The factual element underlying the whole phenomenon

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The differences by which the Marcionite text is distinguished from ours are of a twofold kind. In part, larger and smaller pieces were missing in it, by which the Marcionite Gospel as a whole becomes shorter than ours by a considerable amount. In part, it departs in individual passages, whereby the sense of the passages in question becomes a somewhat different one. The Church Fathers see in everything, without distinction, only an intentional falsification of the text, which Marcion is supposed to have committed in the interest of his system. But if this charge now shows itself to be an entirely groundless one, and if it results from the comparison of the Marcionite text with ours that Marcion cannot have omitted, in the interest of his system, so many passages which were missing in his Gospel, that some

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cannot even, for the sake of the connection, have belonged to the original text at all, what, then, do we have before us here? Nothing other than what is wholly analogous to the rest of the history of the formation of the Gospels: that an originally shorter Gospel received a greater compass through additions and expansions, and, in comparison with its earlier form, seemed to be a different one. The mutilation hypothesis does not even explain what it is supposed to explain. It only makes it impossible to place the phenomenon in question under its natural point of view. Since the differences of the Marcionite Gospel from ours cannot be regarded as alterations which Marcion would have undertaken in the interest of his system, one does not know at all how the Marcionite Gospel, as the shorter one, is supposed to have arisen from the longer one that was already present before it. New Gospels arose either in an entirely new form, like the Johannine, or by a drawing together, in a definite direction, of the common content of ones already present before, like that of Mark. But the reshaping of a Gospel by mere shortening and mutilation would be without any analogy. The Gospel history, still engaged in a living process of formation, did not have the tendency to draw itself more narrowly together and to cut off what was superfluous or foreign, but rather to expand and spread itself, and to hinder nothing that wanted to sprout forth as a new branch from the many-branched trunk. From this point of view, the relation, conformable to nature, of the Marcionite Gospel and of our canonical one can be recognized only in this, that the latter has proceeded from the former as a further development of the same historical material. To the Church Fathers the precisely reversed relation seemed to obtain, which is very easily understood from their standpoint. Irenaeus and Tertullian, from whose writings we first become acquainted with the Marcionite Gospel, lived and wrote at a time in which the canonical Gospel of Luke had already found a more general entrance in the church. It had, as it seems, been accepted without hesitation, since the content of all those additions which had come to the original text could give no ground for its rejection. We do not know, however, by what path it first spread and gradually displaced what had been customary until then, and we can hold only to this, that in the time of Irenaeus and Tertullian it was known of Marcion that he had made use of that older Gospel. But since, according

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to the whole conception which we must form of this Gospel, it is not to be assumed that it was an exclusively Marcionite one, the name of the Marcionite Gospel designates Marcion, in substance, only as the one who, at the time when the canonical Gospel of Luke had already come into more general use, still notoriously attested, through the writings that one had from him, the existence of that older Gospel. To the Church Fathers, of course, it seemed to be only what was peculiarly Marcionite, since, unacquainted with the true historical relation of the two forms of the Gospel, they held the later, more complete one for the original. Instead, therefore, of regarding the later one as an expansion of the earlier, they saw in the earlier one only an abridgment and mutilation of the later; and if the suspicion of such an arbitrariness committed upon the Gospel had of itself already to fall upon the one who had last been in notorious possession of this Gospel, one could, in the case of a heretic such as Marcion, whose tendency was in general one that tore apart, separated, and cut out the connection, all the less have any hesitation in explaining the use of his Gospel only from that cause. Thus there expresses itself, in everything that the Church Fathers bring forward as the difference of the Marcionite and the canonical Gospel, only the consciousness of a fact belonging to the history of the canon; and in the causes from which they seek to explain it, there makes itself known to us only the incapacity, very natural on their uncritical standpoint, to comprehend it historically. The name of Marcion therefore designates, so considered, nothing other than a definite epoch of the history of the canon, or rather, that the canon also has a history, that it was not from the beginning as it later appears, that there are thus also alterations which stand to one another as what is original and what was added only later, or as what is genuine and what is spurious, and must therefore first be separated critically. This factual point comes forward, at the name of Marcion, in the consciousness of the Church Fathers, in this way that was still so unclear for them. The clearest proof of this lies in this, that Marcion, as has already been remarked with reference to the letters, is charged also in the case of the Gospel with such alterations as plainly belong only to the class of the variants: as, for example, when at 6:23, instead of πατ. αὐτῶν, he read πατ. ὑμῶν; at 10:21 he did not have πάτερ and καὶ τῆς γῆς; and in verse 25, beside ζωήν, he did not read the epithet αἰώνιον; at 11:1, after προσευχ., he had τῷ πατρί in addition; at 8:9

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and 15:10, instead of τῶν ἀγγέλων τοῦ θεοῦ, he had only θεοῦ; and so on. Is it not clear that to the name of Marcion there has been attached, in general, everything that in the course of time emerged as a more or less significant difference of text? One can therefore also not judge otherwise about such passages as are neither mere omissions nor yet mere variants, but differences of text which cannot be held to be merely accidental. Of this kind are, in particular, the passages 11:2, where Marcion, instead of ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου, seems, according to Tertullian, to have read ἐλθέτω τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμά σου ἐφ᾽ ἡμᾶς; 5:14, where Marcion read as it reads at Matt. 8:4; 8:19–21, where Marcion did not have verse 19, and in verse 20 had in addition the words τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ τίνες εἰσὶν οἱ ἀδελφοί μου, as it reads in the parallel passage Matt. 12:48; 10:22, where Marcion read οὐδεὶς ἔγνω, τίς ἐστιν ὁ πατήρ, εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱός, καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὁ υἱός, εἰ μὴ ὁ πατήρ; 24:25, where instead of ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται it read in Marcion ἐλάλησεν ἡμῖν. At these, and at some other passages of the same kind, the Marcionite reading is indisputably the original one. In part, its originality can be demonstrated from other testimonies (as, in particular, Luke 11:2 and 10:22); in part, it is plain to see what interest the later reviser of the Gospel had in altering the reading so that it now reads as it does.

What, then, remains, if we draw the concluding result from everything so far, of the charge of the Church Fathers against Marcion, after everything more important on which it is supposed to rest has shown itself so untenable and null? Of the reproach of an intentional, malicious slander the Church Fathers may indeed be acquitted. All the more, however, must the judgment be passed upon them that they here display, quite particularly, that uncritical character, caught in dogmatic presuppositions, which they also otherwise, in accordance with the spirit of their time, cannot deny. It would therefore at last be time to let Marcion, so long and so harshly charged on account of his critical arbitrariness, come into his right again, and to give up a hypothesis which only for this reason could maintain itself, even into the most recent time, with so general an approval, because it, on the authority of its newest defender,¹ who, it is true,

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with all the apparatus of a thorough scholarship, but for the most part grounded it himself only in the spirit and tone of a Tertullian,¹ was taken up without closer examination and has become a standing tradition. As the Church Fathers motivated the curtailment and mutilation of the Gospel of Luke and of the Pauline letters, charged against Marcion, by saying that he had done it in favor of his doctrinal proposition that the true God is another than the creator of the world, so Hahn took his motivations for the passages allegedly omitted by Marcion from Marcion’s Gnostic system in general. That this view, however, cannot be applied at all to so many passages, that Hahn himself could not carry it through consistently, that in general, the further one pursues it in detail, it bears all the marks of a hypothesis false in its principle, Ritschl has shown very well.