth narrative, no genealogy, and no infancy material; it opens with Christ appearing in Capernaum in the fifteenth year of Tiberius.

It carries no author's name in Marcion's edition. It is simply the gospel, the good news, and the title is the content rather than an attribution.

That is the traditional explanation, and it is not the only one the evidence allows. Markus Vinzent and Matthias Klinghardt argue that the Evangelion is the earlier text and that canonical Luke is an expansion of it. On that reading the difference in length is not subtraction by Marcion but addition by later editors.

The True Testament treats the Marcionite text as the baseline. Where the ancient witnesses are firm we say so, where they are ambiguous we mark it, and our comparison pages show verse by verse where Klinghardt, Roth, BeDuhn, Bilby, and Litwa agree and where they part.

Here, free, in full. The True Testament is a modern English edition of the restored eleven-book canon, readable online chapter by chapter with notes, the ancient attestations behind each verse, and side-by-side comparison of the major scholarly reconstructions. Print and PDF editions are also available.

If you want the scholarship behind the text, we also publish the first complete English translation of Adolf von Harnack's Neue Studien zu Marcion, his 1923 supplement to the standard study of Marcion's gospel and canon.

Because it is the earliest Christian canon we can name, and because the canon most of the world reads was built against it. Reading Marcion's Bible is not reading a curiosity at the edge of Christian history. It is reading the book that forced Christianity to decide what its book would be.