C. Investigations [pp. 221*–237*]
[Continuous critical excursus following directly on the Gospel reconstruction, on the same printed page as its close. Like the Apostolikon’s own “C. Untersuchungen,” this section is Harnack’s connected scholarly prose, not a verse-by-verse reconstruction with separate notes; it is translated here as continuous text, page by page, with Harnack’s footnotes collected at the end of the chapter under Notes and Apparatus.]
C. Investigations into Marcion’s Gospel
That Marcion’s Gospel is nothing other than what the judgment of the ancient church has claimed of it — namely, a [p. 222*] mutilated Luke,1 no more words need be wasted on that.2 But the textual recension that M. followed, and the question of how he understood this text apart from his tendentious corrections,3 require an investigation.4
Notes and Apparatus
- [p. 222*] That Hippolytus, who says this expressly in the Syntagma (see Pseudo-Tertullian, under “Cerdo,” Philaster, Haer. 45), nonetheless, in the Refutatio VII, 30, traces Marcion’s Gospel back to the Gospel of Mark, belongs among the various incomprehensible things that this work displays in relation to the Syntagma. Hippolytus must have been asleep when he wrote this down, or else the old man’s memory of the true state of affairs must have grown so dim that the short Gospel of Mark and “stump-fingered” Mark — so he calls him, alluding to an old tradition about him — became confused, in a muddled tertium comparationis, with the abridged Luke.
- Epiphanius, Haer. 42, 9: Οὗτος ἔχει εὐαγγέλιον μόνον τὸ κατὰ Λουκᾶν, περικεκομμένον ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς διὰ τὴν τοῦ σωτῆρος σύλληψιν καὶ τὴν ἔνσαρκον αὐτοῦ παρουσίαν. οὐ μόνον δὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἀπέτεμεν ὁ λυμηνάμενος ἑαυτὸν ‹μᾶλλον› ἤπερ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῦ τέλους καὶ τῶν μέσων πολλὰ περιέκοψε τῶν τῆς ἀληθείας λόγων, ἄλλα δὲ παρὰ γεγραμμένα προστέθεικεν [this is confirmed only to the most modest extent], μόνῳ δὲ κέχρηται τούτῳ τῷ χαρακτῆρι, τῷ κατὰ Λουκᾶν εὐαγγελίῳ [“This man has only the Gospel according to Luke, mutilated from the beginning on account of the conception of the Savior and his incarnate presence. And not only did he cut off the beginning — thereby ruining himself rather than the Gospel — but he also cut out much, both from the end and from the middle, of the words of truth, while adding other things contrary to what is written; and he makes use solely of this type of text, the Gospel according to Luke.”]
- These have already been sufficiently treated in the presentation above.
- From the words of the unknown Syriac anti-Marcionite polemicist — “... in the time of Pilate of Pontus, in that time when the Gospel was written” — one might infer that M. placed the composition of the Gospel in the time of Pilate. That would not be impossible, but the context of the passage makes it more likely that the author expressed himself ambiguously, and meant to say that, according to M., Christ had appeared only in the time of Pilate.