Bibliographic Note
German original: Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott. Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1921 (first edition); second, improved and enlarged edition, 1924. This translation follows the 1921 first edition. Beilage III: Das Apostolikon Marcions, pp. 39*–156* of the separately paginated Beilagen in that printing. The 1924 second edition is the form normally cited in the scholarly literature; its Beilagen were revised and re-paginated (the reconstructed letter text begins at p. 67* there). Starred page numbers in this volume are the 1921 numbers.
Contents of Beilage III, in Harnack’s order: a general introduction on the witnesses and method (pp. 39*–64*, headed “A. Einleitung: Die Zeugen und die Methode der Wiederherstellung” (“A. Introduction: The Witnesses and the Method of Reconstruction”) and now translated in full below), followed by the reconstruction proper, letter by letter: Galatians (65*–77*), 1 Corinthians (77*–94*), 2 Corinthians (94*–100*), Romans (100*–109*), 1–2 Thessalonians (109*–112*), Laodiceans [= Ephesians] (112*–119*), Colossians (119*–122*), Philippians (122*–124*), and Philemon (124*, a single prose paragraph). All ten letters of this reconstruction are complete, audited, and translated below. Every boundary page number in this list is confirmed directly against page images, not merely estimated from running headers. (Each letter after Galatians begins on the same printed page on which the previous one ends, so these ranges overlap by one page rather than running back-to-back. Marcion’s Apostolikon did not include the Pastoral Epistles; 1–2 Thessalonians do receive brief, dedicated treatment in this appendix, immediately after Romans (see below). Marcion’s own copy of Laodiceans/Ephesians was titled “To the Laodiceans,” per Tertullian’s explicit testimony (see the Translator’s Notes for that letter).) Immediately after Philemon, on the same printed page (124*), Harnack’s text continues into a general excursus, “C. Untersuchungen” (“C. Investigations”, pp. 124*–156*), surveying Marcion’s text as a whole: categories of textual variants, the Marcionite Prologues to the Pauline epistles, the letter order, the Pastoral Epistles, and Marcion’s rejection of Acts and Revelation, rather than proceeding letter by letter; this excursus is a different genre of material from the reconstruction proper and is translated in full below, immediately following Philemon. The introduction itself (39*–64*) is organized in three numbered subsections: “1. Tertullian” (42*–54*), “2. Die Dialoge des Adamantius” / “The Dialogues of Adamantius” (54*–62*), and “3. Epiphanius” (62*–64*), surveying, witness by witness, how each preserves Marcion’s text and with what reliability.
Method of reconstruction: Harnack builds up the Marcionite text of each verse from four kinds of witness: (1) Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem (cited by book and chapter, e.g. “Tert. V, 3”), who argues against Marcion’s readings and thereby preserves many of them, usually in Latin only; (2) the Dialogue of Adamantius (a Greek anti-Marcionite dialogue of ca. 300, cited as “Adamant.” or “Dial.”, by book and chapter), preserved complete only in a Latin translation by Rufinus but partly also in the original Greek; (3) Epiphanius, Panarion 42, who excerpts and refutes Marcion’s text clause by clause (cited by page and line of the Holl edition, e.g. “Epiph. p. 120.156”); (4) Origen/Jerome, chiefly Jerome’s Commentaries, which draw on Origen’s lost commentaries and occasionally report a Marcionite reading. Where a verse or clause is attested only in Latin, Harnack gives the Latin and reconstructs the underlying Greek only when he judges it reasonably certain; where the Greek itself is directly attested, he prints it. Sections of a letter for which no witness reports either the presence or the wording of Marcion’s text are marked unbezeugt (“unattested”); Harnack then gives his own judgment on whether the passage was probably present unchanged, probably altered, or probably absent, always as a considered inference, not as a claim to certainty. This method applies uniformly across all ten letters and is stated once here rather than repeated per letter.
Source used for this translation: a public-domain scan of the 1921 first edition on the Internet Archive (item marciondasevange00harn_0), checked directly against page images (300 dpi renderings of the scan), not against OCR alone, letter by letter as each is translated.
Page markers: original printed starred pagination is marked [p. 65*] … [p. 77*] and so on continuously through the book, following the convention already used for starred references in New Studies on Marcion.
Notes: footnotes are Harnack’s own critical apparatus. They are collected at the end of each chapter under the heading Notes and Apparatus and numbered straight through the chapter, and most begin with the starred page of the 1921 printing on which they stand. Greek is reproduced as printed, with a bracketed English gloss added by the translator at first occurrence of a clause; Latin quotations are likewise reproduced as printed (in italics), with an English translation supplied immediately after. Anything added by the translator beyond a bracketed gloss is labelled Translator’s note.
Verification: every letter in this part was verified line by line against the 1921 page images after translation, and a record of that verification is retained by the translator.