Harnack’s pamphlet is a reply, and a reply is a crowded room. Four people are talking in the pages you have just read, and four will be talking in the pages that follow. It is worth knowing who they are before anyone starts arguing.
The first is Harnack himself. He is answering critics of his 1921 monograph, and he is doing it in a hurry: thirty-six pages, four questions, and then eight pages of corrections to a book most of his readers had open beside them. When he speaks in his own voice he is direct and often generous. He marks the moment he takes the floor back with three words on his seventh page: “Thus far Bauer.”
The second is those critics. Hans von Soden, Walter Bauer, Grejdanus and others occupy most of Harnack’s first six pages, sometimes quoted at length and sometimes summarized so smoothly that a reader can lose the seam. This matters more than it sounds. Some of the harshest judgments in the pamphlet (that Marcion was closed to guilt, that his righteous God is simply the bad God under another name, that his soteriology is dilettantism) are not Harnack’s. He is reporting them in order to answer them. Harnack even warns us that the emphases inside those long quotations are his own additions, not his opponents’. I will name the speaker every time, because the whole argument turns on it.
The third voice is the hundred years since 1923. Some of what Harnack took as settled is now genuinely open, and one question, the relationship between Marcion’s Evangelion and canonical Luke, has been reopened so thoroughly that no honest treatment can leave it where he left it. I will say so when it happens, and I will not pretend that every development since has been in our favour. Some has not.
The fourth voice is mine, and you should know what it is. I am not looking at Marcion the way one looks at a fossil. I receive the Evangelion and the ten-letter Apostolikon as scripture. The Good Father is not a historical position I am describing; he is the one I confess. That is a declared commitment, not a concealed one, and declaring it does not license me to bend Harnack into a shape he never held or to walk past evidence that cuts against me. A confession that can only survive by being protected from the sources is not worth confessing. So Harnack will be allowed to speak in his own categories, at length, before I answer him in mine; and where he is right and I would rather he were not, I will say that too.
A Note on Vocabulary
One note on words. The translation you have read renders Harnack’s Kreuz and gekreuzigt as “cross” and “crucified,” because that is what he wrote and the translation is not mine to adjust. When I speak in my own voice I write stake and staked. Both vocabularies will appear in this volume. That is not an inconsistency; it is the difference between quoting a man and agreeing with him.
The Wish, Left on the Table
There is one more thing to put on the table now and leave there. On his twenty-fourth page Harnack quotes the closing sentence of his own monograph: “One can only wish that in the choir of those who seek God, Marcionites should be found again today too!” He was attacked for it. He replied, with some exasperation, that the context made it beyond doubt that he rejected the fundamental idea of Marcionite Christianity, and that he was nonetheless supposed to have become a Marcionite. The wish and the disclaimer sit in the same paragraph, and I am not going to resolve them here. That is the last thing this afterword will do, and it is the reason it exists.
What Comes First
What I want to do first is simpler. Before we can weigh Harnack’s judgments about Marcion’s theology, his Bible, his reading of Paul, or his effect on the Great Church, we have to understand what kind of man he thought he was dealing with. Harnack’s answer to that question is the best thing in the pamphlet, and almost nobody quotes it.