True Testament

    Chapter 1 of 15

    A. Introduction: The Witnesses and the Method of Reconstruction

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    A. Introduction: The Witnesses and the Method of Reconstruction [pp. 39*–64*]

    [p. 39*] Marcion’s Apostolikon.1

    A. Introduction: The Witnesses and the Method of Reconstruction.

    Zahn (History of the New Testament Canon, vol. II, p. 449) was right to say that no reasonably penetrating attempt to reconstruct the text of the Marcionite Apostolikon had been made before his own work (loc. cit., pp. 495–529). As a forerunner, only Hilgenfeld2 could at all be taken [p. 40*] into consideration — one who at least drew certain foundational lines of the reconstruction correctly; but since he did not take into account the general textual history of the Pauline letters, and moreover remained caught in a number of prejudices — even though he has the merit of having refuted the Baurian tendency-criticism on this point3 — his achievement still remained very imperfect. Meyboom’s investigation and determination of the Marcionite text of Galatians, however, marked a step backward, all the worse in that here tendency-criticism, paired with patchy scholarship, made its return4.

    Zahn has not only put research on firm ground by ascertaining the correct principles for the reconstruction, but has also carried out the work itself with well-known care and circumspection, so that every subsequent investigation can, on many points, only be a revision and continuation of his results5. That such an investigation is nevertheless still necessary, the following pages will demonstrate. It is added to this that Zahn, through the impractical form in which he has presented his results, has made it extraordinarily difficult for the reader to become truly acquainted with the Marcionite text: it is true that he has printed the deviations from the original text — though these, too, not always in full — but otherwise has only given [p. 41*] references (with verse-numbers and various kinds of brackets) to the customary text. The reader must therefore laboriously assemble for himself, word for word, what has been preserved of M.’s text, first consulting a critical edition of the Bible. Whoever does not take this trouble gets no picture at all of the Marcionite Apostolikon.

    The need for a revision and continuation of Zahn’s foundational work follows not only from the discovery of the Marcionite Prologues to the Pauline letters, made independently of one another by de Bruyne6 and Corssen7, and from the text-critical works of the latter, of von Soden, and of Lietzmann8, concerning the Western biblical text, but also from the recognition that Zahn, in his critical assessment of the two oldest principal witnesses for the Marcionite text, did not recognize what is correct, or the true state of affairs, on two main points. It is added to this that, despite all his diligence, he has nevertheless still left a gleaning to be done with regard to the material.

    The three principal witnesses for the text of the Marcionite Apostolikon are Tertullian, Adamantius, and Epiphanius. A fourth principal witness would be Origen, if we possessed his works in their entirety in the original; for he demonstrably had a copy of the Marcionite Apostolikon in hand, and made diligent use of it, not only in the exegesis of the Pauline letters, but elsewhere as well. But today we must gather together his reports from the plagiarisms of Jerome — namely, his Commentaries on several of the Pauline letters — and from the sparse remains of the Origen-works preserved in the original. The yield is not at all small, and is especially important in content; it lets us recognize what we have lost9. Other witnesses, such as Ephraem and Chrysostom, come into consideration only through a few contributions.

    Notes and Apparatus

    1. [p. 39*] (Note anchored to the title.) The investigation of M.’s Apostolikon had to be placed ahead of that of the Gospel, because it is more expedient for the critical questions requiring settlement to be discussed first in connection with the former. It is, moreover, probable that M. himself first “purified” the Pauline letters, and only afterward the Gospel, even though the two were published together; for, once it was recognized that Paul sharply distinguishes the God of the Law from that of the Gospel, the assumption of interpolations had to impose itself on the letters with compelling necessity. Numerous passages strictly contradict this; if M. did not wish to become a sophist and an allegorist, he had to remove them, and with this a fixed principle of removal was at the same time given. With the Gospel matters lay more difficult. Are all the Gospels merely falsified — hence, in part, still genuine? Or are all the Gospels entirely spurious? The middle solution that M. arrived at did not by any means present itself as a matter of course (to reject three Gospels entirely, and to purify one), and can only have been the result of repeated deliberation. From the letters, however, a fixed principle of removal was now also given.
    2. Hilgenfeld, Das Apostolikon Marcions (Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie, vol. 25, 1855, pp. 426–484). Semler began the investigations, hinting at conclusions and leading onto a wrong path. At once the question of Marcion’s Gospel came so strongly to the fore that, in the works of Löffler (1794), Schelling (1795), Arneth (1809), Neander (1818), Hahn (1823/24), Ritschl (1846), Baur, and Volkmar (1850/52), among others, the [p. 40*] Apostolikon received only quite inadequate attention (most fully, though most consistently in its wrongheadedness, in Ritschl, who later, however, retracted his positions). Lachmann could not, therefore, have taken the Marcionite readings into account in his edition of the New Testament, even had he wished to; for, apart from a few principal passages, they were unknown at that time.
    3. Hilgenfeld recognized that M.’s text is not the original one, but has the canonical text as its basis, even though he still makes a few qualifications.
    4. Meyboom, Marcion en de Marcionieten, 1888. Meyboom attempted to reconstruct the text of the Marcionite Galatians in the Theologisch Tijdschrift, 1887, pp. 382ff., 451ff.
    5. In the Prolegomena to his edition of the New Testament, von Soden, without new investigations of his own, took his stand on the ground of Zahn’s results and attempted to make them fruitful for textual criticism (I, 2, 1906, pp. 1924ff.; I, 3, 1910, pp. 2028ff.). But he brought no clarity as to what the Marcionite readings actually are.
    6. [p. 41*] In the Revue Bénédictine, January 1907.
    7. In the Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, vol. 10, 1909, pp. 1ff., 97ff.
    8. Erklärung des Römerbriefs [Commentary on Romans], 2nd ed., 1919, pp. 14ff. and elsewhere. Riggenbach, too, and Zahn himself (in his later-published commentaries on the Pauline letters), have advanced the text-critical problems.
    9. Here too the credit belongs to Zahn for having been the first to demonstrate and make use of the rich Origenistic material for M. drawn from Jerome (see Kanonsgeschichte II, pp. 426ff.). Compare my treatises “Der kirchengeschichtliche Ertrag der exegetischen Arbeiten des Origenes” [“The Church-Historical Yield of Origen’s Exegetical Works”] [Texte und Untersuchungen, vol. 42, pts. 3 (1918) and 4 (1919)]. In the latter, compare especially the appendix: “Origenistic Material of Church-Historical Significance in Jerome’s Commentaries on Philemon, Galatians, Ephesians, and Titus.”