Three conventions run through this volume and are worth stating once in one place.
Page references. Harnack’s own pagination is preserved throughout. In the translation it appears as markers of the form [p. 12], placed where the printed page turns. In the afterword it appears in the running prose (“on his twelfth page,” “p. 13 note 3”) and always refers to the same printed pages. His footnote numbering restarts on each printed page, as it does in the original, and his notes are gathered immediately after the text of the page on which they stand. Notes added by the translator are labelled as such and are collected in the translator’s notes; the afterword’s own references are given in its prose.
The stake and the cross. Harnack wrote Kreuz and gekreuzigt, and the translation renders them “cross” and “crucified,” because that is what he wrote. The afterword, speaking in its author’s own voice, writes stake and staked, while preserving Harnack’s words inside every quotation from him. Both vocabularies therefore appear in this volume, and the difference between them is deliberate.
Three kinds of reading in the Evangelion. Where the afterword quotes Marcion’s gospel at a disputed point, it distinguishes three things that are easily confused. A reading may be attested for Marcion by an ancient witness who quotes or reports it. It may be reconstructed by modern scholarship (Harnack’s or anyone’s) from a mixture of attestation and inference about what Marcion would have wanted. Or it may be a True Testament editorial reading, adopted in preparing a continuous text for reading. These are not the same, and the True Testament text is not itself an ancient manuscript witness. The afterword says which of the three it is quoting whenever the question arises.
One instance of the third kind should be recorded here, since it bears on a passage the afterword discusses. The True Testament text of Colossians closes its greetings at 4:5 and does not carry the canonical instruction to have the letter read in the assembly of the Laodiceans. No ancient witness is known to attest the absence of that verse from Marcion’s Apostolikon, and the omission should be understood as a feature of the present reading text rather than as evidence about the Marcionite collection. Nothing in the afterword’s argument rests on it.