How to read this volume
Ferdinand Christian Baur wrote a continuous argument, not a reconstructed text. This book is the English of his treatise on the Gospel of Luke, printed pages 391–531 of Kritische Untersuchungen über die kanonischen Evangelien (Tübingen: Ludw. Fr. Fues, 1847), together with his own preface. The printed page numbers of 1847 are marked throughout, so any passage can be checked against the Munich copy.
His notes stay with the page they belong to. Greek is given as he printed it. A substantial Latin quotation is kept in italics, with an English rendering in brackets at its first use. Nothing in those lines is a True Testament reading. The translation does not put house words in his mouth, and it does not soften the charge he is answering. Where he says the Church Fathers accused Marcion of mutilation, that is his word for their charge.
What the argument is
Baur holds that the shorter Gospel known from Marcion is the earlier form, and that the canonical Gospel of Luke is a later expansion of it. He spends the first part of the treatise on the Church Fathers’ charge, the second on what he takes to be the original Gospel of Luke, and the third on the canonical form and its tendency. The preface tells the reader how this treatise sits beside his earlier work on John and on Paul.
What this book is not
The same 1847 volume also treats John, Mark, and Matthew. Those treatises are not in this book. Their titles appear in Baur’s printed contents, which the reader does not reprint, because the library already supplies a contents list of the chapters that are here. This is a translation of a dated scholarly argument. It is not a new reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel, and it is not the True Testament.
Second Edition, October 2026. For this second edition the translation was read again against Baur’s printed German, page by page, from the Munich scans of the 1847 printing, and every proposed change was confirmed independently against the page image before it was made. The revision corrects places where the English said something other than Baur. On p. 461 the stricter observance of the law is demanded by Jesus, not of him. On p. 418, in Tertullian’s argument, it is Marcion, not the pseudo-apostles, who lets the addition count toward the fullness of his God. In Jerome’s Latin on p. 415, Paul is the target of the hostility, not the one who feels it. Where Baur reports the views of Schwegler, De Wette, Strauss and Ritschl in indirect speech, the English again marks them as theirs rather than his, and where he says a point must be presupposed, the English no longer says foreseen. Greek that the earlier text had misread in the 1847 type, which prints ου as a single joined letter, now reads as Baur printed it, among them οὐαὶ on p. 401, οὐδαμοῦ on p. 414, πολλοὺς on p. 449, ἁψάμενός μου on p. 458, αὐτοῦ on p. 474 and πανοῦργος on p. 529. Baur’s “K. 23” on p. 475 is Matthew chapter 23, and his reference to Ritschl on p. 521 is to p. 293. The note on p. 427 now stands in the same chapter as the sentence that cites it, and a sentence of the Preface (p. V) is again Baur’s wish for a well-founded reply. Baur’s own misprinted references are still left as he printed them.