Apelles is the one disciple of Marcion whose own words we can still partly hear. Rhodon met him as an old man and wrote down what he said. Hippolytus and Origen, by Harnack’s account, had his books in front of them, and Ambrose kept ten of his arguments against the books of Moses, most likely by way of Origen. Everything we have passed through the hands of his opponents, but it is more than we have for any other of Marcion’s followers.
Adolf von Harnack worked on Marcion for more than fifty years, from a prize essay he wrote as a student at Dorpat in 1870 to the second edition of his Marcion in 1924. Apelles was with him from the start: the Latin dissertation he defended at Leipzig in 1874, to gain the right to lecture there, was a study of Apelles. In 1891 he found new fragments of the Syllogisms, and in 1921 he gathered all the witnesses to Apelles into an appendix of his Marcion. As far as I have been able to find, neither the dissertation nor the 1891 essay has been published in English before. The English translation of Harnack’s Marcion, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God (1990), gives the main text of the book but leaves out its appendices, and so the one on Apelles. Having already brought Harnack’s reconstruction of Marcion’s texts into our Library, I wanted readers to have his work on Apelles beside it.
Harnack himself said in 1921 that his dissertation had been made out of date. I have translated it anyway, because it is still the fullest study of the sources for Apelles, and because the three pieces together show how one scholar’s judgment of the same evidence changed over half a century. The reader should also know that Apelles taught one first principle where Marcion taught two Gods. Harnack’s judgments, and Apelles’ teaching, are given as they are, without correction from the True Testament.
W. C. Muenchow IV
November 2026