The Witnesses: 3. Epiphanius

3. Epiphanius.

Epiphanius’s contribution to our knowledge of M.’s Apostolikon is not extensive: a considerable time before he had worked out the chapter (42) of his Panarion against M., he had once — where? in Cyprus? in Palestine? — gotten hold of that Apostolikon together with the accompanying Gospel, and had excerpted from the latter 78 passages, from the former 40, in order to refute the heretic from his own works¹ — a plan already conceived before him by Irenaeus, and carried out by Tertullian. In making these excerpts, however, he had confined himself to six of the ten letters (no excerpts from 1–2 Thessalonians, Philippians, Philemon) and had noted only a single citation from Colossians as well. He had not, at that time, carried out his intention of refutation. Now he returned to these notes, incorporated them into his work, and appended to each citation a more or less detailed refutation, repeating the citation once more verbatim as he did so. He did not, in doing so, take a fresh look into M.’s Bible — either he no longer had it to hand, or he considered a renewed inspection unnecessary. The result was numerous misunderstandings with regard to his old notes. What needed to be disentangled here [p. 63*] has been accomplished by Zahn (loc. cit., II, pp. 409–419) so completely that one may simply refer to his investigation². The worst misunderstanding was that he himself no longer knew why he had omitted those four letters, and now claimed, with incredible carelessness, that this had happened because M. had falsified them beyond hope! A second gross misunderstanding arose from the fact that, in M., the letter to the Ephesians is called “the letter to the Laodiceans,” and that Epiphanius must have noted this at the time of his earlier record; but now, owing to the incompleteness of his record, he arrived at the view that M. had, in his Bible, both a letter to the Ephesians and a letter to the Laodiceans, gave the greater part of the citations under the former title but one under the latter, then imagined that M. had taken up only “parts” of a letter to the Laodiceans — he had heard from somewhere that there really was an apocryphal letter to the Laodiceans — and, indeed, finally came close to the absurdity that M.’s Bible had consisted, in general, only of excerpts serving as proof of his heresy³. He caused a third confusion with regard to the order of the Pauline letters in M.; but against this it may suffice to establish that he read them, in the same copy that had once been available to him, in the same number (ten) and in the same order in which M. had arranged them — only Epiphanius always places Philippians after Philemon. This must have been what the codex offered him; later Marcionites will have placed Philemon immediately after Colossians, where it belongs.

Since, in his refutations of the 40 citations, Epiphanius could add nothing of value for the text, we have to do with the citations alone. That the two records do not agree perfectly was, in the case of Epiphanius, to be expected from the outset, even had the copyists transmitted the texts flawlessly. Yet the differences are slight, and have been dealt with in Holl’s edition.

The citations fall into two classes: a not very extensive one, in which Epiphanius reports M.’s falsifications of the text, and [p. 64*] the other, in which he has extracted passages in order to refute M. by means of them. That former class is naturally the more reliable; in the latter, Epiphanius was not concerned with absolute precision, and at some points he even breaks off the citation with “and so forth” [καὶ τὰ ἑξῆς].

However narrow, then, the material is that Epiphanius has contributed to our knowledge of M.’s Apostolikon, it is nevertheless valuable both where it confirms the text reported by Tertullian or Adamantius, and where it brings an otherwise unattested biblical passage in M.’s wording. That the text had undergone some changes since Tertullian read it was to be expected a priori — not only through the fault of copyists, but because we also know that the Marcionites deliberately altered the text, or rather continued their master’s work.

At not a few places, two of the three witnesses agree excellently with one another in their reproduction of the Marcionite text, and then we have complete certainty (passages attested by all three are rare). Discrepancies do not always point to the hypothesis that the Marcionite text was altered over time and locally, but sometimes also to the assumption that the witnesses are unreliable; but on Tertullian’s reliability one can, as a rule, build.

The arrangement of the reconstruction of the Apostolikon that follows scarcely needs any explanation. Tertullian’s text is given after the edition of Kroymann (1906), where I was able to follow it; that of Adamantius after van de Sande Bakhuyzen (1901; the chapters are those of Rufinus’s translation); that of Epiphanius after Holl, whom I was permitted to use from the page proofs. Following Tertullian, one would properly have to reconstruct first the Latin Apostolikon of M.; but this would have led to great repetitions and would, in any case, have yielded nothing of consequence. What has been preserved for us only in the Latin Apostolikon is easily seen from the apparatus. In the case of the letter to the Galatians I have attempted to give a text that is, to some extent, continuous; with the remaining letters this was not possible.

[This closes “A. Einleitung” (pp. 39*–64*). A short appendix (“Anhang”) and then the reconstruction proper, beginning with Galatians, follow immediately below, both on p. 65*.]