The Marcionite Gospel: the chief passages

I. The Marcionite Gospel²

We place ourselves at once in the center of Ritschl’s investigation if we immediately ask for the proofs of the assertion that the passages of our Gospel of Luke which Marcion is supposed to have mutilated bear striking traces of a lack of connection, as clear proof that here it is not so much that something original has been taken away as that something foreign has been put in, by the removal of which the original connection is restored.

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Ritschl has shown himself, not only in this part of his essay, in which he appears chiefly as an opponent of Hahn’s view, to be a very skillful and acute critic, but has also carried the proof of his assertion, on the whole, through in a satisfactory way. The nature of the case brings it about, however, that among the passages he treats there is a fairly great difference. In some, the connection does indeed become clearer and more natural by the omission of the words which, according to the express statement of the Church Fathers, were missing in Marcion. In others this is not the case to the same degree. And there are likewise passages in which the connection does seem to be gained by omission, while, on the other hand, the circumstance enters which makes this whole investigation so difficult: that one does not know with certainty how Marcion’s text read, and infers a gap in it only from Tertullian’s silence. Still, even if there are only some passages which give a very telling testimony to the truth of the assertion that has been set up, one thereby already obtains a fixed point from which one can go further by way of induction. Whether, then, there are such passages must be asked first.

The very first passage at which, after the infancy, baptism, and temptation narrative, which forms a section of its own, a difference between the Marcionite text and ours emerges, 4:16–37, seems to serve very well as a confirmation of Ritschl’s idea. Marcion’s Gospel began with 4:31–37, and only then followed 4:16ff. If these two sections, 4:31–37 and 4:16ff., are transposed, and thereby set back into their original relation, the difficulty is of itself removed, that verse 23 speaks of γενόμενα εἰς Καπερναούμ before, according to our text, anything has yet happened in Capernaum. If the γενόμενα εἰς Καπερναούμ are healing wonders done for the good of the inhabitants of Capernaum, this fits entirely the event narrated in verse 33; but for that very reason the narration of it ought not to follow, but to precede. Further, the saying that no prophet is welcome in his own homeland, verse 24, is held to be unsuitable, and Ritschl demonstrates what is unsuitable in it at this place still more definitely. If one may now assume that both this saying and what follows immediately after it, down to verse 27, were originally missing, a far better connection seems to be established thereby as well. Only, as goes without

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saying, the better connection can count as a decisive factor only when, apart from that, one is justified in the assumption that the words which burden the connection were missing in Marcion’s text. This assumption rests here only on the fact that Tertullian, with his remark merito unius proverbii ejectus refertur, seems to exclude what follows verse 23. It is, however, even if probable, only an inference; and when Ritschl remarks that Jesus’ resolve, indicated in the citation of the example of Elijah, to leave the Jews and devote himself to the Gentiles, is anything but justified by the resistance of the Nazarenes alone, which the composer has simply presupposed, one can say against this that the exasperation and the violent act of the Nazarenes are also not properly motivated if Jesus said nothing further than what we read in verse 23. The demand must therefore rightly be made of Ritschl’s critical canon that it prove itself above all at those passages about whose absence from Marcion’s text we have a definite testimony.

One such passage is 11:29–32, where Epiphanius expressly designates as missing the words of verse 29, εἰ μὴ τὸ σημεῖον Ἰωνᾶ τοῦ προφήτου, through πλεῖον Ἰωνᾶ ὧδε. Here, Ritschl believes, the following good connection presents itself in Marcion’s text without verses 29–32. After Jesus has rejected the people’s demand for a sign, he makes the objection to himself that, if he is to be effective and wishes to light a lamp, he must not hide himself, but must come forward openly. By this he is led to state the true purpose of his activity in verse 35, while at the same time passing over to this designation of his activity, which concerns the inner life, by the same expression λύχνος which had previously been taken more in the sense of an outward working of wonders. One must admit that if the words of verses 33ff., οὐδεὶς (δὲ must then be omitted) λύχνον ἅψας, and so on, are to be brought into connection with what precedes, they attach themselves, in the sense indicated, better to σημεῖον οὐ δοθήσεται αὐτῇ than to what follows further in verses 30–32. We see from this passage also, however, how difficult it is to make connection the criterion of what is original and what is inserted in a writing in which, as is the case quite especially with the Gospel of Luke, so much, torn out of its original connection, has been brought into a merely accidental combination. The connection between the refusal of the sign and the figurative

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discourse about the λύχνος always remains a very insecure one, and it is hardly credible that the two stood originally in any closer connection with one another at all. If one must first seek the connection so artificially, it makes no very great difference whether a passage such as the one that follows in verses 30–32 also stands between them. Far more than the connection, therefore, speaks for the probability that this passage was not first cast out by Marcion, but originally did not stand in the text: that it has altogether the look of an interpolation, for which the parallel passage in Matthew could easily have given the occasion.

The same case occurs at another passage of the same chapter. According to Epiphanius’s express statement, verses 49–51 of chapter 11 were missing in Marcion. Ritschl also looks at this passage above all with regard to its connection, and remarks in this respect: in Luke, verse 48, differently from Matthew in the parallel passage 23:34ff., already regards the building of the prophets’ tombs itself directly as the guilt of the Pharisees, without the intention being mentioned which the Pharisees nevertheless had, of atoning for the crimes of their fathers. That form of the thought in Luke is therefore decidedly harsh in comparison with Matthew. Yet it is possible to find a certain connection in the verses. By contrast, it is extremely difficult to establish a connection between verse 48 and the following section. From the pleasure in the deeds of their fathers, declared by the Pharisees, it is supposed to follow that the σοφία θεοῦ said: ἀποστελῶ, and so on. How harsh it is, however, that from the so artificially mediated reproach of pleasure in old crimes the prediction of new ones should follow. The passage appears to me somewhat differently, and, as far as verse 48 is concerned, I can find no such great difference between Luke and Matthew. In Matthew too the sense of the passage is this: by everything the Pharisees do at the tombs of the prophets, they only perpetuate the memory of the guilt attaching to their fathers; they thereby present themselves as the sons of the murderers of the prophets, upon whom the same guilt lies as upon their fathers; so everything they do outwardly only sets in a clearer light the contradiction of outer and inner that belongs to their nature. This is also the sense in Luke, verses 47 and 48. If Luke then goes on, διὰ τοῦτο καὶ, and so on, the connection is indeed not further explained; but if we also take διὰ τοῦτο in its ordinary meaning, “for this reason,” that is, because it is simply the case that by your own

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doing you only remind yourselves of your guilt, and yourselves bear witness to the guilt which, from your fathers, the murderers of the prophets, lies upon you, then in this very respect (διὰ τοῦτο) the wisdom of God says that in the prophets and apostles who are sent to you the crimes of your fathers will be repeated, and the measure of the guilt that has lain upon you from the beginning will be made full. There is in this at least no such harshness and no such lack of connection that one would have to conclude, from the absence of the passage in Marcion, that it could not originally have stood in this connection at all. Rather, if we take everything together, the attachment, which is in any case made very external by διὰ τοῦτο, the content of the passage, in which there is only carried further what had already been said energetically enough for the purpose of these heaped-up οὐαὶ [woes], the relation to Matthew, and especially also the peculiar mention of the σοφία θεοῦ, by which, as Ritschl rightly remarks, only Jesus can be understood (so that accordingly these words, placed in Jesus’ mouth, are really a citation formula pointing to his saying in Matthew), the passage gives itself clearly enough to be recognized as an interpolation which does not make the connection impossible, but is also very easily dispensable for it.

It is otherwise, by contrast, at the passage 12:6–7, where the natural, original connection is certainly restored only by the omission of the two verses missing in Marcion. Given the belonging together of the two verses, the testimony of Epiphanius that verse 6 was missing can count for both verses, which Tertullian also passes over in silence. It is by no means clear how what is said in verses 6 and 7 about the sparrows and the hairs is supposed to serve as a motivation of the fear of God. One can therefore regard these verses only as an insertion that is not merely dispensable, but even disturbs the connection. Ritschl asserts this with not the same ground also of verses 33 and 34 of the same chapter, since one does not need to assume so strict a connection among the admonitions given in this whole passage (verse 35 need not be referred precisely to what precedes; a new series of thoughts can also begin), and besides, the absence of these verses in Marcion is inferred only from Tertullian’s silence.

One of the more noteworthy passages is 13:28, where Marcion, as Epiphanius and Tertullian testify, not only read, instead of ὅταν ὄψησθε Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαάκ, and so on, ὅταν ὄψησθε πάντας τοὺς δικαίους ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ

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τοῦ θεοῦ, ὑμᾶς δὲ ἐκβαλλομένους καὶ κρατουμένους ἔξω, but also did not have in his text the whole following section down to the end of the chapter. Ritschl rightly urges here, in favor of Marcion’s reading, the better connection. According to the course and the plan of the whole discourse, the πάντες δίκαιοι already stand over against the ἐργάται τῆς ἀδικίας, as the few who get through the narrow gate, more fittingly than Abraham, Isaac, and the rest. Still more foreign to the character of the discourse, however, is the contrast, which follows in the ordinary text, between the rejected Jews and the Gentiles who enter the divine kingdom in their place. Since what follows, verses 31–35, gives itself of its own accord to be recognized as an interpolation not made in the best place, one can also hold what precedes only for a working together, unsuited to the connection, of the passage Matthew 8:11–12 with the original text that lay before Marcion.

Still more decisive is the connection in favor of the Marcionite text at 16:16–18. The interpreters here despair altogether of the possibility of demonstrating a connection. If one reads with Marcion, as is to be seen from Tertullian, instead of τῷ νόμῳ, as our text has it in verse 17, τῶν λόγων μου, then “the well-ordered sense of the passage is that the law has found its end, but the words of the Lord have eternal validity, as whose test precisely the new ordinance concerning the indissolubility of marriage is adduced.” One could take offense only at the expression τῶν λόγων μου κεραία, since the expression κεραία is indeed quite fitting for the written law, but not equally so for the λόγοι of Jesus, which, in the sense in which they must be taken here, could not well be thought in the form of the written letter. This hangs together, however, with the fact that the author of the third Gospel, in the form in which it lay before Marcion, substituted for the νόμος the λόγος θεοῦ, or the λόγοι of the Lord. If the words of the Lord were thus set entirely in the place of the law, their imperishable duration could very well also be designated by the expression otherwise used of the law, and this too, accordingly, cannot hold us back from recognizing the originality of the Marcionite reading in this passage.

No less does the correctness of the point of view set up by Ritschl prove itself at two other passages which deserve to be brought forward here, 20:19 and 21:17ff. In the former passage the clumsy position of the last clause, ἔγνωσαν γάρ, and so on, must strike one. The

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ground is supposed to be given why the chief priests and the scribes lay in wait for Jesus. The clause therefore refers only to the words καὶ ἐζήτησαν, and so on, and not to the immediately preceding καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν τὸν λαόν, and it can therefore only be disturbing for the connection that this latter clause stands between the other two. Since Marcion’s text, as we see from Epiphanius, did not have the parable of the rebellious vinedressers at all, the words καὶ ἐζήτησαν — τὸν λαόν attached themselves in him quite fittingly to verse 8, and it is clear that the reviser made that addition, to which he knew no other place to give than at the close, only with regard to the inserted parable, which still seemed to him to require this remark, since in the parable Jesus attacked the chief priests and the scribes only in a veiled way.

In the second passage also, 21:17ff., the connection is at once restored as soon as one takes verse 18, which Marcion likewise, according to Epiphanius, did not read, out of the text, in which, as Ritschl rightly remarks, it is without any rational connection with its surroundings, since it flatly contradicts the preceding words of verses 16 and 17. These two passages, then, looked at with regard to the connection in which they stand in our text, would be striking proofs of the originality of the Marcionite text.

One might, by contrast, judge differently again about two other passages which according to Ritschl are supposed to belong in the same category, 19:9 and 20:37–38. In the former passage Ritschl assumes with Hahn that the words καθότι καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ἐστι were missing in Marcion, and argues against them acutely as follows. The υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ is a dogmatic category of the Pauline dialectic (Romans 4:26), which we may not presuppose in Jesus, who acts according to the simple principle of verse 10, ἦλθεν ὁ υἱὸς — τὸ ἀπολωλός. This principle not only excludes Jesus’ justification by the words καθότι καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ἐστι, but even clearly contradicts them. For if Zacchaeus is a son of Abraham, he is so by faith in the Pauline sense. Then, however, he is also no longer ἀπολωλώς, and yet Jesus is supposed to designate him as such with the words that follow immediately? With this last point too much may already be said, since the subjective mediation between the lost and the found can after all only be faith; but the correctness of the argumentation itself is also not to be granted. For even supposing that the υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ does not conceal the Pauline dialectic, why should we not also

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be permitted to presuppose that same dialectic already in the Pauline author of the Marcionite Gospel? But 13:16, in a section that admits of no doubt, also speaks of a daughter of Abraham, in the same sense as a son of Abraham is spoken of here. This comes all the more into consideration because, besides, one infers the absence of those words in Marcion only from Tertullian’s silence. For the same reason one also cannot, as regards the second passage, strengthen the testimony of Epiphanius that Marcion did not read verses 37 and 38 of chapter 20 by saying that the clause πάντες γὰρ αὐτῷ ζῶσιν, whose logical position Ritschl contests with subtleties that are not very sound, betrays, by its similarity to Pauline sentences, the same reviser from whom the clause of 19:9 comes. One could only, given the homogeneity of the two clauses, since the second in any case belongs to the reviser, find it all the more probable that the first also comes from the same hand. Yet this inference too may not be secure enough.

The discussion so far concerns the first main class of passages from which the relation of the Marcionite Gospel to our canonical Luke is to be inferred. They are throughout passages which bear the character of interpolations, and several of them seem so foreign to the connection in which they stand that one can hardly assume they already belonged to it originally. If it is rightly to be presupposed that, of two texts, the one which offers the more natural, simpler, more logically ordered connection, and contains nothing that intrudes disturbingly into the course of thought, is the original, then one must without doubt, already on the ground of the data before us, decide for the originality of the Marcionite text in its relation to that of the canonical Luke. Since Marcion, as Ritschl has shown against Hahn in a thoroughly very satisfactory way, cannot have undertaken such changes as must have occurred here from dogmatic grounds lying in his system, his text can only be the one he already found before him, and all the differences between his text and ours can be regarded only as interpolations of a later hand. But could not Marcion, even if not in accordance with his system, yet from the same critical grounds which determine us to hold his text for the original, have cast out of our already existing canonical Luke the passages by which his text differed from ours? With

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this we would only be transferring our present criticism into the ancient time, to which it was still wholly foreign, and would yet have to come back to this, that the text critically restored by Marcion is also really the original one. The more considerable the number and the extent of the sections missing in Marcion are, and the less a satisfactory ground for their omission, as first carried out by Marcion, can be demonstrated in their own character, the greater becomes the probability that we have here two different recensions of one and the same text, whose existence can be explained only by this, that the original text first expanded to its present extent by additions that came in.

The second main class of passages from which the true relation of the Marcionite Gospel to our canonical one is to be inferred is therefore formed by those in which the difference concerns larger pieces, which in themselves make up a smaller whole. If it can be shown, at least even only this much, that they could just as well have been first added by a later reviser as taken away by Marcion, they fit themselves of their own accord as interpolations under the unity of the same point of view under which the passages of the first class must be placed. The following longer sections belong here: (1) the infancy, baptism, and temptation narrative, chapters 1–4:15; (2) the three parables, the parable of the fig tree attached to the narrative of the Galileans killed by Pilate, 13:1–9, that of the prodigal son, 15:11–32, and that of the rebellious vinedressers, 20:9–18; (3) the narrative of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, 19:29–46.

The first of these sections missing in Marcion is the most specious proof of the usual mutilation hypothesis. How near at hand it is here to give credence to the assertion of the Church Fathers, that Marcion omitted this section because of its so visibly Judaizing character and its incompatibility with his Christology! It is to be regretted that Ritschl did not take this section, which he comes to speak of only at the close of his essay (p. 292), into more exact account, which ought all the more to have been done because it seems to come into a certain collision with the critical canon he has set up. If the lack of connection is a chief criterion for deciding the question whether a passage is to be held original or not, then this canon seems able to be turned here against himself, and one can hold against him the argument: how is it to be thought that a Gospel had so abrupt a beginning

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as was the case with the Marcionite Gospel? If the Gospel began, according to the unanimous statement, with the words Ἐν ἔτει πεντεκαιδεκάτῳ Τιβερίου (Καίσαρος, or τῆς ἡγεμονίας Τιβερίου Καίσαρος) κατῆλθεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἰς Καπερναούμ,¹ πόλιν τῆς Γαλιλαίας, how are we to understand this κατῆλθεν? In our Gospel it has its wholly natural sense, since the evangelist, before this coming down to Capernaum at 4:31, has already had him appear in Galilee. How striking it is, however, to see the whole first appearance and activity of Jesus designated by a κατῆλθεν εἰς Καπερναούμ. For Marcion this difficulty was of course removed by his having Christ come down immediately from heaven. But are we to presuppose the same conception also in the author of the Gospel, if Marcion did not first give it this beginning, but found it already with this beginning? This can hardly be assumed. It therefore remains only to understand that κατῆλθεν in its ordinary sense, that he came down to Capernaum from another place in Galilee. Even so, however, this abrupt beginning remains so enigmatic that, as it seems, one can pass over it only in consideration of the incompleteness of the data lying before us. Not without ground, however, it may be said that the author of the Gospel already had the intention of having Jesus appear right at the start wholly with the immediate impression of the divinity of his appearance. Conceiving the appearance and activity of Jesus altogether from the point of view of its universal determination, striving out beyond Judaism, he passed over everything which the tradition let precede his first wonderful appearance in Capernaum, and had him go down suddenly to the place to which he could of course come only from another place, the mention of which, however, the author of the Gospel, placing himself and the readers in mediam rem, considered as little necessary as the rest, which he passed over and which is only hinted at by the υἱὸς Ἰωσήφ of 4:22. In order to have him appear at once in his whole greatness and divinity, the nearer historical motivation becomes quite inessential for him, with the exception of the likewise non-Jewish,

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but generally world-historical dating. It is therefore not to be overlooked, in this respect, with what pregnant features of the divinity of his appearance he has him come forward at once: not only in Capernaum, where ἐν ἐξουσίᾳ καὶ δυνάμει he commands the spirits, but also in Nazareth, where, despite the danger threatening him, διελθὼν διὰ μέσου αὐτῶν ἐπορεύετο (verse 30), which in such a connection can be understood only of a wonderful vanishing. If in this way the beginning of the Gospel, as it read according to Marcion, can be justified as an original one, not first given to it by Marcion, then the content of the first chapters itself can offer no special ground for recommending the mutilation hypothesis. With the same right with which one asserts that Marcion, by virtue of his view, had a special interest in removing these chapters, one can assert on the other side that a later reviser, from his standpoint, had the opposite interest in taking up these chapters and placing them at the front as the beginning of the Gospel.

As for the parables named, of none of them can it be asserted that Marcion must have taken such great offense at their content that he could not otherwise rid himself of the contradiction into which they came with his view than by violent excision. The parable of the fig tree Marcion needed only to refer to the Jews, and it corresponded entirely to his anti-Judaistic tendency. The parable of the vinedressers he could indeed, as Hahn remarks, not have tolerated, because he recognized no earlier revelations of God, and did not recognize the prophets as envoys of God and as forerunners of Christ. But did he, even if he understood Christ by the son of the parable, have to give all its features so specific an interpretation referring to the Old Testament? Least of all, however, can one think what should have made him so dissatisfied with the parable of the prodigal son, and the defenders of the mutilation hypothesis have taken useless trouble to explain, from their standpoint, the so noteworthy absence of this parable.

Finally, that Marcion could not have been determined to omit the narrative of the entry by grounds such as those Hahn assumes has been rightly remarked by Ritschl. If, then, he did not have this section, this is to be explained simply by its having been missing in his Gospel from the beginning, and by the later reviser first seeing himself moved to fill

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this gap. With this section, however, something further also comes into consideration, which might well justify us in bringing it under the point of view of the passages discussed first. Ritschl remarks aptly (p. 108) that it can be made probable that Marcion did not know this section for the reason that it does not fit the plan of the narrative. The entry into Jerusalem clearly shows the intention of Jesus to come forward as king of the Jews in order to open the expected kingdom. Verse 11, however, expressly contradicts this presentation. It states that Jesus regarded as false the opinion, arising indeed among his disciples at the approach to Jerusalem, that the founding of the divine kingdom would now take place, and sought to suppress and refute it by the parable that now follows. On the parable itself Ritschl agrees with Strauss’s view, that by separating out verses 12, 14, 15, and 27 two independent parables can be produced. Only he thinks it is probably to be assumed that they were mixed without any fault of the evangelist, but then also does not wish to overlook that this parable is very tendentious in its connection, although only one circumstance in it is suited to express this tendency. It is supposed, namely, to refute the opinion that the divine kingdom would enter at once in Jerusalem. For this, however, only the one feature in the whole parable serves: ἄνθρωπος εὐγενὴς ἐπορεύθη εἰς χώραν μακράν. Of the further moments no application is made to the mission of the disciples and the promise of the final return for judgment, as in Matthew, who inserts the simple parable into the eschatological discourse (p. 268).

So far Ritschl correctly gives the data required for a critical combination. He ought then, however, also to have carried out the combination itself. After the evangelist had declared erroneous the expectation, stirred by the nearness of Jerusalem, of the immediate appearance of the divine kingdom (verse 11), he certainly could not let a depiction of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem follow which gave the most evident confirmation of that opinion. The parable can therefore have only the purpose of refuting it. But why did he choose precisely this parable for that? It was suited to it already for the reason that in Matthew too (25:14ff.) it has an eschatological reference. If one now compares Luke’s presentation with that of Matthew, it is easy to see that all those features which in Luke seem so foreign to the original plan of the parable that one believes one must separate them out as elements of another parable were taken up into the original

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form of the parable precisely with the intention of letting the antithetical tendency which it is supposed to have come forward all the more clearly and definitely. Already in Matthew the ἄνθρωπος who is the chief subject of the parable is called an ἀποδημῶν. He sets out on a journey from which he returns only after a longer time. This feature is carried further in Luke quite deliberately. Not only is the predicate εὐγενής, which is supposed to designate his royal descent and dignity, given to the ἄνθρωπος, but it is also said of him that he ἐπορεύθη εἰς χώραν μακράν, and indeed for the purpose λαβεῖν ἑαυτῷ βασιλείαν, καὶ ὑποστρέψαι. One can think here only of Jesus as Messiah, insofar as he, already through his death, as his departure from the world, founded the establishment of his kingdom, but reserved the real opening of it for the future, for the time in which he was first to come again as king. After he had gone away, his citizens, as verse 14 says, went so far in their hatred against him that they formally renounced him, with the declaration that they would not have him as king over them. How can one fail to recognize here that the conduct of the unbelieving Jews, who reject Jesus as Messiah, is meant? The presentation of the parable did not allow his death itself to be presented as an effect of their hatred. The death is therefore taken only as his departure, in order to prepare the founding of his kingdom at a distance. The reference to the death lies clearly, however, in this, that the renunciation and rejection are designated as the immediate consequence of the hatred they had already cherished against him (by the imperfect ἐμίσουν in verse 14, in which the meaning of a longer duration lies). With verse 15 Luke’s presentation turns back into that of Matthew, in that it now passes at once to the point in time of the return of the king, who has already come into possession of his kingdom, and to the reward and punishment connected with the opening of it. The two presentations differ no further, except that Luke’s, at the close, still states in the harshest way the complete exclusion of the Jews, as the enemies of Jesus, from his kingdom. From all these features together there looks out unmistakably the evangelist’s very decided intention not only to give the entry scene no place in his presentation, but even, instead of it, to have Jesus come forward with precisely the opposite character. For while in Matthew, in the prophecy of the prophet, he is expressly depicted as a βασιλεὺς πραΰς, who comes to the daughter of Zion with all the signs of gentleness and peaceableness,

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the parable in Luke by contrast presents him as an ἄνθρωπος αὐστηρός, who without sparing and without mercy will carry out the deserved punishment on the same people to whom, immediately afterward, he is supposed to have entered in a wholly different way. It can accordingly be asserted here as definitely as anywhere that Marcion cannot have found the section in question in his Gospel, unless one is willing to assume that the author of it aimed in his presentation at the most striking contradiction.

As a third class we can gather all those passages which, considered by themselves, for the most part offer no very significant factor already because of the uncertainty whether they really were missing in Marcion, but which, once so much stands firm as results from the passages discussed so far, can well be reconciled with the view of the Marcionite Gospel that has thereby been established. The most important are briefly the following. In chapter 4, verses 38 and 39, which Tertullian does not touch, are supposed to have been missing. Ritschl makes their later insertion very probable from the connection. As at Matthew 8:15, Luke says in verse 39 διηκόνει αὐτοῖς: the healed woman served Jesus and his companions. But in Luke 4:38–39 Jesus still appears without companions, so that διηκόνει αὐτοῖς is here wholly unintelligible, and one thus sees clearly that the story was taken over unchanged from Matthew and clumsily brought into connection with a stay of Jesus in Capernaum other than the one mentioned by Matthew. In chapter 7:29–35, verses 29 and 30, which stand very unsuitably, may not have belonged to the original connection. That not only they, but also the following verses, were missing in Marcion, one can infer only from Tertullian’s passing over them. In chapter 8 Marcion did not have verse 19, but, according to Tertullian and Epiphanius, still had in verse 20 the words τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ τίνες εἰσὶν οἱ ἀδελφοί μου, as at Matthew 12:48. Why should it not also have read thus originally in Luke, and the reviser only later have altered this passage? That in chapter 9 verse 31, and 10:12–15, 11:42, and 12:33–34 were missing is probable, but not expressly attested. By contrast, according to Tertullian and Epiphanius, there were missing in chapter 13:31–33 Jesus’ utterance against Herod, the fox, and in verses 34 and 35 the saying about Jerusalem; in chapter 17, verses 7–10, on the lack of merit of human doing; in chapter 18, verses 31–34, containing an announcement of Jesus’ death; further, 21:21–22, the summons

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to flee from Jerusalem (a faint echo from Matthew); in chapter 22, verse 16 (perhaps also verses 17 and 18), verse 30 (perhaps, as Ritschl will conjecture from the character of the connection, also verses 24–30), and verses 35–37, καὶ μετὰ ἀνόμων ἐλογίσθη. To assume the omission of verses 43 and 44, which Ritschl holds not original merely because of their mythical character, one has no special ground. Finally there were still missing, in chapter 22, verses 49–51, the narrative of the ear cut off from the servant, and in chapter 23, verses 39–43, Jesus’ conversation with the criminal on the cross. All these passages, in which, with slight exception, it is fairly indifferent whether they belong to the text or not, contain nothing that justifies us in the assumption that they were missing in Marcion from any other cause than simply because they already originally did not belong to the text of his Gospel.

If, by the closer consideration of all the passages of which there has been talk so far, one has convinced oneself of the probability that the differences between the Marcionite Gospel and ours, so far as we know them, are not to be derived merely from an arbitrary act of Marcion, then by that very fact the assertion of the Church Fathers, who make precisely this reproach against Marcion with the greatest decisiveness, is declared untrue. The question is therefore whether so definite a testimony may be rejected outright, and whether it does not receive its confirmation already by this, that the same arbitrary act which is charged against Marcion with regard to the Gospel is also supposed to have been committed by him on the apostolic letters. In consideration of the weight of this question, Ritschl extended his investigation also to Marcion’s Apostolikon, without, however, being able to come to a secure result about it. The merit of this part of his essay (pp. 151–171) consists only in the demonstration of the unmethodical, groundless procedure on which Hahn’s hypothesis rests here too. Where the statements of the Church Fathers are so short and incomplete, so ambiguous and uncertain, as is especially the case here, it is indeed not possible to form a more definite conception of the differences between the Marcionite text and ours; but for the same reason one is also not justified in holding the charge of an intentional falsification of the text, especially in the extent in which this is supposed to have happened according to Hahn’s opinion, to be simply proved. One would therefore indeed have to give up seeing the result already gained about the Marcionite Gospel

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confirmed by the same result with regard to the Apostolikon. In order, however, to be able to infer back from the character of the Apostolikon to that of the Gospel, the data before us concerning the former would have to offer a wholly different, far more secure foundation. Whether it is nevertheless not possible to come, concerning the assertions of the Church Fathers about Marcion’s Apostolikon, at least to a more definite result than Ritschl too succeeded in reaching, is now to be attempted further.