About this edition
This volume brings together, in what is believed to be the first complete scholarly English translation, Adolf von Harnack’s textual reconstructions of Marcion’s Bible: the Apostolikon (his edition of ten letters of Paul) and the Evangelion (his edition of the Gospel). Both reconstructions were originally published as critical appendices, Beilage III and Beilage IV, to Harnack’s Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1921). The 1924 second edition is the form normally cited in the scholarly literature; its Beilagen were revised and re-paginated. This translation follows the 1921 first-edition printing and has not, to the best of the editor’s knowledge, previously appeared in English as a complete scholarly edition, though the reconstructions have been cited by scholars of Marcion and of New Testament textual history for over a century.
The two reconstructions are presented here as a single continuous work, in Harnack’s own order (Apostolikon before Evangelion, matching Beilage III before Beilage IV), because together they document his full reconstruction of Marcion’s New Testament, not two unrelated books. Each part carries its own bibliographic note, describing its sources, method, and structure in full; readers wanting the complete picture of Marcion’s Bible should read both parts in sequence.
What is in Book One: The Apostolikon
Book One opens with a Bibliographic Note setting out the sources Harnack worked from and the principles by which he judged them. Harnack’s own introduction then explains the witnesses and the method of reconstruction, followed by three dedicated witness studies, on Tertullian, on the Dialogues of Adamantius, and on Epiphanius. These three chapters are the evidentiary foundation of everything that follows: every reading in the reconstructed text is ultimately a judgment about what one of these hostile reporters saw in front of him.
Then comes the reconstructed text of the ten letters, in Marcion’s order rather than the Catholic order: Galatians, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Romans, 1–2 Thessalonians, Laodiceans (= Ephesians), Colossians, Philippians, Philemon. Each letter is given with Harnack’s verse-keyed apparatus, so the reader can see for every verse which witness attests it, in what wording, and with what degree of confidence.
Two sets of Investigations follow. Investigations I classifies the kinds of textual variation Harnack found, and is the closest thing in his work to a statement of editorial theory. Between the two sets stands a chapter of its own:
The Marcionite Prologues to the Letters of Paul. Numerous Vulgate manuscripts preserve short prologues before the Pauline letters which derive from the Marcionite assemblies, and which the Catholic manuscript tradition carried forward for centuries without recognizing their origin. They are printed here in Harnack’s Latin text with English translation, including the reconstructed prologue to Laodiceans and the three prologues attached to the Pastorals, together with Harnack’s argument for their Marcionite provenance and his discussion of what they imply about the letter collection Marcion published. Because they are short and easy to lose inside a long critical appendix, they are given their own chapter in this edition.
Investigations II then takes up the order of the letters, the standing of the Pastorals, and Marcion’s relation to Acts and Revelation. Book One closes with the Translator’s Notes on the Apostolikon, an apparatus chapter gathering the notes on Harnack’s terminology, sigla, and individual difficult readings.
What is in Book Two: The Evangelion
Book Two follows the same shape. A Bibliographic Note describes the sources and the state of the evidence, and Harnack’s introduction surveys the witnesses to the Gospel.
The reconstructed Gospel text itself is the longest single stretch of the volume, and is presented here in twelve reading units that follow Harnack’s own Cap. sequence through Luke 4 to Luke 24. Harnack keys that sequence to Luke’s chapter divisions; the Roman numerals III through XXIV are Luke’s numbers, not a restarted Marcionite count. The division into reading units is editorial, made for reading and for print; no text has been rearranged, and each unit begins and ends on one of Harnack’s own page boundaries so that a page’s verse text and its apparatus are never separated.
Book Two closes with Harnack’s Investigations on the Gospel: an opening statement of the problem, then the character of the text Marcion used, then Marcion and the three other Gospels, and finally the appendix on Marcion’s Gospel and Tatian’s Diatessaron.
How to read the apparatus
A few of Harnack’s conventions are preserved here, and are worth knowing before starting.
- Starred page markers. Markers of the form [p. 39*] give Harnack’s own pagination of the Beilagen in the 1921 first edition, the printing used for this translation. The star is his, not ours; it distinguishes appendix pages from the main body of Marcion. The 1924 second edition is the form normally cited in the scholarly literature; its Beilagen were revised and re-paginated (the reconstructed Apostolikon text begins at p. 67* there, the reconstructed Evangelion at p. 183*). Starred numbers in this volume are therefore the 1921 numbers.
- Notes. Superscript numbers in the text link to the notes gathered at the end of each chapter. Harnack’s own numbering restarted on every printed page; here it runs continuously through each chapter, and every note carries its original starred page in brackets so that a reference to “note 3 on p. 47*” can still be located.
- Sigla and abbreviations. Harnack’s abbreviations for the witnesses (Tertullian, Adamantius, Epiphanius, and the manuscript families) are kept as he wrote them; the Translator’s Notes explain them.
- Words in ‹ › are added or supplied, as Harnack explains at each place.
- Continuation bridges. Phrases such as “continued on p. 40*” and “concluding the note from p. 39*” are Harnack’s, and are part of the scholarly apparatus rather than editorial additions. They are left exactly as written.
This is a working scholarly translation, prepared by W. C. Muenchow IV. Every page has been checked directly against 300 dpi images of the 1921 first-edition scan, not against OCR alone, and every section has undergone multiple dedicated verification-audit passes.
Second Edition, October 2026. For this second edition of the translation, the whole translation was read again against Harnack’s printed German, page by page, from 300 dpi images of the 1921 printing. Each page was compared line by line: the reconstructed text of Marcion, Harnack’s notes, and his critical apparatus. Every proposed change was then confirmed independently against the page image before it was made, and the finished chapters were checked twice more before they were published.
The revision brings the English closer to Harnack in four ways. First, the wording now follows his German more exactly where his argument turns on a single word, a negation, or the direction of a comparison, and the Greek and Latin he cites are given as he printed them. Second, the witness lists in the apparatus were checked reading by reading, so that each manuscript, version, and church father stands on the side of the variant where Harnack placed it; his siglum “ital.” now reads “Itala” (the Old Latin) throughout. Third, passages that had dropped out where a page turned have been restored, and notes that had drifted into the reconstructed text have been returned to the apparatus. Fourth, every note now sits under the starred page on which Harnack printed it, and the page markers follow the 1921 page breaks. Three Gospel chapter titles were also adjusted so that each names the chapters of Luke it actually contains.