Philemon [p. 124*]
[Beginning on the same printed page as the close of Philippians above. The shortest letter of all — Harnack devotes only a single paragraph of prose to it, with no verse-by-verse reconstruction, because the letter survived untouched.]
This letter was not damaged by M.; for Tertullian remarks (V, 21): “‘This epistle alone benefited from its own brevity, so that it escaped the falsifying hands of Marcion. I wonder, however, that when he received letters written to a single person, he rejected the two [letters] to Timothy and the one to Titus, composed concerning church order. He was eager, I suppose, even to falsify the number of the epistles.’” Following this (in this case, exceptionally, not following Origen), Jerome, in the Preface to his Commentary on Philemon: “‘And since we have made mention of Marcion, let them be taught, at least on Marcion’s authority, that the epistle to Philemon is Paul’s — [Marcion] who, though he either rejected the rest of his epistles or altered and mangled certain things in them (see Tertullian, Against Marcion I, 1), did not dare to lay his hand upon this one alone, because its own brevity defended it.’” Thus Epiphanius’s remark (p. 182) — “‘From this [letter] to Philemon we have set forth nothing, because it lies entirely and thoroughly distorted with him’” — is, in its stated justification, groundless, and rests on the same error as the remarks concerning 1 and 2 Thessalonians and Philippians (see above).
[This completes Harnack’s letter-by-letter reconstruction of Marcion’s Apostolikon (pp. 65*–124*). Harnack’s text continues immediately, on this same printed page, into a general critical section headed “C. Untersuchungen” (“C. Investigations”) — a concluding excursus, not organized letter by letter, that surveys Marcion’s text as a whole. It is translated in full below, page by page, in the same manner as the letters above.]