Harnack’s second question comes in two halves: whether he has overestimated Marcion’s significance for the development of Christianity into the Catholic Church, and whether one may call him the creator of the New Testament. The canon half belongs here; the institution comes later. Bauer and von Soden both thought he had. He concedes on his twenty-first page that this is the kind of question in which “it is difficult to convince others, especially since old prejudices continue to work,” and he is right about that, though the prejudice does not all run one way.
His critics’ strongest card is that nothing in Marcion’s Bible was unprecedented, and Harnack plays it for them. On his twenty-second page he lists four presuppositions already in place before Marcion wrote. Since Paul, the historical scheme of two covenants of God was current in Christendom. Marcion found the fourfold canon of Gospels already in existence. In his time Pauline letters circulated alongside the Gospels and stood in high esteem, and Harnack adds in a footnote that this was so “both in the Great Church and among individual Gnostics,” pointing to Ptolemaeus’s letter to Flora. And in the services of worship, sections from the Gospels were already read alongside the Old Testament, with letters and apocalypses probably not excluded from liturgical reading. Scripture, apostolic writing, high esteem for Paul, public reading: all four are pre-Marcionite, and Harnack says so before anyone can say it to him.
Then comes the sentence the whole section turns on, and he sets it in emphasis: “But out of these four presuppositions very different things could have developed.” That is not an argument from origins but an argument from alternatives, and it is the only kind of argument that can settle a question like this. Ingredients do not entail a dish. What actually came into being, “a second, two-part canonical collection of books, of equal rank with the Old Testament (or superior to it)”, is, he says, “the last thing one would expect if one takes one’s stand in the first half of the second century,” because it means the greatest conceivable innovation over against the hitherto exclusive validity of the Old Testament as canonical littera scripta.
He is entitled to some impatience here, and he shows it. He tells us he had worked the possibilities of development out nine years earlier, in the sixth part of his Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, the study published in 1914 as Die Entstehung des Neuen Testaments und die wichtigsten Folgen der neuen Schöpfung, and he refers the reader to ten pages of it, with the dry remark that “the arguments there have so far not attracted the attention of the critics.” I take his word for what stands there; I have not read those pages. One can derive the Catholic New Testament from the four presuppositions, he allows, “but only with intermediate stages that first have to be constructed and that one does not need if one introduces M.’s creation here. Therefore one is obliged to do so.” Whether that last step is quite as obligatory as he makes it sound is a fair question. But the shape of the argument is sound, and nobody engaged it.
What Was Actually New
What was new, then, was not scripture and not apostolic authority. It was a bounded, two-part, published collection carrying an authorial principle; and it is the authorial principle that Harnack identifies most precisely. In a footnote on the same page he notes that Paul was at first, in the canon, “the apostle, to whom the others were then added.” Not one apostle among several but the apostolic voice, with the rest arriving later as company. And on his twenty-third page he names the move that follows from it: “the canonical identification ‘word of Paul = word of Christ’, which M. was the first to carry out.”
Von Soden’s objection to this is the best one available, and it is worth stating in his own words rather than in refutation. “The thought of apostolic authority that carries the New Testament canon is in any case pre-Marcionite, not created by M. but only restricted by him.” That is true, and Harnack grants it: the sentence “is certainly correct if apostolic authority in general is in question.” His answer is a distinction, and the distinction is the substance of this section. For the written canon, he argues, “the governing thought of apostolic authority is first demonstrable as a Catholic and antithetical thought in the Great Church.” Before that, only the authority of the Kyrios stood alongside the Old Testament, whether in his sayings or in the Gospels, with inspired writings of the most various kinds circulating alongside, of which only a part was apostolic. And then the formulation that makes the difference concrete: it is one thing to appeal early to words of Paul for edification and instruction, and quite another to form the principle that “we accept Paul and Peter as letter-writers just as we accept the Lord in the Gospels.” Between those two lies the identification of Paul’s word with Christ’s, and Harnack’s claim is that Marcion carried it out first.
He is honest about the limit of his own case. He will not confidently contradict the suggestion that the equation would have come about gradually in the Great Church even without Marcion’s precedent; he asks only “why should one eliminate M. here, when what is demonstrable in him is what was accomplished in the Church only a generation later.” That is the right register for a claim of this kind, and it is a good deal more modest than the way his thesis is usually reported.
The Weakest Link
The weakest link in the chain is the argument from Justin, and it should be said so. Harnack rests part of his case on negative testimony: he finds in the Dialogue with Trypho “neither Pauline letters nor Christian writings at all as parts of a New Testament,” and he reports himself astonished by von Soden’s flat contrary assertion that “Justin’s Dialogue surely does attest the writings of the New Testament in a dignity for him not inferior to that of the Old Testament.” Two scholars reading the same text and reporting opposite impressions is not a stalemate that can be resolved by repetition, and Harnack does not resolve it. The argument from silence is weaker here than the argument from alternatives, and the section stands better without leaning on it.
The Shape of the Collection
Now the shape of the thing, which Harnack does not discuss and which seems to me to matter as much as its boundedness.
The Apostolikon is ten letters in a fixed order, and it opens with Galatians. That is unlikely to be a chronological decision and it is certainly not an accident of length. Galatians is the letter in which the question of a rival message and a rival authority is the question, where an alternative announcement is denied even the name of a message, and where, in the sentence quoted earlier, the standard by which any claim is judged is placed outside every possible claimant: “Even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim a message contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let him be condemned” (Galatians 1:7 TT). Put that first and you have told the reader what kind of collection he is holding before he has read a line of doctrine. A collection that opened with Romans would be a body of teaching. A collection that opens with Galatians is a contested deposit.
Laodiceans and Colossians stand together in the sequence, and the letters themselves supply the reason: Colossians sends its greetings on to Laodicea, and Paul reports of Epaphras “that he has great concern for you and for those in Laodicea and Hierapolis” (Colossians 4:4 TT). The two letters know about each other. The simplest explanation is that whoever ordered the collection was reading it as a set of documents with relations among them, not as a shelf.
And then Philemon, which is the detail I find most persuasive about the whole arrangement. It is short, it is private, it concerns one runaway slave, and it settles no doctrinal question whatever. A collection assembled to prosecute a theological programme would have dropped it. It was kept: addressed to a man, his household and “the assembly in your house” (Philemon 1:2 TT), with its thanks for a love and faith shown “toward all the holy ones” (Philemon 1:5 TT). The retention of Philemon tells against every theory in which the Apostolikon is a doctrinal instrument first. The likeliest reason is that somebody kept what Paul wrote because Paul wrote it.
There is one further mark of a published collection rather than a private archive, and it is in the letters. “I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This is the sign in every letter; this is how I write” (2 Thessalonians 3:9 TT). A signature is for readers who do not know the sender’s face, and a sign “in every letter” presumes a plurality of letters travelling. Harnack noticed the same thing from the other end, remarking in a footnote on his twenty-seventh page that Marcion’s Bible acted powerfully as such: “as a model and also through its prologues.” Prologues are for a book.
Which brings me to the one formulation of Harnack’s in this part of the pamphlet that I think should be refused. On his twenty-first page he writes that “the assertion that Marcion was the first ‘Catholic’ Christian, although as a reformer he wanted to tear Christendom out of the development toward Catholicism, is no paradox, if by ‘Catholic’ one thinks of the founding of the Church upon the New Testament and upon a circumscribed faith, and of the earthly execution of her plan.”
It is a brilliant sentence and it costs him more than he notices. He is aware of the strain, because he adds a footnote conceding that he “need not expressly recall the sharply anti-Catholic elements in M.’s Christianity that stand over against this.” But the definition does the damage. If “Catholic” means founding a church on a bounded scripture and a circumscribed faith, then the word has been made to mean something Marcion did, and the conclusion follows by stipulation. Publishing a bounded scripture is not a Catholic act. What made the later thing Catholic was not that it had a canon but that the canon was vested in an episcopal institution with a rule of faith, a succession and a machinery for exclusion; and how far each of those was built against Marcion is the subject of the last section. Harnack has taken a formal feature the two shared and used it to name Marcion after his opponents. The better formulation is the one he half-supplies himself: what Marcion did was demonstrable in him a generation before it was accomplished in the Church. That is a claim about priority and influence, and it does not require calling him the first Catholic.
The Practical Upshot
For a confession that still receives both halves together, the practical upshot is narrower than the historical argument and more demanding. The Evangelion and the Apostolikon are not two collections that happen to be bound in one volume. They were published as a pair, and the pairing is itself a claim: that the one who is proclaimed in the gospel is the one whom the apostle expounds, and that neither is to be read through the older scriptures. What the True Testament receives is not a canon but that arrangement: one gospel, ten letters, in this order, beginning with the letter that puts the question of a rival message first. What that pairing meant for the reading of Paul, and what it meant to be rescued rather than merely pardoned, is the next question.