The notes below record the places where the English could have gone another way, and says which way it went and why. Some turn on a printed word that is misprinted or wrongly transmitted; some on a Greek form that decides whether a clause is active or passive; some on where a quotation ends and Harnack resumes in his own voice. They are given in the order of the pages of the German original, so that a reader working with the 1923 printing can check any one of them against the page in front of him. Ordinary punctuation and copy-editing are not listed.
- p. 3, “M. E.” — attributed to von Soden, inside his quotation, rather than to Harnack. The quotation is therefore not closed until after “more reactionary than radical”.
- p. 3, τῶν πεπιστευκέναι νομιζομένων — rendered as a passive, “those who are reputed to have believed”; the participle is middle-passive and cannot carry an active sense here.
- p. 3, Origen’s remark — the printed Greek is τοιοῦτον δέ ἐστι τὸ πλῆθος, not τοιοῦτον ἦν; corrected against the page and the English adjusted to the present tense.
- p. 3, Zephyrinus’s formula — “publicly promulgated as binding” (zur Nachachtung), replacing any sense of contempt.
- p. 3, typology — Marcion assigned to the modalistic pole and the Gnostics to the aeon-dissolution pole, with the ecclesiastical hypostasis-Christology mediating.
- pp. 4–7, speaker frame — the numbered objections 3–4, the Grejdanus paragraph and the whole Bauer summary are marked as reported criticism; Harnack’s resumption is placed exactly at “Thus far Bauer” (p. 7).
- p. 6, “righteous” — Harnack’s quotation marks around ‚gerechten’ retained everywhere in Bauer’s ironic reading, so that the English does not present Bauer’s irony as a description.
- p. 7, “keinen Auftrieb … erheben” — translated according to the evident intention (“no lift that raises him above the level of the bad”), with the anacoluthon flagged as a printer’s error rather than smoothed over silently.
- p. 8, Adamantius references — verified as II, 9; II, 1 f.; II, 19 f.; I, 3; II, 6.
- p. 8, “mit ihm Fremden als Sündern” — “on those who were foreign to him, as sinners”, not “on the strangers as sinners”; the emphasis is on their being alien to the good God.
- p. 12, “Gut > Gerecht” — printed with the mathematical sign, not a dash; the greater-than is Harnack’s own shorthand for the ranking of the two predicates.
- p. 13, note 3 — the self-reference is to “my compilation of the Antitheses, p. 95”, not p. 85.
- p. 13, πονηρός — the whole gradation (“from oppressor to tormentor …”) kept as a list of burdens imposed on men, not of moral badness, since Harnack’s point is precisely that “bad” does not belong among these properties.
- p. 19, note 1 — the Clement citation reads φύσις κακή, not γένεσις κακή.
- p. 21, note 2 (continued) — Justin’s phrase is οἱ ἀπὸ τούτων ὁρμώμενοι, “those who take their start from these”.
- p. 24, the creed — the printed text is Πιστεύω εἰς θεὸν πατέρα παντοκράτορα, without ἕνα; the creed is quoted short, and the missing word matters to his argument, so nothing has been supplied.
- p. 25, 1 John 5:19 — printed with the article, Ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται, and so retained; rendered “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one”.
- p. 25, πονηρότατος — the gloss “the most sorely tried” (Harnack’s „geplagtesten”) kept, and the God of the world called “a harassed God”, preserving Harnack’s point that πονηρός is not “evil”.
- p. 27, note 5 — the siglum is ℵ (Sinaiticus).
- p. 28 — “put an end to the preferential treatment of B ℵ Origen”; the OCR-derived “Bn Origenes” misread the siglum ℵ as the letter n.
- p. 29, first entry — “Index, p. XII, line 10”, not p. XI.
- p. 29, Justin’s address — printed nominative μισούμενοι καὶ ἐπηρεαζόμενοι retained rather than corrected to the genitive of the standard text.
- p. 30, “S. 7* Anmerk. 2 Z. 5 v. u.” — the word to be read is ἄθεοι; an earlier reading “Stow” was an OCR artefact.
- p. 30, Jodl reference — Gesch. d. Ethik² II, 1912, pp. 474 f., 713 f. (not 718 f.).
- p. 31, “Schlußkammer” — translated “closing bracket” (Schlußklammer), with the misprint noted.
- p. 32, Luke 4:16 — the reconstruction printed as Ναζαρὲδ with ⟨εἰσῆλθεν⟩ supplied in angle brackets, as in the original.
- p. 32, p. 229* list — the first passage is Luke 5:39 (matching item 1 on p. 33), not 6:39.
- p. 34, Arnobius — “the highest God creates only quod omnibus sit salutare”; the OCR “not quod” was a misreading of nur.
- p. 34, Ephrem — “The discourse called ‘of Domnus’”, transcribed by C. W. Mitchell, A. A. Bevan and F. C. Burkitt.
- pp. 34–35, Zacharias Rhetor — Harnack’s corrected rendering is present tense: “They do not hold themselves separate from us, as the Marcionites do” (halten, not hatten).
- p. 35, Photius — the second occurrence of the group name is printed Μαρκιανιστῶν, differing from Μαρκιωνιστῶν earlier in the same sentence; both retained as printed.
- Throughout — kirchlich never rendered “mainstream”; katholisch always “Catholic” in the historical sense; Harnack’s alternation of “M.” and “Marcion” preserved rather than normalized.
The whole translation was afterwards read a second time against the printed German page images, and twenty further readings were corrected in that pass; they are carried in the text above. Where the 1923 printing is itself defective — an anacoluthon, a misprinted siglum, a wrong cross-reference — the note says so rather than smoothing the German silently.