Investigations IV: Marcion and the Three Other Gospels

2. Marcion and the Three Other Gospels.

That Marcion knew Matthew, Mark, and John — a question still disputed two generations ago — no longer needs to be proven, given the present state of the history of the canon and of the text.¹ But conservative criticism was also right in this, that M. expressly grounded his rejection of these Gospels in his “Antitheses.”² It is not so simple, however, to form a picture of how he stood toward the Gospel that he chose as the foundation of his own Gospel, namely Luke. Had he considered it, like the others, a Gospel falsified from the beginning, one cannot understand why he chose precisely this Gospel, and attached himself to it so closely; in that case he would have had to compile, from all four Gospels, [p. 231*] —whatever seemed to him serviceable, and compose his Gospel as a kind of “Diatessaron” or “Diatrion.” But if he held it to be a Gospel originally correct (just as he held the Pauline letters to be originally correct letters), why did he suppress the name of its author, who would after all have had to be, for him, a high authority?³ But he not only suppressed him — he also, most probably, struck out Paul’s friendly mention of Luke in Colossians 4:14, and expressly rejected the Acts of the Apostles (see above, pp. 121*, 152*). From the dilemma that presents itself here, there is only one way out: M. must have assumed that Luke’s Gospel, in its original form, was a heavenly gift of Christ to the Church, which had come to it in some mysterious way;⁴ but that Luke, the Judaizing author of Acts, had falsified this pure Gospel, and that he, Marcion, had been raised up to expunge these falsifications again. Never and nowhere did M. claim that he had rediscovered the unfalsified Gospel in some existing copy; he claimed, always, only that he had restored it. Behind the Gospel, then, as he presented it to the Church, there stands no apostolic authority (or only an indirect one, insofar as Paul acknowledged it as his own Gospel), but rather Christ, from whom the Church has it, and Marcion. Only this conception does justice to the testimonies of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, as well as to the simple title: Εὐαγγέλιον [“Gospel”]. This state of affairs also explains why later Marcionites came to think of Christ himself as the author, or of Paul (see above).

[p. 232*] But that M., from among the four Gospels, chose that of Luke, and saw in it alone the — admittedly falsified — Gospel of Christ and of Paul, even though Luke was, after all, just as much a “Judaizer” as the other evangelists, is probably grounded in the character of this Gospel (unless Luke had simply been the first Gospel to reach Pontus, and he preferred it for that reason). We may assume that he examined the four Gospels very closely before he made his decision. The “Gentile-Christian” and ascetic character of the third Gospel, as against the first and second — once the first three chapters of the work had been struck out — must have appealed to him; and Mark, too, incidentally, M. could have made serviceable to his purposes without much greater difficulty. Before the fourth Gospel, however, he had to shrink back, on account of the prologue, which must have been in the highest degree offensive to him, and, had he struck it out, he would soon have run into the wedding at Cana and other things that were antipathetic to him. That the book was rooted in the sublimated spirit of that late Judaism so repugnant to M., and was full of allegories, which he rejected, made it impossible for him to follow it. From Irenaeus III, 11, 2 (“Secundum Marcionem et eos qui similes sunt ei neque mundus per logon factus est neque in sua venit, sed in aliena,” “according to Marcion and those like him, the world was not made through the Logos, nor did he come into his own, but into what was alien to him”) one cannot conclude with certainty that M. gave, in the Antitheses, a critique of the prologue of John’s Gospel; but it is not improbable.

The rejection of the three Gospels does not, in itself, exclude a priori the possibility that M. incorporated one saying or another from them into his own Gospel, or that, in shaping his sayings, he took their testimony into account here and there.⁵ The latter assumption must, indeed, remain open, although, as we have seen, at least the great majority of the passages in which M.’s text agrees with Matthew (Mark) against Luke are to be explained by conformations that had already taken place before M. undertook his tendency-critical work. Nevertheless [p. 233*] — there is nothing against the assumption that, among the considerable number of conformations that are attested only by M. and not by other witnesses to the Western text, there are also some that M. himself introduced, even though one is unable to identify them as such.

Beyond this, however, Hahn has taken great pains to demonstrate that whole verses from the other Gospels were also received by M. These efforts no longer carry the weight they once did; for ultimately they were meant to serve as proof that M. already found the four Gospels present in the Church. Few today will still dispute this; but the question remains important nonetheless, whether M. really did borrow anything from the three other Gospels.

Here, however, even Zahn — who would have liked to find Matthew-verses in M.’s Gospel — has acknowledged⁶ that the three passages from Matthew that alone could come into consideration, namely ch. 1:23 combined with 2:11 (in relation to Isa. 7:14 and 8:4), further 5:17 and 19:12ff, were not taken up by him into the Gospel, but that he took issue with them in the Antitheses instead.⁷ It was only later Marcionites who took the words (5:17), which their master had expressly designated as an addition foreign to the true Gospel,⁸ and reversed them into their opposite, incorporating them into the Gospel (οὐκ ἦλθον πληρῶσαι τὸν νόμον ἀλλὰ καταλῦσαι, “I have not come to fulfill the law, but to abolish it”). This is attested both by the Marcionite Marcus in Adamantius⁹ and by Isidore of Pelusium; the [p. 234*] — latter [Isidore] moreover indicates the point in the Gospel at which (approximately) the interpolation took place.¹⁰ M. himself, incidentally, had prepared the way for this insertion through his own addition in ch. 23:2, where he has Jesus’s accusers say: “We found this man ... dissolving the law and the prophets” (τοῦτον εὕρομεν ... καταλύοντα τὸν νόμον καὶ τοὺς προφήτας). Elsewhere, too, later Marcionites probably inserted a couple of additions from Matthew. This is fairly certain with regard to Matthew 20:20ff; for if, according to Origen, Marcionites declared that Paul sits in heaven at the right hand of God, and M. at the left (Hom. XXV on Luke, vol. V, p. 181f), they can hardly have attached this fantasy to any other text.

According to Zahn,¹¹ Marcion himself is supposed to have taken up four passages from John’s Gospel into his own Gospel, or to prove dependent on them; but the proof does not suffice for any of these passages. Because M., in Luke 11:13 [read: 11:3], placed σου (“your”) after ἄρτον (“bread”) in the fourth petition [of the Lord’s Prayer], and thereby prescribed the spiritual interpretation, he is supposed to have been influenced by John 6:33. This combination may be left to rest on its own. In the Dialogues of Adamantius, John 13:34 (“A new commandment I give you, that you love one another, as the Father has loved you”) is cited at II, 16, and John 15:19 (“If you were of this world, the world would love its own”) at II, 20, by the Marcionite Marcus (in the first case expressly as from his own Bible), with small deviations that have a Marcionite ring to them. It is therefore to be assumed that these words stood in a later Marcionite Bible; but the proof cannot be furnished that M. himself already inserted them. Finally, Chrysostom reports that the Marcionites, in their interpretation of Philippians 2:6f., recognized in the footwashing the assumption of the servant-form of the Redeemer.¹² Here too one has no guarantee that M. [p. 235*] — himself had taken up the footwashing into his Gospel — just as little as one may conclude, from the Marcionites’ fantasy in Origen that M. sits in heaven at the left hand of Christ, that M. himself had taken up Matthew 20:20ff into his Gospel (see above). It is not impossible that he treated the footwashing in the Antitheses.

Marcion’s Gospel is thus exclusively a falsified Gospel of Luke; M. has taken up absolutely no material from any other Gospel, even though, in the conformations (with Matthew), some passages may go back to him. In these cases he must have assumed that the falsifier of the genuine Gospel, Luke, had altered something that happened, in the Judaizing Gospel of Matthew, to escape the falsification. But everything that might perhaps come into consideration here is without significance.

This purity of M.’s Gospel from all “apocryphal” material is very remarkable.¹³ How different the situation is with Justin, or in the Second Epistle of Clement! The exclusive energy with which he created the New Testament canon of 1+10 writings shows itself also in the firm restriction to a single source with regard to the gospel material. This procedure — which must be considered together with the exclusion of prophecies and apocalypses of every kind, as well as the rejection of allegorical interpretation — betrays the firm intention to counter all [p. 236*] uncertainties, and to give the proclamation of the new religion a secure foundation.

But since M. could not claim infallibility for his Biblical text, the alterations of the text began at once within his church — that is, they continued. This was so notorious and offensive that even the thoroughgoing opponent of Christianity, Celsus, a few years after M.’s death, took disapproving notice of it, and Tertullian expressly remarks that this “improvement of the Bible” was still being practiced, indeed that even the polemical disputations or writings against the Catholics gave the Marcionites occasion for it.¹⁴ On M.’s tendentious corrections, see the discussion above in the main part.