Chapter V. Variants, and alleged alterations

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Chapter V

Marcion’s Gospel Compared with the Gospel of Luke

As we pass to the examination of the individual differences between the two Gospels, we can, in agreement with the earlier critics, distinguish two classes of them: namely, insignificant and indifferent differences, to which scribal errors and variants belong; and such differences as have hitherto been regarded as alterations and mutilations by Marcion.

A. Variants and Scribal Errors

In Luke 5:14 the canonical text reads: προσένεγκε περὶ τοῦ καθαρισμοῦ σου. [Offer (the sacrifice) for your cleansing.] Tertullian cites from Marcion’s Gospel: offer munus. [offer the gift.] (chapter 9, p. 209.) In Epiphanius, on the other hand, it reads (Refutation 1, p. 322 D): κἂν ἀποκόψῃς τὸ δῶρον. [even if you cut off the gift.] Epiphanius’s statement is evidently false, whether he had in mind the reading of Matthew 8:4 or had also read that reading in Luke. For Tertullian’s testimony secures that reading in Marcion’s text, in which the whole verse shows a striking agreement with Matthew against Luke. Compare:

[Marcion: “Go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift which Moses commanded.” Matthew: “Go, show yourself to the priest and offer the gift which Moses commanded.” Luke: “Go away, show yourself to the priest and offer (the sacrifice) for your cleansing, as Moses commanded.”]

This divergence, however, has no dogmatic significance, since the parallel texts could easily

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be exchanged for one another. — In the same verse Marcion further read, instead of εἰς μαρτύριον αὐτοῖς [for a testimony to them], εἰς μαρτύριον ὑμῖν [for a testimony to you] (Tertullian, p. 210; Epiphanius, scholion 1), which is also found in various manuscripts of Luke.

In Luke 6:17 Marcion read, instead of κατέβη μετ᾽ αὐτῶν [he came down with them], ἐν αὐτοῖς [among them] (Epiphanius, Refutation 4; the words ἐν αὐτῷ [in him] in scholion 4 are a scribal error): a variant.

Luke 6:23: πατέρες αὐτῶν. [their fathers.] — Tertullian (chapter 15, p. 236): patres eorum. [their fathers.] Epiphanius (scholion 6): πατέρες ὑμῶν. [your fathers.] Probably only a scribal error.

Luke 10:21: πάτερ, κύριε οὐρανοῦ καὶ τῆς γῆς. [Father, Lord of heaven and earth.] Marcion (according to Tertullian, chapter 25, p. 288, and Epiphanius, scholion 22): κύριε τοῦ οὐρανοῦ. [Lord of heaven.] The absence of πάτερ [Father] may be accidental; the words καὶ τῆς γῆς [and of the earth] will be discussed later.

Luke 10:25: τί ποιήσας ζωὴν αἰώνιον κληρονομήσω. [What shall I do to inherit eternal life?] Marcion did not read the word αἰώνιον [eternal]. (Tertullian, chapter 25, p. 293: in haeretico [evangelio] vita solummodo posita est, sine aeternae mentione. [In the heretical (Gospel) only “life” is set down, without mention of “eternal.”]) There would be no objection to seeing in this a mere variant, if Hahn did not draw from the following words of Tertullian — ut doctor de ea vita videatur consuluisse, quae in lege promittitur a creatore, longaeva [so that the teacher may appear to have inquired about that life which is promised in the law by the creator, a long life] — the conclusion that the omission had been made intentionally by Marcion;¹ and if he did not use the later words of Tertullian, viderit nunc si aeternam nostri addiderint [let him now see to it whether our people have added “eternal”] (p. 294), in order to claim for the Antitheses, in which Marcion is supposed on this occasion to have given the explanation contained in the words of Tertullian above, a critical tendency, namely that they designated the divergences of Luke as falsifications.² Both views lack sufficient ground. That addition, ut doctor videatur consuluisse and so on, as well as the exclamation viderit nunc si aeternam nostri addiderint, rest only on Tertullian’s presupposition, known to us, that Marcion had mutilated the Gospel of Luke. For this reason he, Tertullian, foists upon the divergence

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an intention of Marcion’s and a charge of forgery against the Catholics.³ In this way the passage is explained simply. To prove the contrary, this one case is not sufficient, a second instance of which is not to be found in the whole of Tertullian’s writing, and of which one might also demand greater clarity. What is to be assumed, then, is evidently an accidental variant, which Marcion used in order to understand by the ζωή [life], as the reward of service to the law, only the long life promised by the God of the Old Testament.

In Luke 11:1 Marcion read τῷ πατρί [to the Father] after προσευχόμενον [praying]. (Tertullian, chapter 26, p. 294: cum in loco quodam orasset ad patrem. [when in a certain place he had prayed to the Father.]) At verse 2 Tertullian cites: a quo spiritum sanctum postulem? [from whom should I ask for the Holy Spirit?] (p. 295.) So there probably stood, in place of ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου [hallowed be your name], the sentence ἐλθέτω τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμά σου καὶ καθαρισάτω ἡμᾶς [let your Holy Spirit come and cleanse us], as in Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor. This is evidently the oldest genuine reading, to which verse 13 also points back: ὁ πατὴρ δώσει πνεῦμα ἅγιον τοῖς αἰτοῦσιν αὐτόν. [the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.]

In Luke 11:42, παρέρχεσθε τὴν κρίσιν [you pass over justice] reads in Marcion τὴν κλῆσιν [the calling]. (Tertullian, chapter 27, p. 301; Epiphanius, scholion 26.) It is much more probable that a scribal error underlies this divergence than an intentional alteration by Marcion [Corrected in Ritschl’s errata: printed Tertullians], since the device of removing an offensive thought by slipping in a similar word is not repeated anywhere, and this one case does not entitle us to regard a falsification of this kind as probable.

In Luke 12:8, 9 [Corrected in Ritschl’s errata: printed 8, 9]: ἔμπροσθεν (ἐνώπιον) τῶν ἀγγέλων τοῦ θεοῦ. [before (in the presence of) the angels of God.] Marcion read ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ [in the presence of God] (Tertullian, chapter 28, p. 305; Epiphanius, scholion 30). This reading is also found in one manuscript of Luke, but it stands closer to Matthew 10:32, 33: ἐνώπιον τοῦ πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς. [in the presence of my Father who is in heaven.]

Luke 12:38: ἐν τῇ δευτέρᾳ καὶ ἐν τῇ τρίτῃ φυλακῇ. [in the second and in the third watch.] Marcion (Epiphanius, scholion 35): Ἐν τῇ ἑσπερινῇ φυλακῇ. [In the evening watch.] A variant in many manuscripts of Luke.

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Luke 12:50: καὶ πῶς συνέχομαι ἕως οὗ τελεσθῇ. [and how I am constrained until it is accomplished.] Marcion (Epiphanius, p. 304 D): Καὶ τί θέλω εἰ ἤδη τετέληκα αὐτό. [And what do I wish, if I have already accomplished it?] The Marcosians in Irenaeus I, 21, 2 have the sentence in the form καὶ πάνυ ἐπείγομαι εἰς αὐτό. [and I am very eager for it.] The sentence seems to have varied a great deal. Compare, moreover, on the reliability of that citation of Epiphanius, Hahn on the passage, p. 173.

Luke 14:26: καὶ οὐ μισεῖ τὸν πατέρα αὐτοῦ. [and does not hate his father.] Marcion (according to Epiphanius, Refutation 70) read καταλείπει. [he leaves behind.] The same variant is also found in Origen (cf. Lachmann on the passage).

Luke 15:10: ἐνώπιον τῶν ἀγγέλων τοῦ θεοῦ [in the presence of the angels of God] is mentioned in Tertullian (chapter 32, p. 320): Atque adeo illius (dei) est de poenitentia peccatoris [And indeed the sinner’s repentance belongs to that one (God)], so Marcion, as it seems, read here too ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ [in the presence of God] (cf. Luke 12:8, 9).

Luke 16:12: τὸ ὑμέτερον τίς ὑμῖν δώσει. [who will give you what is yours?] Marcion in Tertullian (chapter 33, p. 322): meum quis vobis dabit. [who will give you what is mine?] The variant τὸ ἡμέτερον [what is ours] occurs in B and in Origen.

Luke 16:13: οὐδεὶς οἰκέτης δύναται [no household servant can] is cited in the Dial. de fide recta [Dialogue on the Right Faith], I, p. 820 D, without οἰκέτης [household servant]. Cf. Matthew 6:24.

Luke 17:2: λυσιτελεῖ αὐτῷ εἰ μύλος ὀνικὸς κ. τ. λ. [it is better for him if a millstone, and so on.] Marcion in Tertullian (chapter 35, p. 331): expedisse ei, si natus non fuisset, aut si molino saxo etc. [that it would have been better for him if he had not been born, or if with a millstone, and so on.] The same variant, ne nasceretur aut [that he should not be born, or], occurs in several manuscripts. Cf. also Matthew 26:24.

Luke 18:20: Τὰς ἐντολὰς οἶδας. [You know the commandments.] Epiphanius gives as an alteration οἶδα [I know] (scholion 50). This is a mere scribal error, because Marcion’s citation in Tertullian (chapter 36, p. 338), interrogatus ab illo quodam, — de praeceptis creatoris, an illa sciret — expostulavit [when asked by a certain man — concerning the creator’s precepts, whether he knew them — he demanded], presupposes the correct reading.

Luke 24:37: ἐδόκουν πνεῦμα ἰδεῖν. [they thought they saw a spirit.] Marcion read φάντασμα. [a phantom.] (Tertullian, chapter 43, p. 367: haesitantibus eis ne phantasma esset. [while they hesitated lest it be a phantom.]) A reading of Luke in Codex D. If Hahn nevertheless calls attention to the fact that this reading is necessary for Marcion’s system (p. 219), he appears to insinuate the opinion that Marcion here

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had chosen between two readings of equal authority, which is nevertheless not to be thought of.

All these cases are of such a kind that they do not establish the charge of falsification which Epiphanius raises particularly on their account, and for the most part they are regarded in the same way by the critics since R. Simon.

B. Alleged Alterations and Mutilations

Leaving for the present untouched the absence, in Marcion’s Gospel, of the narratives of the infancy, the baptism, and the temptation, and likewise the words with which that Gospel began, we shall go through all the cases in which a divergence occurred between that Gospel and the canonical Luke, and in most of the sections which Luke had in addition to that Gospel we shall demonstrate traces that they do not belong to the original connection.

Luke Chapter IV

The first difference between the two Gospels that meets us is the transposition of the narratives of the stormy scene in the synagogue at Nazareth (verses 16–30) and of the healing of the demoniac in Capernaum (verses 31–37).⁴ Marcion’s Gospel opened with the latter narrative, and to it there was joined — indeed, probably in a form somewhat different from the one it has in Luke — the narrative of the scene at Nazareth. Now the place which this narrative occupies in our Luke, and its inner connection, have already given the interpreters many an offense. The words, namely, which Jesus utters in the sense of the Nazarenes,

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ὅσα ἠκούσαμεν γενόμενα εἰς Καπερναούμ, ποίησον καὶ ὧδε ἐν τῇ πατρίδι σου [whatever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in your hometown] (verse 23), point back to a wonder-working activity in Capernaum,⁵ which our evangelist decidedly excludes by mentioning, before Jesus’s appearance in his hometown, only his teaching activity in Galilee (verse 15: καὶ αὐτὸς ἐδίδασκεν ἐν ταῖς συναγωγαῖς αὐτῶν [and he himself was teaching in their synagogues]). When, now, Strauss inferred from the perception of this contradiction that the narrative was originally made for a later position and was placed earlier by Luke only through conjecture,

> “who in this was honest enough (if we wish), or careless enough, to leave standing the mention of Jesus’s deeds at Capernaum, a mention conceivable in a later position,”⁶

the position which the section occupied in Marcion, immediately after the narrative of a miracle in Capernaum, which closes with the words καὶ ἐξεπορεύετο ἦχος περὶ αὐτοῦ εἰς πάντα τόπον τοῦ περιχώρου [and a report concerning him went out into every place of the surrounding region] (verse 37), must be the only one that corresponds to the connection, and thus the original one.

It has further been observed by de Wette⁷ that if verse 24 is given as the ground why Jesus had not worked in his hometown — that no prophet is acceptable in his own country — this is indeed fitting at Matthew 13:57 [Corrected in Ritschl’s errata: printed 38], but is simply not fitting here, because there a repeated rejection of Jesus by his fellow townsmen can already be presupposed, which, however, will not do here. The difficulty of the connection of verses 22, 23, and 24 is occasioned not only by a chronological error; it lies deeper. For whereas in the parallel passage, Matthew 13:54 ff., that saying of Jesus is in place over against the contemptuous question of the Nazarenes, how he whose family they knew could have come by such wisdom (καὶ ἐσκανδαλίζοντο ἐν αὐτῷ [and they were offended at him], verse 57), on Luke’s presentation his countrymen give the Lord not the least occasion

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for the declaration οὐδεὶς προφήτης δεκτός ἐστιν ἐν τῇ πατρίδι αὐτοῦ [no prophet is acceptable in his hometown] (verse 24). What is said of them is rather: καὶ πάντες ἐμαρτύρουν αὐτῷ καὶ ἐθαύμαζον ἐπὶ τοῖς λόγοις τῆς χάριτος τοῖς ἐκπορευομένοις ἐκ τοῦ στόματος αὐτοῦ [and all bore witness to him and wondered at the words of grace which proceeded out of his mouth] (verse 22). And in this context it cannot have been contempt, but only pleasure, and the wish that Jesus might work a great deal among them, his fellow townsmen, that called forth the question οὐχ οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς Ἰωσήφ [is not this the son of Joseph?].⁸ At least the immediate answer of Jesus presupposes no other sense in that question: πάντως ἐρεῖτέ μοι τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην · ἰατρὲ θεράπευσον σεαυτὸν · ὅσα ἠκούσαμεν γενόμενα εἰς Καπερναούμ, ποίησον καὶ ὧδε [doubtless you will say to me this parable: Physician, heal yourself; whatever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here] (verse 23). This answer unriddles the full content of that question, and indirectly contains the refusal of that desire. How, then, does the maxim in verse 24 fit with this, especially in the turn which the discourse then takes? Have the Nazarenes, then, rejected Jesus, and shown him that he is not welcome to them? Does not precisely the contrary take place? For that reason it is not enough, in this case, to miss the gentleness and prudence of Jesus, on the ground that he appears to be intent on repelling his hearers rather than winning them, and for that reason to doubt the probability of the story;⁹ rather, one will not be able to avoid recognizing in verses 24–27 an element foreign to the original narrative. For the resolve of Jesus, indicated in the citation of the example of Elijah, to abandon the Jews and to devote himself to the Gentiles is anything but justified by the resistance of the Nazarenes alone, which the composer has in any case presupposed. The inner contradiction of these verses with the preceding ones is unmistakable; it cannot have lain in the original design;

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it can come only from different hands, and for that reason the Marcionite Gospel recommends itself,¹⁰ in which verses 28–30 followed immediately upon verse 23 (καὶ ἐπλήσθησαν πάντες θυμοῦ ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ ἀκούοντες ταῦτα · καὶ ἀναστάντες ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω τῆς πόλεως, καὶ ἤγαγον αὐτὸν ἕως ὀσφρύος τοῦ ὄρους ἐφ᾽ οὗ ἡ πόλις αὐτῶν ᾠκοδόμητο ὥστε κατακρημνίσαι αὐτόν · αὐτὸς δὲ διελθὼν διὰ μέσου αὐτῶν ἐπορεύετο. [And all were filled with wrath in the synagogue when they heard these things; and they rose up and cast him out of the city, and led him as far as the brow of the hill on which their city was built, in order to throw him down; but he, passing through their midst, went on.]) — as, in this respect, the more original. It cannot be proved with the same evidence that the interpretation of the Old Testament undertaken by Jesus at the beginning of the narrative, in order to attest his messianic character, was not original, because the connection of this part offers no opening to the attack. Yet the very circumstance that verses 24–27 come from a second hand already gives occasion for the urgent suspicion that this passage too was not original. That suspicion will have to become certainty once we have come to know, from a series of cases, the tendency of the reviser, and once that tendency is confirmed in the present case as well.

Verses 38, 39 contain the narrative of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, which Tertullian does not touch, because, as Hahn thinks, it offered no occasion for polemic against Marcion.¹¹ Since for us this ground

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is not decisive, we investigate rather whether the section belongs in the connection. The narrative has its parallel in Matthew, chapter 8:14, 15, in a connection of the history of Jesus in which he is already surrounded by disciples, whose joining him has been reported beforehand (chapter 4:18 f.; 5:1). For that reason it is also natural that the healed woman, as it says, διηκόνει αὐτοῖς [was serving them] (Matthew 8:15), namely Jesus and his companions. The same words now stand in Luke 4:39 as well, although the first calling of disciples is spoken of only in the fifth chapter. Before that, and thus also in the fourth chapter, Jesus still appears without companions, so that the words διηκόνει αὐτοῖς would be entirely unintelligible if the section in which they occur belonged to the original connection. As it is, however, it is clear that the reviser took the story over from Matthew unchanged, and in doing so committed the error of not joining it to the narrative of the healing of the servant of the centurion of Capernaum (Luke 7:1–10), with which that section is connected in Matthew (8:5–13). In that case he could have left it unchanged, since the calling of the disciples had already been reported beforehand, and one would not even have been able to notice that it had been inserted. But the circumstance that moved the reviser to the procedure which he adopted, and which betrayed him, was that according to Matthew the healing occurred during Jesus’s first stay in Capernaum. He held to this, and likewise relocated the story into the first stay of Jesus in Capernaum, as the Gospel before him depicted it, without noticing that this Gospel still knows of an earlier stay of Jesus there than the one which it narrates in common with Matthew, and which is marked by the healing of the servant of that centurion. The two verses, then, are not original in Luke; for that reason we also interpret Tertullian’s silence about them as meaning that he had not read them in Marcion’s Gospel, to which, in still further cases, we shall have to ascribe the greater original character [Ursprünglichkeit: belonging to the original text]

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by which the decision just given will also be justified.

Luke Chapter VII

Tertullian passes over the close of the discourse about John the Baptist (verses 29–35),¹² and Hahn is of the opinion that Marcion had deleted it, because in it there would be presupposed, in part, a relationship of the Baptist to Jesus such as Marcion did not accept, and, in part, Jesus would be depicted as drinking wine and as sensual.¹³ Against this it has rightly been objected by Schwegler¹⁴ that if Marcion retained the narrative of the δοχὴ μεγάλη [great feast] of Levi, together with the questions of the Pharisees, διατί μετὰ τῶν τελωνῶν καὶ ἁμαρτωλῶν ἐσθίετε καὶ πίνετε [why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?], and διατί οἱ μαθηταὶ Ἰωάννου νηστεύουσι πυκνὰ, οἱ δὲ σοὶ ἐσθίουσι καὶ πίνουσι [why do John’s disciples fast often, but yours eat and drink?], as well as Jesus’s confirming and justifying answers (Luke 5:29–34), that ground for the omission is not to be assumed at this passage either. Why, further, should Marcion have taken offense at Luke 7:29, 30,¹⁵ if he accepted the honorable statement of Jesus that John was his forerunner (verse 27)? But precisely these two verses lead rather to the suspicion that the passage which they are meant to introduce does not belong to the original connection. The interpreters are already in disagreement as to whether the two verses belong to the continuous discourse of Jesus or are meant to be an inserted historical remark of the evangelist. When, now, de Wette does indeed decide for the former, but adds, “although they have been inserted by the evangelist,”¹⁶ he thereby makes it plain that he misses the connection of the

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verses with the discourse of Jesus. But if this connection is lacking in the first place, we have no interest in still wanting to find it there to some extent by reckoning those verses to the discourse of Jesus, on the ground that the resumption of that discourse in verse 31 is not marked more precisely by anything. In short, we take the verses to be a historical remark. They fit, however, neither the preceding nor the following words of Jesus. For even though Jesus had previously given a most honorable testimony concerning the Baptist, there was still no ground for πᾶς ὁ λαὸς καὶ οἱ τελῶναι ἐδικαίωσαν τὸν θεόν, βαπτισθέντες τὸ βάπτισμα Ἰωάννου [all the people and the tax collectors justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John] — because Jesus, by the remark ὁ μικρότερος ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ μείζων αὐτοῦ ἐστιν [the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he], had already directed the hearers’ attention away from John and onto himself. After this maxim it is no longer fitting that the superiority of the tax collectors and the wickedness of the Pharisees should be measured, and made vivid, in so striking a way by their relationship to John’s baptism. But as an introduction to the following verses 31–35, that sentence is also quite unusable; rather, those verses stand in complete contradiction with this sentence. Jesus’s discourse of rebuke against his contemporaries (οἱ ἄνθρωποι τῆς γενεᾶς ταύτης [the people of this generation]) is grounded in the fact that, despite the difference in the character of the Baptist and of Jesus, they had decided for neither of the two, but had been perplexed by both. This charge, however, had no ground at all if really πᾶς ὁ λαὸς καὶ οἱ τελῶναι had decided for John, and only οἱ φαρισαῖοι καὶ οἱ νομικοί [the Pharisees and the lawyers], who are yet evidently to be regarded as the smaller number, had decidedly rejected him. After these discussions it is surely clear that we rightly find, in the absence of those two verses, an indication of the original character of the Marcionite text. And from their comparison with Matthew 21:32¹⁷ one easily recognizes that

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they are an exaggerating reworking of this passage. With these verses, however, the following ones, which contain the discourse of rebuke, must also have been originally missing. Not only because verse 31 stands in only a very loose connection with verse 28, but also because it is less probable that the reviser inserted those two verses than that he composed them, in order to be able only then to attach at this place the section, verses 31–35, known to him from elsewhere.

Luke Chapter IX

In the narrative of the transfiguration (verses 28–36) it is difficult to reconstruct the text of Marcion, insofar as it diverged from our verses 30, 31, exactly and correctly. For the statements of the two authorities seem mutually to exclude one another. Epiphanius cites verse 30 in the following form: καὶ ἰδοὺ, ἄνδρες συνελάλουν αὐτῷ, Ἠλίας καὶ Μωϋσῆς ἐν δόξῃ. [and behold, men were talking with him, Elijah and Moses in glory.] (scholion 17.) Tertullian remarks: Nam etsi Marcion noluit eum colloquentem domino ostensum sed stantem, tamen et stans os ad os stabat, et faciem ad faciem cum illo, inquit, non extra illum in gloria ipsius nedum in conspectu. [For even if Marcion refused to have him shown conversing with the Lord, but standing, nevertheless even while standing he stood mouth to mouth, and face to face with him, he says, not outside him, in his glory, much less in his sight.]¹⁸ In reconstructing the text Hahn decides for Tertullian, and would have one read: ἄνδρες δύο συνέστησαν αὐτῷ, οἵτινες ἦσαν Μωϋσῆς καὶ Ἠλίας ἐν δόξῃ αὐτοῦ. [two men stood with him, who were Moses and Elijah in his glory.]¹⁹ In this, Epiphanius’s testimony for συνελάλουν [they were talking with] is rejected. But there is still a way out on which both testimonies receive their due. The prominent words, namely, which Tertullian weaves into the sentence cited above — stabat cum illo, gloria ipsius [he stood with him, his glory] — are found in verse 32: εἶδον τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, καὶ τοὺς δύο ἄνδρας συνεστῶτας αὐτῷ [they saw his glory, and the two men standing with him], and make it probable that, having had this verse in view, Tertullian on that account forgot, or overlooked, that the word συνελάλουν, the absence of which he makes a charge against Marcion, had occurred shortly before in verse 30 (ἄνδρες δύο συνελάλουν αὐτῷ οἵτινες ἦσαν Μ. καὶ

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Η. [M. and E.: Moses and Elijah]). For that this verse stood in Marcion is sufficiently secured by Epiphanius’s fairly exact citation. If, then, in this way verses 30 and 32 are established for Marcion’s text with great probability, it is, on account of Tertullian’s silence, very credible that verse 31 was missing (οἱ ὀφθέντες ἐν δόξῃ ἔλεγον τὴν ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ, ἣν ἔμελλε πληροῦσθαι ἐν Ἱερουσαλήμ. [those who appeared in glory spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.]). In Hahn’s opinion Marcion would have deleted it. Yet marks can again be demonstrated that this verse was rather inserted into the finished narrative. The notice is already foreign to the whole tendency of the transfiguration narrative. Its high point lies in that word from heaven: οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ υἱός μου ὁ ἀγαπητὸς, αὐτοῦ ἀκούετε. [This is my beloved Son; listen to him.] (verse 35.) In this presentation of Jesus as revealer and messenger of God, Moses and Elijah appear only so that their dignity as God’s messengers may be taken from them and transferred to Jesus, as Marcion too has rightly observed.²⁰ That allusion to the death of Jesus has nothing to do with this; by it, rather, the point of view in the conception of the narrative is shifted, and Matthew too has nothing of it. It is evidently a mythical interpretation of the συλλαλεῖν [talking with one another]. The seam is also still recognizable by which the verse betrays itself as an insertion. Namely, the words ὀφθέντες ἐν δόξῃ ἔλεγον [having appeared in glory, they spoke] (verse 31) evidently contradict the thirty-second verse: ὁ δὲ Πέτρος καὶ οἱ σὺν αὐτῷ ἦσαν βεβαρημένοι ὕπνῳ · διαγρηγορήσαντες δὲ εἶδον τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ καὶ τοὺς δύο ἄνδρας τοὺς συνεστῶτας αὐτῷ. [But Peter and those with him were weighed down with sleep; but when they had become fully awake they saw his glory and the two men who were standing with him.] If the disciples saw the glory and the men only after they had been roused, then it could already all along have been said of these men beforehand that they were there, surrounded by glory, and so on, but simply not ὀφθέντες ἐν δόξη [having appeared in glory]. By whom, then, were they seen?

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By the disciples, precisely not. Or if that word were supposed to refer to Jesus, it would be, after the συνελάλουν, a highly superfluous addition. So it does not fit into the connection at all. A narrative of one piece, especially one with so simple a pragmatism [nineteenth-century causal, purposive narration] as the one before us, does not entangle itself in such contradictions. We recognize rather, in the position of ὀφθέντες, the second hand, from which the whole verse comes, with the exception of ἐν δόξῃ [in glory], which in Epiphanius’s citation is joined to συνελάλουν. The reviser, as it appears, inserted the ὀφθέντες into the relative clause which he introduced, and referred the words ἐν δόξῃ to it, in order to make the connection with the main clause smoother. Thus this divergence of the Marcionite Gospel from the canonical Luke is also settled in favor of the original character of the latter.

Luke Chapter X

Verses 12–15, which contain the cry of woe over the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, are passed over by Tertullian, although the preceding and following verses are indicated fairly exactly.²¹ Hahn therefore finds it probable that they were missing in Marcion, since without special explanations, which, however, we do not know, they would not correspond to the nature of the good God, who is not a judge.²² In this remark there already lies the concession that Marcion, if he mutilated Luke at all, had no need to delete precisely this passage,²³ and one sees from this,

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that Hahn himself did not know how to carry through, with full confidence in it, his principle for the assessment of the Marcionite Gospel. For that reason a different standpoint must be taken, and it must be investigated from the connection of the passage whether Marcion will prove to have read it or not. The twelfth verse, λέγω ὑμῖν, ὅτι Σοδόμοις ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ ἀνεκτότερον ἔσται ἢ τῇ πόλει ἐκείνῃ [I tell you that it will be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that city], does indeed attach itself in the best way to the preceding verses, in which it is indicated that the message of the disciples would be rejected in many a city. As regards the following verses, however, the divergence which accompanies the closest verbal agreement with the parallel, Matthew 11:21–24, is striking. In this passage the intentional character of the parallelism of the members is unmistakable: first the woe upon Chorazin and Bethsaida is grounded in the greater inclination which the Lord presupposes in Tyre and Sidon toward his cause, and then, with the same formulas, Capernaum and Sodom are set over against one another.²⁴ In Luke this connection is torn apart and the parallelism disturbed, although it follows from the verbal agreement with Matthew that the parallelism was originally proper to the passage. The first member (Luke 10:13, 14) agrees completely with Matthew. Of the second member, the middle clause is missing in Luke: ὅτι εἰ ἐν Σοδόμοις ἐγένοντο αἱ δυνάμεις αἱ γενόμεναι ἐν σοὶ ἔμειναν ἂν μέχρι τῆς σήμερον [for if the mighty works that were done in you had been done in Sodom, they would have remained until this day], and

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the concluding clause is placed before the whole passage: λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι Σοδόμοις ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ ἀνεκτότερον ἔσται ἢ τῇ πόλει ἐκείνῃ (v. 12). [I tell you that it shall be more tolerable for Sodom on that day than for that city.] If, now, the verses’ agreement in other respects with the parallel in Matthew, and their obvious dependence upon it, arouses the suspicion that they have been relocated here from Matthew, v. 12 nevertheless bears, in its divergences from the parallel words of Matthew, the stamp of original character (Σοδόμοις — Σοδόμων, ἐν ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ — ἐν ἡμέρᾳ κρίσεως). [For Sodom — of Sodom; on that day — on the day of judgment.] And this view is fully confirmed by the fact that only verses 13–15 make the understanding of v. 16 more difficult, a verse which, by their dropping out, enters into the best connection with vv. 11, 12. For while these concern the conduct of the cities toward the disciples, one passes with v. 13 to the consideration of the conduct of the cities toward the Lord himself, and with v. 16 returns again to the disciples: ὁ ἀκούων ὑμῶν, ἐμοῦ ἀκούει, καὶ ὁ ἀθετῶν ὑμᾶς ἐμὲ ἀθετεῖ· ὁ δὲ ἐμὲ ἀθετῶν ἀθετεῖ τὸν ἀποστείλαντά με. [He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me; and he who rejects me rejects the one who sent me.] One no longer expects this at all, since the discourse had left the disciples entirely. The verse contains, on the other hand, the most striking ground for holding that a city’s resistance to the disciples draws a harder punishment after it than the shameful deeds of Sodom. And this circumstance must ground the decision that vv. 13–15 do not originally belong to the connection, but have been brought in from Matthew on the occasion of the twelfth verse. They will therefore also have been absent in Marcion, and for that reason are not mentioned by Tertullian. Verse 12, however, he passed over, as he does not mention many individual verses.

Luke Chapter XI.

Vv. 29–32. The discourse concerning the sign of Jonah and the queen of the South, which Tertullian passes over, is expressly designated by Epiphanius as absent.²⁵ Yet Marcion read the words of the twenty-ninth verse, with the exclusion of:

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εἰ μὴ σημεῖον Ἰωνᾶ τοῦ προφήτου. [except the sign of Jonah the prophet.] We cannot bring ourselves to find a mutilation in this, on the ground that the honoring reference to the Old Testament would contradict Marcion’s system,²⁶ since Marcion did not reject references of that kind from the Old Testament elsewhere either. He read ch. 6:3, where Jesus appealed to David’s manner of acting; ch. 7:27, where Jesus proved the dignity of the Baptist from the Old Testament; and ch. 20:41–44, where Jesus drew from David’s words a proof of his own dignity.²⁷ The ground adduced by Hahn therefore cannot explain the absence of the section, and we must assume that Marcion did not know it. Little as the section, to be sure, offends against the verse that precedes it, an indirect proof against its original character can nevertheless be drawn from this: that if the verses are not read, the difficult passage that follows yields a more satisfying sense than has hitherto been found in it. The difficulty of this passage lies in the fact that the word λύχνος [lamp] has a different sense in v. 33 from the one it has in v. 34. This difference cannot possibly be removed. For if, with de Wette, one explains it thus:²⁸ “I am more than Jonah, but in order to recognize this, one does not, as you do, put the light under the bushel,” this interpretation is contradicted by the circumstance that the light which one is to put on the lampstand is to shine for the εἰσπορευόμενοι [those who come in], and not only for the persons addressed themselves. One will therefore be unable to avoid taking the lighting of the lamp here, as in Matthew 5:16 and Luke 8:16, as an image of the activity of Jesus. A linking of this thought to the discourse concerning Jonah, and so on, is not, however, possible in a simple and natural way. In the discourse concerning Jonah, Jesus lets his light shine; one could therefore see in v. 33 a justification of that procedure before his own conscience, were it not that in this case the connection

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would have to be made by γάρ [for] and not by δέ [but], and that by that very fact v. 33 would be altogether separated from the following verses, which nevertheless belong closely together with it. In Marcion’s text, by contrast (without vv. 29–32), the following good coherence presents itself. After Jesus had rejected the people’s demand for a sign, he makes to himself the objection that, if he wished to be active and to light a lamp, he ought not to hide himself, but would have to come forward openly. He is thereby led to express the true purpose of his activity in the words σκόπει οὖν, μὴ τὸ φῶς τὸ ἐν σοὶ σκότος ἐστιν (v. 35) [See to it, then, that the light in you is not darkness], in that he at the same time passes over, to this designation of his activity as one that concerns what is inward, by means of the same expression λύχνος, which before had been taken more in the sense of an outward working of wonders. Even if the precision of the thought does not emerge altogether cleanly in this, the chief difficulty nevertheless seems to be solved, from which it follows that the intervening passage must have been foreign to the original discourse. Should this deduction commend itself, we note yet one further circumstance, which is in itself too trifling for any significant value to be placed upon it, but which proves that a not very skillful hand wrote down vv. 30–32. Verses 31 and 32 must be exchanged if the right logical order is to obtain. The mention of the queen in v. 31 separates, in an improper way, the two verses that deal with Jonah and the Ninevites; and this corruption of the order is certainly not original.

V. 42. The words ταῦτα ἔδει ποιῆσαι κἀκεῖνα μὴ ἀφιέναι [these things one ought to have done, and not abandoned those] are passed over by Tertullian,²⁹ and have probably been absent, not through any fault of Marcion’s, but because they do not fit the connection, and have rather been relocated here from Matthew 23:23. At that passage they are altogether in place, since the woe pronounced by Jesus strikes the Pharisees only on account of their ὑπόκρισις [hypocrisy], in that they

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fulfill the lighter duties, but neglect the heavy ones. Since, then, the ἀποδεκατοῦν κ.τ.λ. [tithing, and the rest] is not itself condemned, the concluding clause, which presses for the observance of both classes of duties (ταῦτα ἔδει ποιῆσαι κἀκεῖνα μὴ ἀφιέναι), fits the connection in the most complete way. It is otherwise in Luke. For, apart from the fact that, on account of the sentence παρέρχεσθε τὴν κρίσιν κ.τ.λ. [you pass over justice, and the rest], one would have to expect the conclusion ταῦτα ἔδει ποιῆσαι, κἀκεῖνα μὴ παρέρχεσθαι [these things one ought to have done, and not passed over those], just as the ἀφιέναι [abandon] in Matthew corresponds to the ἀφήκατε [you have abandoned], the obligation to those petty ceremonial commandments, pronounced in the concluding clause, does not fit the connection of Luke’s discourse. For this differs essentially from the Matthaean discourse in that the woe refers not to the hypocrisy, but to this: that both those petty commandments are given and observed, and the higher duties are transgressed (οὐαὶ ὑμῖν ὅτι ἀποδεκατοῦτε κ.τ.λ. [woe to you, because you tithe, and the rest]). But if this is the case, ἐκεῖνα μὴ ἀφιέναι [do not abandon those things] cannot be commanded immediately thereafter; that is, the concluding clause cannot originally have been joined with the verse of Luke.

Vv. 49–51 were absent in Marcion, as Tertullian’s silence and Epiphanius expressly testify.³⁰ Hahn’s remark, that Marcion struck out the verses because the sayings of the God of the Old Testament are mentioned too honorably in them, does not hold, because a citation of the Old Testament in the proper sense is not present at all. The passage, moreover, contains no promise referring to Jesus himself, the only thing against which Marcion could have balked; for that he did not absolutely reject proofs from the Old Testament is to be inferred from the passages he retained, Luke 6:3; 7:27; 20:41f. That the section, however, does not fit well into the connection, and therefore cannot be held to be original, the comparison with its parallel, Matthew 23:34–36, will show. Here Jesus pronounces a woe upon the Pharisees,

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to the effect that they built the tombs of the prophets; for although they had the intention of thereby atoning for the crimes of their fathers, who killed them, they would, in the confession that they were their sons, also take upon themselves the guilt of their fathers. This old guilt, however, they would increase yet further by new guilt,³¹ and would therefore in no case escape the judgment. For this reason (διὰ τοῦτο [on account of this], in order to make that prediction come true), they would kill and crucify the messengers whom the Lord sent to them.³² In Luke v. 48, now, the very building of the prophets’ tombs is already regarded directly as the guilt of the Pharisees (ἄρα μαρτυρεῖτε καὶ συνευδοκεῖτε τοῖς ἔργοις τῶν πατέρων ὑμῶν, ὅτι αὐτοὶ μὲν ἀπέκτειναν αὐτούς, ὑμεῖς δὲ οἰκοδομεῖτε αὐτῶν τὰ μνημεῖα [So you testify and approve the works of your fathers, because they killed them, and you build their tombs]), without any mention being made of the intention which the Pharisees nevertheless had in doing so, namely to atone for the crimes of their fathers. That form of the thought in Luke is therefore decidedly harsh in comparison with Matthew. Yet it is possible to find a certain connection in the verse, for which reason we set it aside for the present. It is, by contrast, extremely difficult to establish a connection between the section that now follows and the verse just discussed. From the pleasure in the deeds of their fathers, declared by the Pharisees, it is supposed to follow that the σοφία θεοῦ [wisdom of God] has said, ἀποστελῶ κτλ. [I will send, and the rest]. For the citation formula that intervenes in Luke is linked to the preceding sentence by διὰ τοῦτο, not that promise itself. How harsh it is, however, that from the charge of taking pleasure in old crimes, a charge mediated in so artificial a way, the prediction of new ones should follow. From the comparison with Matthew, where that promise is fully

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justified by the verse καὶ ὑμεῖς πληρώσατε τὸ μέτρον τῶν πατέρων ὑμῶν [and you, fill up the measure of your fathers], this much therefore emerges: that the connection of verses 48 and 49 in Luke can be no original one.³³ A further suspicion against the original character of the section at this place is awakened by the formula in v. 49, ἡ σοφία τοῦ θεοῦ εἶπεν [the wisdom of God said]. It would be unusual if ἡ σοφία were meant to introduce an Old Testament saying, and were thus confused with τὸ πνεῦμα [the Spirit]. But the promise of v. 49 is, besides, no passage of the Old Testament. Evidently Jesus himself is rather meant by that expression, who, as we have seen, utters the same words in his discourse at Matthew 23:34. But in that at this place a dogmatic designation is not only applied to Jesus, but is even placed in his own mouth, the hand of a later reviser shows itself plainly, who evidently attributed canonical authority to the passage in Matthew and therefore, although in the most unskillful way, wove it, furnished with a solemn citation formula, into the text which he found without this section.³⁴ After these demonstrations have made the later origin of this section a certainty for us, we call attention further to this,

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that whereas the parallel passage in Matthew closes the whole series of οὐαί [woes] pronounced against the Pharisees and the lawyers, our section in Luke cuts off from the rest of the discourse the last οὐαὶ τοῖς νομικοῖς κτλ. [woe to the lawyers, and the rest] contained in v. 52 — a discourse which is evidently so designed that the οὐαί follow one another blow upon blow — and thus interrupts the connection of the characteristic discourse.³⁵ This circumstance is not probative in and of itself, yet it does contribute toward confirming the discussion above. We have hitherto taken as the basis of our investigation Epiphanius’s statement that vv. 49–51 were absent in Marcion, and have therefore assumed that v. 48 had not been absent from his copy. Tertullian, to be sure, passes over this verse too in his refutation; yet because from his silence one may not always infer with certainty the absence of the verses passed over in silence, Hahn has followed the direct statement of Epiphanius and has retained v. 48 in Marcion’s text.³⁶ Epiphanius, however, is often so inexact in his statements that he declares only individual verses to have been struck out, with which, for the sake of the connection, several further verses must also have been absent in Marcion,³⁷ so that we must necessarily check his statements by Tertullian and by the internal criticism of the sections themselves. It is, namely, probable to us that v. 48 too was not read by Marcion, not only because Tertullian passes over it, but chiefly because its sense is not simple enough, and is to be understood only from the more complete text of Matthew.³⁸ The unskillful reviser betrays himself

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in this as well: that after ὅτι οἰκοδομεῖτε τὰ μνημεῖα κτλ. [because you build the tombs, and the rest] had already been pronounced in v. 47 as the ground of the ἄρα μαρτυρεῖτε κτλ. [so you testify, and the rest], the same thought is repeated once more in v. 48, instead of the mediation of the two thoughts that is pronounced by Matthew in v. 31 being attached, a mediation indispensable to the understanding. We shall therefore probably not be mistaken if we assign v. 48 also to the same reviser, whose unskillfulness has already shown itself in this section, and if we assume at the same time that, since in Marcion’s text v. 52 thus followed upon v. 47,³⁹ the same text is to be held the original one at this place as well.

Luke Chapter XII.

In the twelfth chapter Marcion did not read verses 6 and 7, which proclaim God’s care for sparrows and hairs, and draw from it the conclusion that human beings, on account of their higher worth, would have no cause for fear. Tertullian passes over these verses, and Epiphanius remarks that v. 6 had been absent.⁴⁰ Hahn therefore explains the verses as struck out by Marcion, for “in his opinion the good God concerned himself not with the sparrows and the hairs, but only with the souls.”⁴¹ We can, however, rest content with this explanation all the less, since Marcion had not expunged the twenty-fourth verse, which contains pretty much the same thought: κατανοήσατε τοὺς κόρακας — καὶ ὁ θεὸς τρέφει αὐτούς· πόσῳ μᾶλλον ὑμεῖς διαφέρετε τῶν πετεινῶν [Consider the ravens — and God feeds them; how much more are you worth than the birds]. For if he interpreted that verse too as referring to the creator of the world,⁴² the same course was open to him at verses 6 and 7. If, then, it naturally becomes uncertain by this whether Marcion struck out those verses, it is rather, from

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the connection, probable that if he did not read them, his text was simpler and more intelligible than that of our canonical Luke. Verses 6 and 7 directly contradict the fifth verse. This contains the strongest summons to fear of God as judge, and thus gives a determination concerning human beings as moral beings. The verse does, to be sure, now await its contrast, that is, a demonstration of the conditions under which one does not have to fear, for Christianity does indeed mean to do away with the fear of God. This contrast does, to be sure, now lie before us in μὴ οὖν φοβεῖσθε (v. 7) [do not therefore fear]. But in that, in the ground given for it, human beings are regarded only as sparrows and hairs, that is, as natural beings, we see that we are suddenly transferred to another field of consideration. The fear of God arising from moral considerations cannot be removed by the certainty that the human being, as a natural being, has the care of God to look to. Verse 8, by contrast, contains the right contrast to v. 5, in that here the means is named by which the human being is relieved of the fear of God, namely the confession of Christ before human beings, whereupon the Lord promises to confess those who confess him as his own before God as well. If, now, the more original text is the one that is simplest and most intelligible, we must assume that, in that Marcion read v. 8 immediately after v. 5, he possessed in this a more original text.

On Luke 12:33, 34, a passage which Tertullian does not touch (v. 32 was present, according to Epiphanius, scholion 34, p. 335), Hahn explains that Marcion will probably have read it, since it is altogether suited to his system, and was passed over by Tertullian only as unfit for refutation.⁴³ Since we cannot share Hahn’s presupposition, that Marcion’s system supplies the standard for the form of his Gospel, we cannot bind ourselves to this decision, but must also, to this passage passed over by

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Tertullian, apply the standard as to whether it fits the connection or not, and assess accordingly whether it will have stood in that Gospel. The content of these two verses differs essentially, however, from the preceding discourse. While this points out that earthly needs would not be worth striving after, in comparison with the divine kingdom, and therewith commends indifference toward them, since God would of himself give to his own what they required, in vv. 33, 34 earthly goods are set in a far sharper contrast to the heavenly ones, and repugnance and aversion toward them are at the same time commended. If the inner connection between these two verses and the thought which is developed, from vv. 22–32, in a firm articulation is therefore lacking, v. 35 also attaches itself to v. 32 in a simple and natural way, whereas no closer relation obtains between verses 34 and 35. Only to the promise εὐδόκησεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν δοῦναι ὑμῖν τὴν βασιλείαν (v. 32) [your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom] can the summons refer: ἔστωσαν ὑμῶν αἱ ὀσφύες περιεζωσμέναι καὶ οἱ λύχνοι καιόμενοι· καὶ ὑμεῖς ὅμοιοι ἀνθρώποις προσδεχομένοις τὸν κύριον αὑτῶν κ.τ.λ. (vv. 35, 36) [Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves like men waiting for their lord, and the rest]. From the remark ὅπου γάρ ἐστιν ὁ θησαυρὸς ὑμῶν, ἐκεῖ καὶ ἡ καρδία ὑμῶν ἔσται (v. 34) [For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also], by contrast, no transition to that summons is to be found. If, then, the passage cannot possibly have belonged to the original connection, it was for that reason absent from Marcion’s Gospel, and for this ground Tertullian, too, has been unable to mention it.

Luke Chapter XIII.

On vv. 1–9 see further below.

Verses 29–35 were absent from Marcion’s Gospel,⁴⁴ and in Hahn’s opinion Marcion would have struck the section out, for “already the sitting at table sounded too sensuous to him; the answer to Herod was probably

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offensive to him; the word concerning Jerusalem sounded too Jewish to him.”⁴⁵ These grounds, however, are by no means cogent. That Marcion knew how to set himself at ease, by a symbolic interpretation, about the heavenly meal to be held in that world, and therefore had no cause to take offense at the words ἀνακλιθήσονται ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ (v. 29) [they shall recline in the kingdom of God], has already been remarked above.⁴⁶ What Marcion would have had to object to in the answer given to Herod, Hahn himself does not know how to determine; a dogmatic ground, which one would after all have to demand, he could not have had. And the discourse against Jerusalem was in fact rather anti-Jewish (ἀφίεται ὑμῶν ὁ οἶκος ἔρημος v. 35 [your house is left desolate]). If, therefore, we cannot find in Hahn’s explanation the sufficient ground why the section was absent, the difficulty of the passage is increased still further by the fact that in v. 28 Marcion had a reading other than that of the canonical Luke. In our text the verse reads: ἐκεῖ ἔσται ὁ κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὁ βρυγμὸς τῶν ὀδόντων, ὅταν ὄψησθε Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἰακὼβ καὶ πάντας τοὺς προφήτας ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ ὑμᾶς δὲ ἐκβαλλομένους ἔξω. [There shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves cast out.] Instead of this Marcion read: ἐκεῖ ἔσται ὁ κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὁ βρυγμὸς τῶν ὀδόντων ὅταν ὄψησθε πάντας τοὺς δικαίους ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ, ὑμᾶς δὲ ἐκβαλλομένους καὶ κρατουμένους ἔξω.⁴⁷ [There shall be the weeping and the gnashing of teeth when you see all the righteous in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves cast out and held outside.] This divergence is so striking, and seems so tendentious, that the charge of alteration of the text here almost seems one that cannot be warded off from Marcion, a charge which Hahn, of course, does not hold back.⁴⁸ But if that charge is rightly made in the case of this verse, then the same case arises for v. 29, which is closely connected with v. 28, and for the following verses, against which the objections made above would have to give way entirely. Yet even in this case

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Marcion’s reading is the more natural one in the connection, and therefore the original one, and the reading of the canonical Luke comes from the reviser. The section from verse 22 on contains Jesus’ answer to the question εἰ ὀλίγοι οἱ σωζόμενοι [whether those who are saved are few]. This question is answered in the affirmative by the image of the wide gate and of the narrow gate. To the wide gate correspond the many who have entered only into an apparent and outward connection with Jesus (ἐφάγομεν ἐνώπιόν σου καὶ ἐπίομεν, καὶ ἐν ταῖς πλατείαις ἡμῶν ἐδίδαξας, v. 26 [we ate in your presence and drank, and you taught in our streets]), but who are rejected as ἐργάται τῆς ἀδικίας (v. 27) [workers of unrighteousness]. Who, however, corresponds to the narrow gate? According to the canonical text, it is Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets; of other members of the divine kingdom nothing is said. And yet the course and the design of the whole discourse require that, as the few who arrive through the narrow gate, not those men of former times but contemporaries be shown, just as those ἐργάται τῆς ἀδικίας also stood in living personal contact with Jesus. There can therefore be no doubt that Marcion’s reading, πάντας τοὺς δικαίους [all the righteous], corresponds much better to the connection, especially since the outward form, too, constitutes a direct and striking contrast to the ἐργάται τῆς ἀδικίας. But we must hold Marcion’s reading to be the original one on yet another ground. With the twenty-eighth verse, the twenty-ninth and the thirtieth stand in the closest connection; they contain, considered by themselves, the promise that, instead of the rejected Jews, the Gentiles will enter the divine kingdom (καὶ ἥξουσιν ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν καὶ δυσμῶν καὶ ἀπὸ βοῤῥᾶ καὶ νότου· καὶ ἀνακλιθήσονται ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ. καὶ ἰδοὺ, εἰσὶν ἔσχατοι, οἳ ἔσονται πρῶτοι· καί εἰσι πρῶτοι οἳ ἔσονται ἔσχατοι). [And they shall come from east and west and from north and south, and shall recline in the kingdom of God. And behold, there are last who shall be first, and there are first who shall be last.] This contrast, however, is foreign to the original character of the whole discourse. It would indeed be possible that the contrast of the unrighteous and the righteous should be transferred to the contrast of Jews and Gentiles, yet this could reasonably happen only by an express remark, and not in such a way that that

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substitution crept in, as is the case here. Such a double tendency as we have demonstrated in this narrative cannot originally have been proper to it, and it is therefore probable that the present form of the discourse comes from this, that with the original form which lay before Marcion the passage in Matthew 8:11, 12 has been worked together: πολλοὶ ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν ἥξουσι καὶ ἀνακλιθήσονται μετὰ Ἀβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ Ἰακὼβ ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τῶν οὐρανῶν· οἱ δὲ υἱοὶ τῆς βασιλείας ἐκβληθήσονται εἰς τὸ σκότος τὸ ἐξώτερον ἐκεῖ ἐστι ὁ κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὁ βρυγμὸς τῶν ὀδόντων [Many shall come from the east and shall recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom shall be cast out into the outer darkness; there is the weeping and the gnashing of teeth]. If, now, besides this, no mark of later revision were present in the remaining verses 31–35, which are absent in Marcion, one could nevertheless not avoid assigning them too to the reviser whose activity we have demonstrated in the verses shortly preceding, especially since, for the application of the mutilation hypothesis to them, no sufficient ground can be adduced. But the position of vv. 34, 35 in this connection is also, as Schleiermacher and de Wette (on the passage) have already remarked, not the most skillful, if one compares them with Matthew 23:37, where the words are altogether fitting at the close of Jesus’ public activity. In particular, however, the word οὐ μή με ἴδητε, ἕως ἂν ἥξῃ ὅτε εἴπητε εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου [you shall by no means see me, until the time comes when you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord] cannot be understood here at all. It has already misled some interpreters into regarding it as an allusion to the entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:29f.), whereas it can refer only to the return of Jesus, which, however, he could promise in this form only if he was on the point of withdrawing from intercourse with the people. This discourse, then, cannot belong here to the original connection.

Luke Chapter XVI.

Verse 17 Marcion, instead of εὐκοπώτερόν ἐστι, τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν παρελθεῖν ἢ τοῦ νόμου μίαν κεραίαν πεσεῖν [it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of the law to fall], read: ἢ τῶν λόγων μου μίαν κεραίαν πεσεῖν [than for one stroke of my words to fall].⁴⁹

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Apparent as, in this case too, the explanation given by Hahn (p. 185) sounds, that this change was undertaken by Marcion for the sake of his antinomian system, his reading is rather the original one, through which alone order and light enter the much-discussed difficult passage. Of late one has despaired of understanding it, and has wished to find in it only false reminiscences from Matthew.⁵⁰ And it really is an accumulation of the most striking contradictions. For after it is asserted in v. 16 that the end of the law had come in with John the Baptist (ὁ νόμος καὶ οἱ προφῆται ἕως Ἰωάννου [the law and the prophets until John]), there follows in v. 17 the proposition that the same should remain in force so long as heaven and earth continued. Even if one does not wish to find in this an expression of its eternal duration, the contradiction with what precedes is nevertheless not removed, for when Jesus spoke the words, heaven and earth still continued, and therefore the law as well. But the formula εὐκοπώτερον κ.τ.λ. [it is easier, and the rest] is rather supposed to contain the assertion of eternity, since the passing away of heaven and earth is presupposed not merely as something difficult, but as something impossible. Then there follows in v. 18, yet evidently as evidence for the eternity of the law, a commandment which belongs so little to the law that it is rather pronounced by Jesus, in Matthew, as a commandment which surpasses the law and is set over against it.⁵¹ This whole difficulty, to be resolved by no artifice,

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does not obtain in the case of Marcion’s reading. According to it, the well-ordered sense of the passage is that the law has found its end, but that the words of the Lord would have eternal validity, as the test of which the new ordinance concerning the indissolubility of marriage is adduced. The simplicity and artlessness of this coherence, however, is yet evidently a completely indisputable mark of the original character of the Marcionite text! We are thereby spared the expedient which de Wette and Strauss were compelled to adopt, but which sets the reliability and usefulness of the third Gospel altogether in a bad light. The unskillfulness now falls not to the author, but only to the reviser.⁵²

Luke Chapter XIX.

V. 9. The words καθότι καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ἐστιν [inasmuch as he too is a son of Abraham] are omitted by Tertullian, who otherwise cites vv. 9, 10 word for word,⁵³ and probably because Marcion’s Gospel did not contain them. Against Hahn’s view, that he would have struck them out on account of his anti-Jewish tendency,⁵⁴ Schwegler has recalled that he nevertheless took no offense, at ch. 13:15, 16, at the words ἕκαστος ὑμῶν τῷ σαββάτῳ οὐ λύει τὸν βοῦν κ.τ.λ. — ταύτην δὲ θυγάτερα Ἀβραὰμ οὖσαν — οὐκ ἔδει λυθῆναι [Does not each of you on the Sabbath loose his ox, and the rest — and this woman, being a daughter of Abraham — ought she not to have been loosed?].⁵⁵ He ought, indeed, not to have tolerated this particular justification of the activity of Jesus either, if Hahn’s presupposition were correct, and precisely by this the insufficiency of Hahn’s hypothesis shows itself again. For that Jesus worked among the Jews, and concerned himself with this people before all others, Marcion could not at all subject to his dogmatic criticism, because it is a historical fact. Another ground is therefore to be sought, why those words

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were not in his text. These differ from the passage cited in the 13th chapter in that there something factual is touched upon, whereas in the passage before us the υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ [son of Abraham] is a dogmatic category, because it is to be presupposed of Zacchaeus, of whom the words are said, that he was a Gentile. But then they are meant entirely in the sense in which Paul represents believers as sons of Abraham, because faith was first reckoned to him as righteousness.⁵⁶ This thought, which rests on the finest dialectic, the dialectic Paul employed over against the Jewish-Christian party, is not to be presupposed in the case of Jesus, who from the beginning, without further ado, associated with the tax collectors, and who gives as his ground for this, in Luke 5:31: χρείαν ἔχουσιν τοῦ ἰατροῦ οἱ κακῶς ἔχοντες [those who are ill have need of the physician]. Whoever was firm in this simple principle, and set it against the impositions of the strict Jewish party, had no cause at all to justify his conduct in that artificial way; rather, the two points of view exclude one another. But Jesus expresses that principle in our passage as well, in v. 10: ἦλθεν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ζητῆσαι καὶ σῶσαι τὸ ἀπολωλός [the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost]. The same principle, however, not only excludes the justification of Jesus by the words καθότι καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ἐστιν [inasmuch as he too is a son of Abraham], but even plainly contradicts it. For if Zacchaeus is a son of Abraham, he is so through faith in the Pauline sense. But then he is also no longer ἀπολωλώς [lost], and yet Jesus is supposed to designate him as such with the words that follow immediately? Rather, that addition is not original here, but comes from a reviser who dogmatizes in the Pauline spirit.

Verses 29–46, the account of Jesus’s solemn entry into Jerusalem, of his lament over the city, and of the cleansing of the temple, was, according to the testimony of Epiphanius,

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missing in Marcion’s Gospel, and Tertullian’s silence agrees with this.⁵⁷ Against Hahn’s view, that Marcion omitted the passage because the entry, as a fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 ff., seemed to him intolerable, the weeping over Jerusalem too human, and because by the cleansing of the temple Jesus was represented as standing in a relationship to the God of the Old Testament that was repugnant to him,⁵⁸ the objection is to be made that in Luke, after all, the passage from the prophet is not mentioned at all; that, further, the expressions of Jesus’s humanity had to be interpreted by Marcion consistently as appearance, and that therefore there was no ground for casting away one single one of them, since so many others still remained; and that, finally, if Jesus took the part of the house of the God of the Jews, the same explanation lay ready to hand for Marcion here as in the passages where Jesus spoke in favor of the prophets (Luke 6:23).⁵⁹ At the same time, however, it can also be made probable that Marcion did not know this section, because it does not fit the design of the narrative and directly contradicts the 11th verse. That entry into Jerusalem plainly shows Jesus’s intention to appear as king of the Jews. For even though our account makes no reference to the prophecy of Zechariah, it nevertheless has Jesus appear with the same marks which that prophecy had indicated, and which are also at once recognized by the people. With the cry εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος βασιλεὺς ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου [blessed is he who comes, king in the name of the Lord] (v. 38) the people greet the Lord, and he is so far from disapproving of this opinion and rejecting it that he rather refuses to suppress these marks of honor, as the Pharisees desire. He therefore wishes to be taken for the king who means to found and open the expected kingdom. This representation is contradicted

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quite expressly, however, by the eleventh verse. It tells us that Jesus regarded as false the opinion which did indeed arise among his disciples as they drew near to Jerusalem, that the founding of the divine kingdom would now take place, and that by the parable which now follows he sought to suppress and to refute it.⁶⁰ For however unclear the way this verse is attached, by ἀκουόντων αὐτῶν ταῦτα [as they heard these things], to the preceding speech addressed to Zacchaeus is — since, if one was drawing near to Jerusalem, one must have left Jericho and [printed nnd] the house of the tax collector — it is nevertheless clear that that erroneous opinion of the disciples is not represented as called forth by the saying ἦλθεν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ζητῆσαι καὶ σῶσαι τὸ ἀπολωλός [the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which is lost] (v. 10), but by the ἐγγὺς εἶναι Ἱερουσαλήμ [being near Jerusalem]. On this basis, however, it is rather to be supposed that a definite contrast with the report of Jesus’s entry, known from elsewhere, is hereby indicated, than to be assumed that that report stood in an original connection with the parable introduced by v. 11. A lacuna in the factual connection is not produced by the absence of the story of the entry either. For upon the parable, which is told ἐγγὺς τῆς Ἱερουσαλήμ [near Jerusalem], there follows v. 28: καὶ εἰπὼν ταῦτα ἐπορεύετο ἔμπροσθεν, ἀναβαίνων εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα [and when he had said these things, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem], to which v. 47 attaches quite well: καὶ ἦν διδάσκων τὸ καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ [and he was teaching daily in the temple]. It remains to be noted that the beginning of the inserted section, καὶ ἐγένετο ὡς ἤγγισεν [and it came to pass, as he drew near] (v. 29), is set off from the preceding words not indistinctly.

Luke Chapter 20

The parable of the rebellious vinedressers (vv. 9–18), which Tertullian does not mention, Marcion, according to the testimony of Epiphanius, certainly did not read.⁶¹ The

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view of Hahn, that Marcion cut it out because he could not acknowledge the prophets as forerunners of Jesus,⁶² cannot, to be sure, in this case be contested by pointing out parallels that would have stood in that Gospel. Yet in v. 19 there is a clear trace that the parable has been inserted, and has not belonged to the original connection of Marcion’s Gospel. In Marcion the 19th verse in Luke followed immediately upon v. 8, and read: καὶ ἐζήτησαν ἐπιβαλεῖν τὰς χεῖρας ἐπ᾽ αὐτὸν, καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν [and they sought to lay hands on him, and they were afraid]. On this basis, then, the addition which refers to the parable in question was quite certainly missing: ἔγνωσαν γὰρ ὅτι πρὸς αὐτοὺς τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην εἶπε [for they knew that he had spoken this parable against them].⁶³ It is supposed to give the reason why the Pharisees had lain in wait for Jesus. It is striking, however, that it does not then follow immediately upon the clause ἐζήτησαν [they sought], but is separated from that clause by the clause καὶ ἐφοβήθησαν [and they were afraid], so that at first glance one is tempted to see in it a ground for ἐφοβήθησαν [they were afraid]. That addition therefore occupies a logically wrong place, and thereby betrays that it was only afterward appended, in a careless manner, to the sentence already completed. In this, however, we recognize once more the reviser, not on the ground that we presuppose absolute logical exactness in the original Gospel, but because it is really much harder to write illogically in this way than to express the thoughts in the proper and correct order.⁶⁴ The reviser made the addition with a view to the inserted parable, in order

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to give a ground for the ἐζήτησαν [they sought], since the parable itself attacked the Pharisees only in a veiled manner. In Marcion’s Gospel, however, the clause ἐζήτησαν, in its connection with v. 8, was fully motivated by Jesus’s dismissive answer: οὐδὲ ἐγὼ λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐν ποίᾳ ἐξουσίᾳ τοῦτο ποιῶ [neither do I tell you by what authority I do this].

Verses 37, 38, Jesus’s appeal to the testimony of Moses for the resurrection of the dead, was missing in Marcion.⁶⁵ That it must have given him offense is not to be denied, if he read it at all.⁶⁶ That it did not, however, belong to the original connection is probable. The words do not, indeed, stand in contradiction with the preceding words of Jesus, but they are superfluous in the discourse. For since the Sadducees, although they otherwise denied the resurrection, let no doubt about it be voiced in Jesus’s presence, but rather provisionally conceded it, and put to the Lord only a particular question relating to the resurrection, the design of the narrative in Luke by no means requires that Jesus at the same time attacked and refuted the unspoken conviction of those men. In the parallel passage, Matthew 22:31, 32, the matter is different. Here the addition of this refutation is rendered necessary by the fact that Jesus opens his answer to the question that had been put to him at once with the charge of error in general, namely in regard to the resurrection (v. 29: πλανᾶσθε μὴ εἰδότες τὰς γραφὰς, μηδὲ τὴν δύναμιν τοῦ θεοῦ [you are mistaken, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God]). The δύναμις τοῦ θεοῦ [power of God] is then shown in v. 30 in the abolition of marital and sexual relationships in that world, and the sense of the γραφαί [scriptures] is set forth in vv. 31, 32 by the appeal to the formula, “the God of Abraham, and so on.” In Luke, by contrast, Jesus in v. 34 comes out at once with the answer to the question that had been put to him, and therefore had no need to enter upon the discussion of the real fundamental error. Therefore at least the possibility cannot be disputed, that the narrative

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originally also still included the two verses in question. This possibility, however, is raised to probability when we consider the formula πάντες γὰρ αὐτῷ ζῶσιν [for all live to him] (v. 38), which is foreign to Matthew as well.⁶⁷ If one considers the formula by itself, one will find the chief weight to lie in αὐτῷ [to him], and will find in it a thought similar to that expressed in Acts 17:28, ἐν αὐτῷ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν [in him we live and move and are], and in Romans 14:8, ἐάν τε ζῶμεν, ἐάν τε ἀποθνήσκωμεν, τοῦ κυρίου ἐσμέν [whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s]. In our passage the formula is adduced as the supreme principle, in proof of the words θεὸς οὐκ ἔστι νεκρῶν αλλὰ ζώντων [God is not the God of the dead, but of the living]. We must therefore, because what is at issue is the abolition of death by life, lay the chief emphasis in this context on ζῶσιν [they live]. But this shows that the formula does not really belong here at all. For in spite of this it is not fitted to exclude the thought of ἀποθνήσκειν [dying], which is, after all, what it really comes down to; for the thought does not have even an antithetical relation to ἀποθνήσκειν. The emphasis will always rest chiefly on αὐτῷ, and the abolition of the contrast between life and death could be expressed only by the words of the Epistle to the Romans cited above, τοῦ κυρίου ἐσμέν [we are the Lord’s], or by the words in v. 38, which the unfortunate formula is supposed to come to the aid of: θεὸς οὐκ ἔστι νεκρῶν ἀλλὰ ζώντων [God is not the God of the dead, but of the living], in which the contrast between death and life is manifestly abolished in the thought θεὸς ἔστι [God is]. One will convince oneself that the formula under discussion is not at all in its place here, if one resolves so precise a thought, θεὸς οὐκ ἔστι νεκρῶν ἀλλὰ ζώντων [God is not the God of the dead, but of the living], into its elements. What is presupposed is the factual point, that God is called the God of Abraham, and so on, and thus of persons long dead. But because God is the Living One, only what is living can be referred to him; those men, therefore, because they are after all referred to God, are not dead but alive. The supreme principle, on which it therefore here

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comes down to, is this: God is living, not, however: we are living, as the addition states. It can therefore not have belonged to the original, vigorous discourse, and by its similarity to Pauline maxims it betrays the same reviser from whom the sentence also derives (Luke 19:9), καθότι καὶ αὐτὸς υἱὸς Ἀβραάμ ἐστιν [inasmuch as he too is a son of Abraham]. The same reviser, then, will also have inserted both verses at this place altogether, the superfluity of which has shown itself, and Marcion’s Gospel, in which the passage was missing, would rightly deserve the character of belonging to the original.

Luke Chapter 21.

Verse 18, καὶ θρὶξ ἐκ τῆς κεφαλῆς ὑμῶν οὐ μὴ ἀπόληται [and a hair of your head shall by no means perish], was missing in Marcion.⁶⁸ Hahn explains that the verse was offensive to Marcion because the good God, after all, did not care for the hairs, and that for that reason he would have struck the verse out.⁶⁹ This ground, however, does not fit at all, because in the text the care for the hairs is not ascribed to God at all; rather, the verse bears a proverbial character, without touching the dogmatic sphere, as for instance Luke 12:6, 7 does. Although, then, no necessity lay before Marcion to delete the verse, it was nevertheless missing, and missing because it is without any reasonable connection with its surroundings. For the verse plainly contradicts the preceding words: παραδοθήσεσθε καὶ ὑπὸ γονέων κτλ. καὶ θανατώσουσι ἐξ ὑμῶν καὶ ἔσεσθε μισούμενοι ὑπὸ πάντων [you will be delivered up even by parents, and so on, and they will put some of you to death, and you will be hated by all] (vv. 16, 17).⁷⁰ No less does it contradict the 19th verse. For if the disciples were as sure of their invulnerability as it is promised them in v. 18, they had no need of the comfort in v. 19: ἐν τῇ ὑπομονῇ κτήσασθε τὰς ψυχὰς ὑμῶν [by your endurance gain your souls]. This verse, however, has the plainest reference to the 17th, just cited, and v. 18 does not belong here at all. Once again a proof of the original character of the Marcionite text!

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Verses 21, 22, Τότε οἱ ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ φευγέτωσαν εἰς τὰ ὄρη καὶ οἱ ἐν τῷ μέσῳ αὐτῆς ἐκχωρείτωσαν καὶ οἱ ἐν ταῖς χώραις μὴ εἰςερχέσθωσαν εἰς αὐτὴν. Ὅτι ἡμέραι ἐκδικήσεως αὗταί εἰσι τοῦ πλησθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα [Then let those in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those in the midst of it depart, and let those in the country places not enter into it. For these are days of vengeance, that all things that are written may be fulfilled], Marcion did not read, and indeed, as Epiphanius had already supposed, and as Hahn agrees with him, on account of the formula τοῦ πλησθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα [that all things that are written may be fulfilled].⁷¹ But if he took offense at this, he needed, after all, only to omit these words. That ground, moreover, is not even entirely conclusive. Marcion could reject only those prophecies of the Old Testament which were supposed to refer to Jesus himself. Insofar as they concerned something purely Jewish, as is the case here, there lay in his system no ground for suppressing them. This is proved by the circumstance that, if he mutilated Luke at all, he did not tamper with the passage Luke 7:27, where Jesus, with the words οὗτός ἐστι περὶ οὗ γέγραπται [this is he of whom it is written], applied a passage of the prophets to the Baptist. If, then, we must seek another ground why the verses may have been missing, there is, to be sure, nothing to object to in the connection in which they stand, but they are also not necessary in the connection. And at the same time the flatness of the thought, in comparison with the parallel passage in Matthew 24:16–18, is fitted to arouse the suspicion of its later origin. With what pregnant words is the haste of the flight that is urged made vivid in Matthew? (ὁ ἐπὶ τοῦ δώματος μὴ καταβαινέτω ἆραι τὰ ἐκ τῆς οἰκίας αὐτοῦ· καὶ ὁ ἐν τῷ ἀγρῷ μὴ ἐπιστρεψάτω ὀπίσω ᾆραι τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ. [Let him who is on the housetop not come down to take the things out of his house; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his clothes.]) In Luke, by contrast, the summons to flight is repeated once (οἱ ἐν μέσῳ αὐτῆς ἐκχωρείτωσαν [let those in the midst of it depart]), and the naturally quite unnecessary and absurd command is added, οἱ ἐν ταῖς χώραις μὴ εἰςερχέσθωσαν εἰς αὐτὴν [let those in the country places not enter into it] (namely, into the besieged city!). Since the words of Matthew just cited were already contained in the original Gospel (Luke 17:31),⁷² to the reviser it

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seemed fitting, however, at this place to take up the summons to flight from Matthew, so he attached to the words τότε οἱ ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ φευγέτωσαν ἐπὶ (εἰς) τὰ ὄρη [then let those in Judea flee upon (into) the mountains] those dull and clumsy exhortations, and added, for seasoning, that general appeal to the Old Testament.

Luke Chapter 22.

Since Epiphanius states that v. 16 was missing in Marcion’s Gospel, but Tertullian passes over in silence not only this verse but also the verses 17, 18, which are closely connected with it,⁷³ we have decided, since several such cases occurred in which Epiphanius had indicated a lacuna incompletely, that all three verses were missing in Marcion: Λέγω γὰρ ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐκέτι οὐ μὴ φάγω ἐξ αὐτοῦ (τοῦ πάσχα) ἕως ὅτου πληρωθῇ ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ θεοῦ. Καὶ δεξάμενος ποτήριον, εὐχαριστήσας εἶπε· λάβετε τοῦτο καὶ διαμερίσατε ἑαυτοῖς· λέγω γὰρ ὑμῖν ὅτι οὐ μὴ πίω ἀπὸ τοῦ γεννήματος τῆς ἀμπέλου, ἕως ὅτου ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἔλθῃ. [For I tell you that I shall not eat of it any more (the Passover) until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And when he had received a cup, he gave thanks and said: Take this and divide it among yourselves; for I tell you that I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.] The grounds on which Marcion is supposed to have cast these verses away, as Hahn states them,⁷⁴ cannot suffice. With the conception of a meal to be held in heaven Marcion came to terms by the explanation which was reported above at Luke 13:29 ff. If, further, Marcion, as Epiphanius reports,⁷⁵ understood by the πάσχα [Passover] (v. 15) not the lamb but the Eucharist itself, nothing was more natural than to apply the same explanation also to vv. 16 and 17, in which, moreover, it is not stated at all, as Hahn thinks, that

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Jesus really ate the Passover lamb. It is therefore not at all to be seen why Marcion should have struck the passage out! One could for that reason almost come to the thought that the statement of Epiphanius rests on an error, or on an accidental defect in the copy of the Gospel, and that Marcion read the whole passage. I leave this way out open, in case the grounding of the view that the verses derive from the reviser wins no assent. According to the usual interpretation, the verses contained an occurrence and sayings at the meal itself, before the institution of the memorial meal. What is striking here, however, is that the same word which in Luke (v. 18) refers only to the Passover meal itself is set by Matthew in relation to the memorial meal. (Matthew 26:28, 29: τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ αἷμά μου κτλ. — λέγω δὲ ὑμῖν, ὅτι οὐ μὴ πίω ἀπάρτι ἐκ τούτου τοῦ γεννήματος τῆς ἀμπέλου ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας ὅταν αὐτὸ πίνω μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν καινὸν ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ πατρός μου. [This is my blood, and so on. — But I tell you, I shall not drink from now on of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in the kingdom of my Father.]) For it is justified by nothing when one refers this saying to an earlier drinking of wine, “since Jesus himself probably did not partake of the symbolic cup.”⁷⁶ This last is a dogmatic presupposition, which is refuted precisely by the words just cited. These words, however, also stand in an essential relationship to the solemn institution of the memorial meal. As in Luke this meal is instituted εἰς ἀνάμνησιν [for a remembrance] (v. 19), so its significance in Matthew seems to be placed in hope, namely in the hope of Christ’s return. Looked at more closely, these two relationships are only poles of one and the same thought; one remembered Christ only as the one who was to come again, and one expected, after all, precisely the one who had already been present. Those closing words in Matthew, too, therefore plainly belong to the solemn formulas in which the memory of that last meal of Jesus was handed on. Then, however, one must also scruple

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to interpret the same formula in Luke v. 18 and v. 16 of an indifferent moment of the last meal, upon which the institution of the memorial rite only afterward followed. Rather, we plainly have in our three verses likewise a report of that event, so important for Christians, to which vv. 19, 20 also refer. This becomes all the more probable when we compare v. 17 with Matthew 26:27, in which verse, after all, the formula of the institution of the rite is uttered.

Even if this passage, vv. 16–18, is placed at the beginning of the meal and distinguished from the scene narrated in vv. 19, 20 and in Matthew 26:26–29, it contains the same thing which these verses can only ever contain, namely the determination of the Passover as the point of attachment for the religious remembrance and hope of the disciples. But if this was at all the significance of what took place on that evening, it is yet improbable that the tradition would have preserved different acts which are not really different but one and the same. And for that reason the original belonging-together of the sections vv. 16–18 and 19, 20 is not to be assumed. If, then, those verses were really missing in Marcion’s Gospel, this is a mark of its original character.

Of the section vv. 23–30, which Tertullian passes over,⁷⁷ Marcion will probably have read the 23rd verse (καὶ αὐτοὶ ἤρξαντο συζητεῖν πρὸς ἑαυτοὺς τὸ τίς ἄρα εἴη ἐξ αὐτῶν ὁ τοῦτο μέλλων πράσσειν [and they began to discuss among themselves which of them, then, it might be who was going to do this]), since it is necessary as the close of the preceding announcement of the betrayal. On the following verses, which contain a dispute of the disciples over rank, Hahn judges very

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uncertainly, “that, apart from v. 30, which contained a thoroughly Jewish view,⁷⁸ they could well have been tolerated by Marcion, unless the worldly mind of the disciples was too offensive to him.”⁷⁹ Hereby a moral standard for his treatment of the Gospel is imputed to Marcion which does not agree at all with the presupposition that he had been guided only by the interest of his system, which, however, naturally determined nothing about the disposition of the disciples. From Hahn’s standpoint, then, a definite judgment on this passage is not possible; we, on the other hand, can hold it to be quite certain that Marcion did not know the passage at all, because it does not fit in the least into the connection of the story and into the situation which we have to presuppose at the last meal of Jesus with his disciples. For it offends against all historical probability that the disciples, after the moving moment of the institution of the memorial meal, and after the crushing words, “the hand of my betrayer is with me on the table,” should have leaped over to such an utterance of silly pride, so that an original report cannot have contained this section. It bears, besides, the plainest traces of dependence on Matthew, whose reports, not further connected with one another, Matthew 20:20–28 and 19:28, are put together in it in a manner that is not entirely skillful. For as the ground of the promise of participation in the divine kingdom (vv. 29, 30) it says in v. 28: ὑμεῖς ἐστε οἱ διαμεμενηκότες μετ᾽ ἐμοῦ ἐν τοῖς πειρασμοῖς μου [you are those who have continued with me in my trials]. But the πειρασμοί [trials] were only just about to begin for Jesus, and how little the Lord at this passage will have conferred that honorable predicate on the disciples is proved by the words that follow immediately: ὁ σατανᾶς ἐξητήσατο ὑμᾶς τοῦ σινιάσαι ὡς τὸν σῖτον [Satan has demanded you, to sift you as the wheat] (v. 31),

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to which, further, the prediction of the denial by Peter is attached. The section, the lack of original character in which has also been noted elsewhere,⁸⁰ is therefore plainly an insertion into the text that lay before Marcion, in which, in a natural, simple way, one passes at once from the announcement of the betrayer, and the debate about him, to the prediction of the general weakness of the disciples. It is mistaken to try to justify the position and arrangement of that section in Luke by supposing, as De Wette too still thinks,⁸¹ that here, particularly by v. 27, account is taken of the foot-washing narrated in John 13 and of the discourse on humility attached to it. For what is an agreement in the one thought supposed to mean, when at the two passages it has entirely different occasions? For in Luke the humility of Jesus is set over against the pride of the disciples, in John over against the respect for him which did not allow Peter to accept from him a demonstration of humility. And these relationships separate themselves from one another so plainly that De Wette’s explanation, too, has no ground to show for Luke’s having undertaken a mixture of the reports of Matthew and John. For the narrative of Luke agrees completely with the passages of Matthew that have been cited, without there being found in it any hint of the tendency of the Johannine passage indicated above.

On the section vv. 35–46, which Tertullian passes over,⁸² we are in agreement with Hahn that Marcion read of it only verses 39–42, 45, 46, since these are presupposed by v. 41, which according to the testimony of Epiphanius was present.⁸³ If, now, it is indeed to be granted that the verses which accordingly drop out

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could not be acceptable to Marcion, because the summons to buy a sword contradicted his conception of the gentleness of Jesus, because besides an appeal to the Old Testament occurred in them, and because the drops of sweat which Jesus shed were a striking proof of his corporeality, one at the same time misses in the verses intelligibility and simplicity, and for that reason they cannot be held to be original. The sense of verses 35–38 is unclear, and so far as it lets itself be understood, it stands in no connection with the preceding discourses. The question is: what does the summons of Jesus in v. 36 mean, ἀγορασάτω μάχαιραν [let him buy a sword]? Were the disciples really to offer violent resistance to the persecutions which, after all, could at first break in only upon Jesus himself? This one must reject outright. Or is μάχαιρα [sword] to be understood figuratively? Then, however, a great clumsiness in the expression shows itself. Those words ἀγορασάτω μάχαιραν are, namely, placed together with rules about the conduct of the disciples which may be understood only in the proper sense: ὁ ἔχων βαλάντιον ἀράτω, ὁμοίως καὶ πήραν [let him who has a purse take it, and likewise a bag], further πωλησάτω τὸ ἱμάτιον αὐτοῦ [let him sell his cloak]. And precisely because this last direction admits of no figurative interpretation at all, it becomes almost impossible to assign to the words connected with it, ἀγορασάτω μάχαιραν (namely, for the sale price of the cloak), any sense other than the proper one. But even if we set this aside and pursue the figurative meaning, it is possible, first, to take the sword as the “sword of the Spirit” (as in Ephesians 6:17). If, however, one compares how Jesus is otherwise accustomed to present such a thought (compare Luke 21:15: ἐγὼ δώσω ὑμῖν στόμα καὶ σοφίαν [I will give you a mouth and wisdom]; Luke 12:11: τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα διδάξει ὑμᾶς ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ ὥρᾳ, ἃ δεῖ εἰπεῖν [the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say]) — then the ἀγοράζειν [buying] in this phrase is too bold and too divergent a notion for that interpretation to commend itself. But if it is merely to mean that the disciples should arm themselves for enmity and conflict, it is plain how far it is from the formula οὐκ ἦλθον βαλεῖν εἰρήνην ἀλλὰ μάχαιραν [I did not come to cast peace, but a sword] (Matthew 10:34)

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to the summons ἀγορασάτω μάχαιραν for that formula to explain it. For if that sword is an image for the separation itself, it is not yet said thereby that the one party is to use the sword against the other. In any case, that word of Jesus had to be misunderstood, as the answer of the disciples (ἰδοὺ μάχαιραι ὧδε δύο [behold, two swords here]) proves. But then, again, the ambiguous answer of Jesus, ἱκανόν ἐστι [it is enough], is offensive. If Jesus thereby gives it to be understood that they needed no more swords, this again presupposes the altogether incomprehensible intention of active resistance. But if it means, it is enough of this matter, you do not understand me — then Jesus was not permitted to content himself with this remark, but had to enlighten the disciples about his true intention. As artificial and unintelligible, then, as the section is in itself, so little natural is the thought which we may still recognize in it, in its relation to what precedes. Directions are plainly given in it about the further exercise of the vocation of the apostles. Now, although such things could well be uttered by Jesus, even though he had just predicted (vv. 31–34) the fickleness and the weakness of the disciples, it must nevertheless be striking that he confined himself to such external and obscure instructions where what mattered was to strengthen the faith of the disciples at all. Into the connection, then, there fit either quite different directions, or none at all, for the further exercise of the vocation of the disciples. And in view of this, as also in view of the altogether unintelligible character of the words of Jesus themselves, the verses are to be held a later insertion, and the text of Marcion, which did not contain them, the more original.⁸⁴

There still remain vv. 43, 44 to be considered. They contain the notice of the sweat shed by Jesus in his agony, and of his

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strengthening brought about by the appearance of the angel. These verses were also missing in many copies of the canonical Luke (compare Griesbach on the passage), and so one might answer the application of Hahn’s hypothesis at this passage by saying that in the copy used and mutilated by Marcion those verses had probably already been missing. This negative objection, however, does not suffice; Marcion’s Gospel has already so often proved itself the more original over against the canonical Luke that we must assign these verses, too, among the sections deriving from the reviser. They are also distinguished, by their mythical, exaggerating character, very much from the rest of the history.⁸⁵

Luke Chapter 23.

Verses 39–43, the conversation of Jesus with the criminal on the cross, was missing in Marcion.⁸⁶ Now, although the Jewish representation of the divine kingdom contained in it may indeed not have pleased him,⁸⁷ the section is nevertheless subject to the definite suspicion of later origin. In v. 43, namely, the thought is plainly expressed that full blessedness begins immediately after death, and precisely in contrast to the original expectation of a blessedness that dawns only with the later arrival of the divine kingdom (ὅταν ἔλθῃς ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ σου [when you come in your kingdom], v. 42).⁸⁸ The expositors, to be sure, wish to understand by the παράδεισος [paradise] only the κόλπος Ἀβραάμ [bosom of Abraham] (Luke 16:22), the provisional, subterranean abode of the blessed. This, however, cannot be the sense of the passage. First, παράδεισος, in the passages of the New Testament in which it occurs besides, means the place of the highest blessedness (2 Corinthians 12:4, where it is synonymous with ὁ τρίτος οὐρανός [the third heaven], and Revelation 2:8). Further, however, the

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solemn formula ἀμὴν λέγω σοι [truly I say to you], with which Jesus introduces his answer, is plainly used in the sense that the promise surpasses the request, that Jesus wills to grant the petitioner not merely a future blessedness, but the same in the immediate future. By contrast, the content which, for example, De Wette finds in the promise of Jesus⁸⁹ stands in no proportion at all to its solemn introduction. That interpretation cannot be evaded. But then the passage bears plainly enough in itself the stamp of later origin, since it expressly sets itself against the original eschatology, as it is proper throughout to the synoptic tradition and also otherwise to the Gospel of Luke. If, then, it was missing in Marcion, this only proves once again for the original character of his Gospel.⁹⁰

There still remain some sections of Luke which did not stand in Marcion’s Gospel, but which neither in themselves nor in their connection with the rest contain a mark that they do not originally belong to the Gospel. The view, however, which has been grounded by so great a series of sections, namely that what was missing in Marcion did not belong to the genuine and original design of the Gospel — this view may yet also be applied to the few remaining passages, even if, considered singly, they cannot be drawn in to ground the hypothesis that has been set forth. In any case, however, it will be necessary to apply our hypothesis to these apparently neutral sections as well,

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if it appears that their absence in Marcion is not explained by Hahn’s hypothesis either. It will therefore suffice to demonstrate the inadequacy of that hypothesis in the individual cases.

Luke 13:1–9, the narrative of the slaughter of the Galileans, and the discourses attached to it by Jesus, together with the parable of the fig tree, is supposed, as Hahn thinks, to have been struck out by Marcion⁹¹ because a punishment inflicted by God is spoken of in it. This ground is not tenable. The words πάντες ὡσαύτως ἀπολεῖσθε [you will all likewise perish] (v. 3) Marcion did not need to refer to the good God at all. Further, he could interpret the words εἰς τὸ μέλλον ἐκκόψεις αὐτὴν [in the future you shall cut it down] (v. 9) just as he did Luke 12:46: διχοτομήσει αὐτὸν καὶ τὸ μέρος αὐτοῦ μετὰ τῶν ἀπίστων θήσει [he will cut him in two and appoint his portion with the unbelievers]. For in these words he recognized no positive punishment inflicted by the good God, but the procedure by which the good God would dismiss from his kingdom those unworthy of him, whereby they would then, to be sure, fall again to the cruel creator of the world.⁹² Or he could interpret the passage directly of the creator of the world, as Luke 19:27: τοὺς ἐχθρούς μου ἐκείνους — ἀγάγετε ὧδε καὶ κατασφάξατε ἔμπροσθέν μου [those enemies of mine — bring them here and slay them before me] (in Tertullian, chapter 37, p. 344). Thus precisely the view of Marcion which Hahn states thus, “that the unbelievers punish themselves only by not accepting the grace that is offered, and consequently do not receive a share in the blessedness of the Christians, but remain in misery under their God” — precisely this view did not need to induce him to strike this passage out. He therefore plainly did not know it at all.

Here belongs also Luke 15:11–32, the parable of the lost son, which was already discussed at length above, pp. 66 f.

Luke 17:7–10 contains a discourse on the unmeritoriousness

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of human action. The section was missing in Marcion.⁹³ That he struck it out, however, is not explained by Hahn’s remark “that in the passage, again, worldly affairs and enjoyments are spoken of, and that v. 10 does not correspond to Marcion’s view of the essence of the Christian life as a free exercise of virtue out of love.”⁹⁴ For those worldly affairs are adduced only as examples; besides, mentions of eating and drinking are not otherwise lacking either, and even the mention of usury is tolerated by Marcion in a parable (Luke 19:13), though he must have abhorred it still more than plowing. But how the free exercise of virtue is supposed to exclude the humility enjoined in v. 10 is not to be comprehended; and if Hahn perhaps holds the expression δοῦλος [servant] to be offensive, there is no occasion at all for that, since Marcion did not remove passages such as μακάριος ὁ δοῦλος ἐκεῖνος, ὃν ἐλθὼν ὁ κύριος αὐτοῦ εὑρήσει οὕτως ποιοῦντα [blessed is that servant whom his lord, when he comes, will find so doing] (Luke 12:43), καλέσας τοὺς δέκα δούλους κτλ. [having called the ten servants, and so on] (Luke 19:13). This passage, too, then, will be held a later addition.⁹⁵

Luke 18:31–34, an announcement by Jesus of his death, was missing in Marcion, and Hahn thinks it was omitted by him on account of the words καὶ τελεσθήσεται πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα διὰ τῶν προφητῶν τῷ υἱῷ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου [and everything written through the prophets will be accomplished for the Son of Man],⁹⁶ which beyond all question contradict Marcion’s view. This circumstance would therefore explain it completely, if precisely these words alone had been omitted. Why, then, should Marcion have struck out the whole passage, since the announcement of death in and of itself gave him no offense?

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Hahn’s hypothesis, then, again does not suffice to explain the case, and we see ourselves driven rather to the assumption that the section was not known by Marcion at all. The connection with what precedes and what follows contains, indeed, no mark of a later revision. Yet precisely that appeal to the Old Testament arouses suspicion. In the whole part of Luke from chapters 4–23 which we have gone through, the formula πληρωθῆναι τὴν γραφὴν [that the scripture should be fulfilled], or something similar, is found only in the following passages: σήμερον πεπλήρωται ἡ γραφὴ αὕτη ἐν τοῖς ὠσὶν ὑμῶν [today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears] (4:21); ἔτι τοῦτο τὸ γεγραμμένον δεῖ τελεσθῆναι ἐν ἐμοὶ, τό· καὶ μετὰ ἀνόμων ἐλογίσθη [this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, namely: and he was reckoned with the lawless] (22:37); ἡμέραι ἐκδικήσεως αὗταί εἰσὶ, τοῦ πλησθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα [these are days of vengeance, that all things that are written may be fulfilled] (21:22). These formulas of citation, however, all belong to passages whose original character is, on other grounds, more than doubtful. As has already been recalled several times, Marcion’s Gospel was not without appeals to the Old Testament (compare Luke 6:3; 7:27; 20:41–44); but this definite formula is found only in those sections. It therefore appears as a literary manner of the reviser. For that reason the present passage, too, will derive from the same source, and Marcion must be acquitted of the suspicion of having struck it out.

On the section likewise missing in Marcion’s Gospel,⁹⁷ Luke 22:49–51, where it is narrated of Peter how he defended Jesus with the sword, one can conclude only from the results reached so far that it was originally missing in Marcion’s Gospel. At least the ground given by Hahn, “that according to Marcion a Christian may not punish positively,”⁹⁸ does not explain at all his assumption that Marcion struck these verses out. For the conduct of Peter is certainly not set up as a model. For that reason he had here as little cause as in the case of the words of the sons of Zebedee (Luke chapter

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9:54, κύριε, θέλεις εἴπωμεν πῦρ καταβῆναι ἀπὸ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἀναλῶσαι αὐτοὺς [Lord, do you want us to bid fire come down from heaven and consume them]) to undertake a mutilation.

As, then, in many cases Hahn’s hypothesis has proved inadequate to explain the divergence of the Marcionite Gospel from the canonical Luke, so in almost all the sections we have gone through traces have been found by which the sections of the canonical Luke that are not present in Marcion’s Gospel appear as such as have been inserted by a second person into the text known to Marcion. What we at first presupposed only as possible has risen to that degree of certainty which is at all possible in the field of internal criticism. We can therefore now, with greater confidence in our hypothesis, pass to another class of differences between the two Gospels.

C. Alleged Additions and the Remaining Divergences

The opposite view grounds the well-known charge against Marcion not only by the omissions which he is supposed to have committed, but also by some transpositions and additions which one thinks one can demonstrate against him. For this, besides the interchange of the order of Luke 4:16–30 with vv. 31–35, which we have nevertheless had to find justified, two further cases are adduced,⁹⁹ which are to be considered more closely.

Epiphanius reports,¹⁰⁰ namely, that Marcion, in the narrative of the healing of the ten lepers (Luke 17:11–19), ἄλλα ἀντ᾽ ἄλλων ἐποίησε λέγων· ὅτι πολλοὶ λεπροὶ ἦσαν ἐν ἡμέραις Ἐλισσαίου τοῦ προφήτου καὶ οὐκ ἐκαθαρίσθη εἰ μὴ Νεεμᾶν ὁ Σύρος [put other things in place of other things, saying that many lepers were in the days of Elisha the prophet, and none was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian], with which v. 27 in the 4th chapter of the canonical Luke, which, however, Marcion did not read there, agrees word for word. This statement of Epiphanius is also supposed to be confirmed by Tertullian,¹⁰¹ and if this really

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were the case, this phenomenon would indeed be a significant support for Hahn’s hypothesis. From Tertullian’s words,¹⁰² however, only this much emerges: that the antithesis which Marcion attached to the healing narrative, and which probably stood beside the Gospel text,¹⁰³ contained the mention of the healing of Naaman by Elisha. When, in his refutation of Marcion out of Marcion’s own Gospel, Tertullian comes to the section Luke 17:11 f., he evidently holds rather to Marcion’s remarks upon it than to the text itself, which he summarizes only in short sentences. His words are: Lex leprosorum, quantae sit interpretationis erga species ipsius vitii et inspectationis summi sacerdotis, nostrum erit scire: Marcionis, morositatem legis opponere, ut et hic Christum aemulum ejus affirmet, praevenientem solemnia legis etiam in curatione decem leprosorum, quos tantummodo ire jussos, ut se ostenderent sacerdotibus, in itinere purgavit, sine tactu jam et sine verbo tacita potestate et sola voluntate. [It will be ours to know the law of lepers, of how much interpretation it admits with respect to the kinds of the disease itself and the inspection of the high priest; Marcion’s part, to set the moroseness of the law against it, so that here too he may affirm Christ to be its rival, anticipating the solemn rites of the law even in the cure of the ten lepers, whom, merely bidden to go and show themselves to the priests, he cleansed on the way, now without touch and without a word, by a silent power and by will alone.] That what lies before us here is Marcion’s explanation, into which the content of the text is woven only incidentally, is proved by Tertullian’s remark, added immediately as a refutation: quasi necesse sit semel remediatore languorum et vitiorum annunciato Christo et de effectibus probato, de qualitatibus curationum retractari. [as if, once Christ had been announced as the healer of weaknesses and of vices and had been proved by the effects, it were necessary to go back over the qualities of the cures.] For this reason we have, in the sentence that soon follows upon that one—nunc etsi praefatus est, multos tunc fuisse leprosos apud Israelem in diebus Elisaei prophetae, et neminem eorum purgatum, nisi Neeman Syrum: non utique numerus faciet ad differentiam deorum, [now, even if he has said by way of preface that there were then many lepers in Israel in the days of Elisha the prophet, and that none of them was cleansed except Neeman the Syrian: the number will certainly not make for a difference of gods]—only a remark of Marcion’s and a counter-remark of Tertullian’s. For who, then, would the subject in praefatus est [he has said by way of preface] be?

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Jesus, perhaps, into whose mouth, according to Epiphanius, the words would have been put? This reference, however, is too remote, and even Hahn cannot approve it, if one may conclude this from the position which he has given the words in Marcion’s text, after v. 14.¹⁰⁴ The evangelist, however, can still less serve as the grammatical subject, because his words are not expressly given at all. And how should the expression praefatus est fit him either? It can therefore refer only to Marcion’s antithetical remark on the passage, which here attached itself both to the number of those healed and also to the manner of the healing, as emerges from Tertullian’s first remark. That Tertullian, then, found the verse not in Marcion’s text, but only in the Antitheses, we must maintain even against Epiphanius: especially since, at the healing of a leper narrated in Luke 5:12–14 as well, Marcion drew in the example of Elisha and Naaman in order to form an antithesis.¹⁰⁵ Whether Marcion’s remark now came into the text in later copies through an oversight of the copyists, as something similar took place at Luke 23:2, or whether a carelessness was committed by Epiphanius himself—which may well be credited to him, since precisely at our passage he repeatedly raises the charge of mutilation, without demonstrating wherein it consisted, and without its probability being apparent—we must in any case hold to Tertullian’s report,¹⁰⁶ from which one certainly would not have inferred the presence of that verse in the section under

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discussion, had one not been prejudiced by Epiphanius’s statement. The charge of an arbitrary alteration of the text cannot, then, be grounded against Marcion on this passage either.

In the section Luke 8:19–21 Marcion did not read the 19th verse (παρεγένοντο δὲ πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ μήτηρ καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ· καὶ οὐκ ἠδύναντο συντυχεῖν αὐτῷ διὰ τὸν ὄχλον) [and his mother and his brothers came to him, and they were not able to reach him because of the crowd], but, according to the unanimous testimony of Tertullian and Epiphanius,¹⁰⁷ he still read in the 20th verse the words τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ τίνες εἰσιν οἱ ἀδελφοί μου; [who is my mother, and who are my brothers?], which are absent in the canonical Luke, but are found in Matthew at the parallel passage, chapter 12:48. From there, it is supposed, Marcion took them over into his text, in order to use them as proof that his Christ knew of no mother and of no brothers, and so had none either. And so that the evangelist might not, as it were, come forward as an authority for the opposite view, that Jesus had relatives, he is supposed to have struck out the 19th verse.¹⁰⁸ This explanation rests on the presupposition that Marcion knew the Gospel of Matthew. But since this has been proved by Tertullian just as little as Marcion’s acquaintance with Luke,¹⁰⁹ the solution proposed by Hahn becomes more than doubtful. On a closer view, by contrast, the assumption commends itself that in this passage too Marcion had the original reading. For in other passages as well, where there is a divergence from Luke, the Marcionite text agrees with Matthew. To this class belong the variants cited above: coram deo (Luke 12:8, 9) [before God], the omission of οἰκέτης [household servant] in Luke 16:13, and the citation of Luke 5:14 in the Marcionite text.¹¹⁰ This last case in particular fully justifies the assumption that here too an original agreement of the text with Matthew

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had taken place. That v. 19 was nevertheless absent is a fairly indifferent matter, since even without it the narrative has the form it needs. This view, however, still requires, for its confirmation, the demonstration of the ground on which that question was omitted, in the text of the canonical Luke, by the reviser of the Marcionite text. For this it is necessary to enter upon the tendency of the revision of the Gospel, the complete assessment of which is, to be sure, not yet in place here. Yet some other divergences of the two texts will also receive their proper light from this point. In order to gain a firm foothold for this investigation, we turn first to

Luke 10:22. In this verse Marcion had, instead of the present reading οὐδεὶς γινώσκει τίς ἐστι ὁ υἱὸς, εἰ μὴ ὁ πατὴρ, καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὁ πατὴρ εἰ μὴ ὁ υἱὸς [no one knows who the Son is, except the Father, and who the Father is, except the Son], not only the two members in reverse order—nemo scit, qui sit pater, nisi filius, et qui sit filius, nisi pater [no one knows who the Father is, except the Son, and who the Son is, except the Father]¹¹¹—but even, instead of the present γινώσκει [knows], the form ἔγνω [knew],¹¹² which we have to hold to be the more correct reading. For the passage in Irenaeus, adv. haer. [Adversus haereses, Against Heresies] IV, 6, 1, which from the context evidently refers to Marcion, gives this reading as his;¹¹³ from which it emerges that the citation from Tertullian above is not entirely exact. This divergence, however much it is in the Gnostic interest, cannot be explained by Hahn’s hypothesis. This the scholar has himself seen well enough, in that he mentions the citations of Justin the Martyr and of the Clementine Recognitions which agree with it.¹¹⁴ For that reason he also takes care, at this passage, not to repeat

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the usual charge against Marcion. But precisely this passage is a reef for his whole hypothesis. For the reading is accredited as the original one not merely by these traces of the oldest Gospel citations; it also prevails in Clement of Alexandria and in Origen, and even to Tertullian it is not foreign.¹¹⁵ But since, as is clear from Irenaeus as well, it was a principal support of the Gnostics, and specifically of the Marcionites,¹¹⁶ while in the canonical Gospels it has been displaced by the reading which contains the members in reverse order and the present instead of the aorist, an anti-Marcionite tendency in the final redaction of the Gospels, and thus also of Luke, is not to be mistaken. If, however, that tendency is secured in one case, we may also apply it to the explanation of other differences between the Marcionite and the canonical Gospel of Luke. If, then, we return to the passage Luke 8:19–21, it is probable, by analogy with the case just discussed, that here too the reviser of Marcion’s Gospel omitted that question of Jesus, τίς ἐστιν ἡ μήτηρ μου κτλ. [who is my mother, and so on], which was for Marcion the principal proof-text for the non-human origin of Jesus, and in its place inserted the definite assertion of human descent in the words παρεγένοντο πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ μήτηρ καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοὶ αὐτοῦ [his mother and his brothers came to him].

Only the same tendency can also have moved him, in Luke 16:17, to put, in place of εὐκοπώτερόν ἐστι τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν παρελθεῖν ἢ τῶν λόγων μου μίαν κεραίαν πεσεῖν [it is easier for heaven and the earth to pass away than for one tittle of my words to fall],

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τοῦ νόμου μίαν κεραίαν [one tittle of the law]. For that passage, in connection with the preceding verse, evidently supplies a principal proof of the separation of law and Gospel asserted by Marcion. In order to render that proof harmless, the church-oriented reviser substituted the word νόμου [of the law] for λόγων μου [of my words], unconcerned about the sense, or the nonsense, that would thereby arise. To the same end he put into Jesus’s mouth, right at his first appearance in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4:16 f.), the speech by which Jesus presented himself as the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, since it was precisely from his sudden appearance in Capernaum that the Marcionites inferred an origin wrought immediately by the unknown God. Now, since these alterations have been made precisely at the passages which served Marcion as principal proof-texts, these examples may well give us the right to explain still other divergences of the two Gospels in this way as well.

In Luke 10:21 the address to God in Marcion did not read κύριε τοῦ οὐρανοῦ καὶ τῆς γῆς [Lord of heaven and of the earth], but only κύριε τοῦ οὐρανοῦ [Lord of heaven].¹¹⁷ This formula was perhaps applied by the Marcionites in order to prove that the earth was no concern of the highest God. And in order to guard against this, καὶ τῆς γῆς [and of the earth] was added in the ecclesiastical reworking.

Luke 20:35 read in Marcion οἱ δὲ καταξιωθέντες ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐκείνου τυχεῖν (καὶ) τῆς ἀναστάσεως [but those who have been counted worthy by the God of that age to obtain (also) the resurrection], and he joined, in an incorrect manner, the words ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐκείνου [by the God of that age], in order to draw from them a proof of his highest God.¹¹⁸ In our canonical text ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ [by God] is now absent, evidently for no other reason than to guard against that explanation.¹¹⁹

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In Luke 22:3 Marcion did not read the words εἰσῆλθε σατανᾶς εἰς [Satan entered into], and so probably read ἀπῆλθε δὲ Ἰούδας ὁ ἐπικαλούμενος Ἰσκαριώτης, ὢν ἐκ τοῦ ἀριθμοῦ τῶν δώδεκα καὶ συνελάλησε κτλ. [but Judas, called Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve, went away and conferred, and so on].¹²⁰ The passage did, to be sure, serve his view that the creator of the world had brought about the Lord’s death through his creatures. Naturally the charge is also pronounced, in the case of this passage, that Marcion had fitted it to his own purpose (by Hahn, in the work cited above, p. 203). Such a change, however, would have been very ill-suited to its purpose. For the mention of Satan did not hinder him from ascribing the guilt for the death of Jesus to the creator of the world, since he could just as well regard Satan as that creator’s instrument; but if he really changed anything, he would rather have woven in a direct indication of the guilt of the creator of the world, since that creator’s influence upon Judas was not at all so clear, and first required a further demonstration. Since, then, neither the purposiveness of a change in general nor of this change in particular is to be seen [printed nach; the correlative of weder is noch], the mention of Satan in this passage is to be ascribed to the reviser, who here wished to cut off the possibility of charging Judas’s deed to the creator of the world.

Luke 24:25, where our canonical text reads ὦ [O]

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ἀνόητοι καὶ βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ τοῦ πιστεύειν ἐπὶ πᾶσιν οἷς ἐλάλησαν οἱ προφῆται [foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken], Marcion read ἐλάλησεν ὑμῖν [he spoke to you] (as in v. 6).¹²¹ But then v. 27, which hangs together with the canonical reading, will also have been absent: καὶ ἀρξάμενος ἀπὸ Μωϋσέως καὶ ἀπὸ πάντων τῶν προφητῶν διηρμήνευεν αὐτοῖς ἐν πάσαις ταῖς γραφαῖς τὰ περὶ αὐτοῦ [and beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself], and—in v. 32—the words καὶ ὡς διήνοιγεν τὰς γραφάς [and how he opened the scriptures]. We should have to abandon our whole investigation up to this point if we were to blame this divergence on Marcion. His reading is rather to be held original.¹²² The weaving in of the appeal to the Old Testament comes from the reviser, out of the same tendency with which he put such a speech into Jesus’s mouth at his first appearance as well (Luke 4). It lay in the anti-Marcionite interest that the Lord should begin his course, and close it, by presenting himself as the fulfiller of the prophecies of the Old Testament.

In the same way one will also have to judge the detailed citation of the Old Testament which is spoken by Jesus in vv. 44–46. Tertullian passes over it,¹²³ and the formula δεῖ πληρωθῆναι πάντα τὰ γεγραμμένα ἐν τῷ νόμῳ Μωϋσέως καὶ προφήταις καὶ ψαλμοῖς περὶ ἐμοῦ [all things written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms concerning me must be fulfilled] is precisely the sort that is found only in such passages as belong to the reviser of the Marcionite

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Gospel.¹²⁴ The complete enumeration of the parts of the Old Testament also bears a stamp of intentionality which distinguishes itself very clearly from the original forms of the tradition. Likewise the words ψηλαφησατέ με καὶ ἴδετε [handle me and see] (Luke 24:39), which Tertullian (l. c. [loco citato, in the passage cited]) passes over in silence, are, if we may conclude from this that they were absent in Marcion, to be held only an anti-docetic addition of the reviser. Yet this will have to remain doubtful.

About the close of Marcion’s Gospel, unfortunately, only little can be ascertained. Of the verses 47–53 that now follow, Tertullian mentions only the 47th, with the words Apostolos mittens ad praedicandum universis nationibus [sending the apostles to preach to all nations].¹²⁵ The words in the canonical text of Luke which correspond to this citation are, however, so woven into the construction of the preceding verses—against the original character of which we rightly entertain mistrust—that the form of the original text can hardly be reconstructed with certainty. One must, besides, be doubtful whether everything that follows was absent, or whether the last verses, which contain the narrative of the ascension, formed the close of the Gospel. That the ending was absent, as Hahn thinks,¹²⁶ does not follow quite so decisively from Epiphanius’s words; he says only that some things were absent from the ending.¹²⁷ It is also to be expected that the Gospel, whose original character has proved itself at every point, will have reached an appropriate close and resting point. But since, precisely in this last portion, divergences that are not insignificant must after all have taken place, the question is by what we are able to recognize them. About vv. 44–46 we have already decided. Verse 47 was present in Marcion, so vv. 48–53 still remain.

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In these, however, there is a striking agreement with the parallel report of the Acts of the Apostles. The two reports are not originally identical. In the Gospel the appearances of Jesus between the resurrection and the ascension follow immediately upon one another. According to the Acts of the Apostles, a period of 40 days falls between the two points. According to this report the ascension takes place on the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:12); according to the Gospel, Jesus disappears at Bethany (v. 50). There the last speeches of Jesus concern the βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ [kingdom of God] (Acts 1:3); here, chiefly the necessity of his death. In the Gospel it is reported that Jesus blessed the disciples before the ascension; in the Acts of the Apostles there is no mention of this. In spite of this difference, however, there is also verbal agreement in individual verses. Compare

[Luke vv. 48, 49: But you are witnesses of these things. And behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you; but you, sit in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Acts 1:4, and v. 8: He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father. You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses. Luke vv. 52, 53: And they, having worshipped him, returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Acts 1:12, and chapter 2:46, 47: Then they returned to Jerusalem. Continuing steadfastly day by day with one accord in the temple, praising God.] [The verse numbers which Ritschl sets inside the parallel columns are his reference aids.]

If, then, we must find in the Gospel something that was added by the reviser to the original design, it will be the passages which agree with the Acts of the Apostles, which was after all composed by the same man whom we have to regard as the reviser of Marcion’s Gospel. To him, then, the verses compared above, 48, 49, 52, 53, would

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belong, whereas vv. 50, 51, which do not agree with the report of the Acts of the Apostles, would be original. Yet it would be possible that v. 52 also still belonged with them, since its agreement with Acts 1:12 is not entirely exact. And these 3 verses would be a fitting close. The 47th verse, by contrast, must in Marcion have been joined to the formula εἶπε δὲ αὐτοῖς [and he said to them] (v. 44), and that in the form κηρύσσετε ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματί μου μετάνοιαν καὶ ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη [preach in my name repentance and forgiveness of sins to all the nations]. The formula ἀρξάμενον ἀπὸ Ἱερουσαλήμ [beginning from Jerusalem] is, however, suspect to me as a mannerism of the reviser (cf. Luke 24:27; Acts 1:22), and I prefer not to incorporate it into the original Marcionite text.

These differences between the two Gospels which have just been gone through can also, then, be reconciled very well with our assumption. Apart from the story of the childhood of Jesus, and so on, only 2 cases still remain to be considered, namely the omission of the word Ναζαρηνέ [Nazarene] in Tertullian’s citation of Luke 4:34 (chapter 7, p. 201) and of the word Ναζωραῖος [Nazoraean] in the citations of Luke 18:37 (Tertullian, chapter 36, p. 340; Epiphanius, scholion 51). Although the citations can be inexact, Tertullian would certainly have argued from that word against Marcion if he had found it before him; it is therefore probably to be assumed that Marcion really did not read it at those passages. But whether he struck it out, or whether it was not rather the reviser who put it into the text—about that there can now surely be no further doubt.