Book One, Chapter I. The history of the investigation

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Book One

The Gospel of Marcion

Chapter I. The History of the Investigation concerning the Gospel of Marcion

The notice which Christian antiquity has handed down, that the Gnostic Marcion mutilated the canonical Gospel of Luke for his own use,¹ had maintained itself unchallenged or unnoticed until at last it was drawn into its province by biblical criticism, then not yet 200 years old. Since then it has passed through every possible case of positive recognition and of complete rejection. The various stages of its critical consideration have not followed one another arbitrarily and by chance. They have followed in that, one after another, all the individual elements of the tradition concerning this subject have been held up against one another and critically compared among themselves, so that a survey of the history of the criticism of this point is not merely interesting in itself, but can at the same time serve as a test of whether a repeated investigation of the point is warranted, and whether it is the absolutely warranted one.

The beginning of the critical consideration of that tradition concerning Marcion’s Gospel is naturally of such a kind,

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that criticism itself is still, in general, caught in the presuppositions of tradition, and does not yet feel itself free over against it. This lies so much in the laws of all development, that the beginning of a thing is still scarcely similar to the thing itself, that one does not even need to appeal to the fact that the founder of biblical criticism, as a Catholic, presupposed the absolute validity of ecclesiastical tradition. Thus we find in R. Simon² no doubt about the statements of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius, that Marcion mutilated the canonical Gospel of Luke in accordance with his antinomian system. He rather gives full credence to the proof which Tertullian advances, for the high antiquity and the authenticity of Luke, from the unanimous testimony of the apostolic churches. Simon declares himself unwilling, however, to follow the specific statements of the Church Father in support of that accusation, in that he rightly takes exception to Tertullian’s charging Marcion with the omission of some Matthean verses, since Marcion is supposed to have used only Luke. He therefore supposes that Tertullian had had only a copy that was not entirely accurate, and prefers to pass on to the consideration of the statements of Epiphanius, whose definite utterances about omissions and alterations which Marcion had undertaken seem to him to promise more certainty. That judgment on Tertullian, however unfounded it will prove to be, and the circumstance that Simon, in some statements of Epiphanius upon which he bases the charge of falsification against Marcion, rightly notes only variants, prove, however, that tradition must already yield to criticism. Complete trust in tradition is therefore no longer found even at this first appearance of criticism.

Mill³ repeated, as did R. Simon, the judgment of the

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Church Fathers concerning Marcion’s procedure with the Gospel of Luke. But from the proofs of the intentional falsification of the canonical text he not only set apart individual passages as indifferent scribal errors. He also called attention to the fact that Epiphanius had had before his eyes a more altered copy of the Gospel in question than Tertullian had. Other divergences he explained as glosses which, originating with the orthodox, had come into Marcion’s text. Finally, however, he recognized that some of Marcion’s readings might well be held to be the authentic readings of the canonical text, without, however, naming them.⁴

It was Semler who first called the whole customary view of Marcion’s Gospel into question. This happened first in the notes to the translation, cited above, of R. Simon’s critical history of the New Testament. He here expresses the conjecture that Marcion’s Gospel and the canonical Luke had been different recensions of one writing. In the former, such passages had been missing as, being allusions or appeals to the New Testament, would have had no value for Gentile Christians. He censures in Tertullian the lack of historical knowledge, and the declamations offered in compensation for it, by which one must become distrustful of his statements. The definite reports of Epiphanius about omissions in Marcion’s Gospel he seeks to cast doubt upon by Tertullian’s silence. With these conjectures he was, to be sure, unable to bring all the data into agreement, as indeed he wonders that the story of the entry into Jerusalem was missing from the Marcionite textual recension, although this was after all a historical matter.

Semler pursued the question further, however. In the “Preface to Townson’s Treatises on the Four Gospels,” Leipzig, 1783, he analyzed the first chapters of

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Tertullian’s fourth book against Marcion, and showed how Tertullian’s proof of the higher antiquity, not merely of Luke but of all four Gospels, rested solely on the allegedly concordant judgment of the Church and on the assertion of the complete agreement of the apostles, an assertion resting on a failure to recognize the independence and higher maturity of Paul as against the other apostles. In Marcion he saw a pure Paulinist, and he repeated the view that the Gospel Marcion used could have had its origin in a Pauline circle, from which the absence of Judaizing elements would be explicable — without, however, undertaking the more exact testing of this opinion. In this treatise we have the interesting phenomenon that Semler, with a sound tact, at once attacks the alleged testimony of the universa ecclesia [the universal Church], as the real chief hindrance to a historical view. In combating Tertullian, however, he falls into so passionate a zeal over his “hollow declamations and wretched sophistries” that one sees well how his criticism still lacks an objective attitude toward its subject matter: the critic’s irritation at Tertullian shows that he himself is inwardly not yet free from the opposition he is combating. In a later writing⁵ Semler asserts, still without further proof, that Marcion’s Gospel had belonged to the many from which the Catholic Church later selected the four canonical ones. Since it was unproved that Marcion owed his canon to the Catholic Church, the alleged forgery of the Gospel was also not reliable.⁶

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At almost the same time as Semler’s first utterances, Griesbach⁷ also expressed himself doubtfully against the usual view. He recalled that Marcion had indeed not presented his Gospel as that of Luke, and he denied the close kinship of the two Gospel writings with one another. He held it to be more probable, since Marcion was supposed also to have taken up many things from other Gospels, that the writing he used had been an extract from all the Gospels, which he had prepared for the use of Gentile Christians and had therefore omitted the references to the Old Testament. This view, which, just as little as Semler’s, was grounded on an exact knowledge of the remains of that Gospel, stood midway between the orthodox view and Semler’s. With the former it shared the assumption of the high antiquity of the canonical Gospels, without, however, also assigning to them the canonical, inviolable character which, in the eyes of the Church Fathers, was necessarily given with their apostolic origin. In this respect he followed Semler, who set the beginning of the canonical validity of the Gospels far down into the second century, but at the same time also doubted their high antiquity. Griesbach has had no successor in this mediating view.

Semler’s suggestions, on the other hand, stimulated further investigations. Löffler⁸ first called attention to the fact that not only had Marcion not presented his Gospel as that of Luke, but Tertullian himself had only expressed the conjecture that the two were identical.⁹ The alleged similarity of the two, from which the identity of the author was supposed to follow, he sought, by

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recalling the similarity of the Synoptics to one another, to cast doubt upon that similarity; and if Epiphanius indicated so many points of agreement between the two, he held that nothing against the essential difference followed from this, since Epiphanius passed over most of the discrepancies in silence. To the remains of Marcion’s Gospel that are preserved in Tertullian he paid just as little attention as R. Simon and the other critics before him. He found the ground of the well-known charge against Marcion in this, that the Church Fathers had been too firmly convinced of the original character of the canonical Gospels to have been able to recognize the independence of another Gospel writing. That their assumption of a falsification of Luke by Marcion was not thereby secured, however, he proved by showing that a tendentious expunging of the passages that opposed Marcion did not explain all the divergences between the two Gospels, for he must have deleted passages which entirely suited his view, and have made additions which condemned him. Löffler did not seek to establish a positive view. He briefly declared himself in agreement with Semler’s hypothesis; and even if we miss an exact grounding of his objections to the usual view, it is to be acknowledged that the remark last cited is of the utmost importance for the testing of the usual hypothesis.

Corrodi¹⁰ based his objections to the usual view of Marcion’s Gospel chiefly on this argument, recalling that if Marcion had removed from Luke the passages that contradicted him, he would not have left standing so much that was serviceable for his refutation as Tertullian and Epiphanius in fact find and use. Rather, all the canonical Gospels had certainly been unknown to him;

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otherwise the Johannine Gospel, as Griesbach too had already brought out, would surely have corresponded far better to his view, and he would have taken it into his canon. It was therefore probable that his Gospel had been one current in the use of Gentile Christians, which underlay the canonical Luke, the latter besides still containing a series of Judaizing pieces. With respect to the specific statements about Marcion’s Gospel, Corrodi too gave Epiphanius the preference over Tertullian, and judges Tertullian wrongly in this respect, inasmuch as he presupposes in him the same method in his excerpts as in Epiphanius. If, then, the latter reports a contradiction in the reading between Marcion’s text and his own, which Tertullian’s citations also contain, without Tertullian’s making any remark about it, however, Corrodi assumes that Tertullian agrees with Marcion against Epiphanius.

It was that observation, already made by Löffler and Corrodi, that Marcion, as a falsifier of Luke, must have proceeded very inconsistently, which also moved J. E. C. Schmidt¹¹ to depart from the usual view. The assumption recommended itself to him instead, that Marcion’s Gospel was rather the authentic Luke, which had arisen, through a revision, from the Hebrew original Gospel [Urevangelium]. Only through further additions had the canonical Luke proceeded from this. Schmidt claimed to recognize the fluctuating character of the latter, even as late as Tertullian’s time, from the fact that Tertullian missed in Marcion’s Gospel, among others, some passages which we find only in Matthew, but which Tertullian must have read in his canonical Luke. But because, on his presupposition, the original Gospel, and accordingly the authentic Luke as well, must in any case have contained the narrative of the baptism and the temptation, he explained their absence in Marcion from an accidental incompleteness of his

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copy. All this Schmidt expressed only as a conjecture, without undertaking a more exact test of the passages in dispute between Marcion and the canonical Luke. That Schmidt later gave up his view that Luke was the actual author of the writing used by Marcion,¹² and fell back on the less definite assertion that his Gospel was independent of the canonical Luke, changes nothing essential.

Eichhorn¹³ gathered together the objections which the rationalistic criticism had advanced individually against the usual view of Marcion’s Gospel. He appealed, as Löffler had, to the passage of Tertullian cited above, that Tertullian expressed the well-known charge against Marcion only as a conjecture. He repeatedly called attention to the fact that Marcion must have pursued his purpose very inconsistently, since he had not only left so much that is Jewish standing, but even the only addition with which he was charged contained an allusion to the Old Testament, and he must besides have deleted much that was anti-Jewish. He explains that Marcion’s acquaintance with the four canonical Gospels had not been demonstrated, and that on this presupposition the Johannine Gospel would have served his view much better. Acquaintance with Luke, and the falsification of Luke, were also improbable for this reason, that his Gospel bore no author’s name. After all this, the conjecture lay much nearer, that it was one of the source writings of Luke. For the reconstruction of the Marcionite text Eichhorn too, like all his predecessors, holds Tertullian’s statements to be unusable, and even expresses the conjecture that Tertullian had not so much as had Marcion’s text before his eyes. He therefore keeps only to Epiphanius, and indeed

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so closely that he takes Epiphanius’s citations, on which Epiphanius bases his refutation of Marcion, for the verbatim text of the Marcionite Gospel. Since those citations are almost throughout shorter and more compressed in comparison with the words of the canonical Luke, Eichhorn believed he might see, in these traces of the imperfection of the presentation, an all the more certain proof of original character.

With this result of the rationalistic criticism, that Marcion’s Gospel had not been dependent on the canonical Luke, Bolten (Der Bericht des Lucas von Jesu dem Messia, prefatory notice, p. 29 f., 1796 [Luke’s Report of Jesus the Messiah]), Bertholdt (Einleitung in die Schriften des A. und N. T. [Introduction to the Writings of the Old and New Testaments], vol. 3, pp. 1294 ff., 1813), and Gieseler (Versuch über die Entstehung der schriftlichen Evangelien [An Attempt concerning the Origin of the Written Gospels], pp. 24 ff., 1818) further agree. The difference that obtains among all these critics, whether the writing is to be held only positively as another recension of the canonical Luke, or as a source writing, is fairly inessential. That common result, however, was grounded less on specific investigations of the remains of the Gospel than on the rejection of the ecclesiastical tradition and on the reflection that the usual assumption was not sufficient to explain the facts of the case. Only Schmidt had made the attempt to establish the original character of the shorter Gospel writing by comparing its contents with the so-called Hebrew original Gospel, without, however, carrying this matter through thoroughly. And the criticism of the traditional view in Tertullian had been undertaken in a more comprehensive way only by Semler. The rest had contented themselves with challenging individual striking statements of Tertullian, without, as was necessary, examining more closely the whole section of his work that comes into consideration. A chief defect of all these attempts to arrive at clarity about Marcion’s Gospel lay, however, in the critics’ insufficient acquaintance with Marcion’s system, in that they held him to be only a Paulinist, and therefore

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were unable to grasp precisely the point of view in the falsification of Luke with which he was charged. It was therefore natural that the old traditional view sought, and with a certain right, to establish itself again against the criticism.

Storr¹⁴ had already refused to be moved by Semler and Griesbach to depart from the view sanctioned by tradition; and even if he did not enter upon a more exact refutation of the views of these men, the grounds on which he supported himself against them are nevertheless of unmistakable importance. He adduces, namely, that the manifest mutilation of the Pauline epistles would lead one to expect nothing other than that the Gospel too had been falsified by Marcion, and he rightly takes exception to the striking opening of Marcion’s Gospel.¹⁵ Storr is the only theologian in the previous century who raised an objection against the new view.

After him Arneth¹⁶ was the first to come forward again with the view of the falsification committed by Marcion, though with the consciousness that he could not refute all the objections of criticism. He has the merit, however, of having first called attention to the usability of Tertullian’s specific statements for the reconstruction of the Marcionite text.

Schütz¹⁷ and Hug¹⁸ further joined the old view,

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and Neander,¹⁹ of whom the two latter did not enter into a comprehensive treatment of the question. The work of the first is not known to me. Gratz’s writing²⁰ is very superficial and inadequate. On the worth of the ecclesiastical tradition concerning Marcion’s Gospel he does not waste a word. Concerning Tertullian he holds that he refutes Marcion not from Marcion’s Gospel but from the canonical Luke, therefore fails to recognize the worth of the Gospel citations in the fourth book against Marcion, and holds one-sidedly to Epiphanius’s report. Against Eichhorn he rightly objects that in the scholia in Epiphanius we do not have the actual words of the Marcionite text. Even if he in general joined the usual view, and sought to escape the rationalists’ chief argument against it by remarking that, if Marcion had not deleted with complete consistency, he would for the rest have helped himself with forced explanations — he nevertheless diverged in this, that he characterized several passages which the canonical Luke has over and above the Marcionite text as later interpolations, and suspended his judgment on some other passages. That he did not, for the rest, see of what weight the question of Marcion’s Gospel is for the whole history of the canon and of the Church is clear from this, that, in order to excuse Marcion and thereby to reconcile his opponents to his view, he made the otherwise correct remark that such mutilations of writings had been customary among Catholics and heretics of the second century.

There followed the thorough and comprehensive writing of Hahn,²¹ whose merit it is to have assembled, in a fully

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sufficient manner, the data for the reconstruction of the Marcionite text, and which, over against the sporadic comparisons of texts and the doubts of the critical school, grounded the ecclesiastical tradition by the specifically executed proof of the mutilation of Luke in the service of a tendency, and grounded this proof in turn by the presentation of those testimonies. Hahn has discussed some points conclusively, and every subsequent treatment of the question at hand will need only to adopt his results on them. A specific exposition [Translator: the print has “Darleguug”] of his reasons against Eichhorn’s hypothesis can, however, be passed over here, since we shall return to all the individual points in the course of the investigation. Let only so much be remarked, that Hahn too, like Gratz, rejects the rationalists’ argument, drawn from Marcion’s necessary inconsistency, against the probability of an expunging of passages undertaken by him, by pointing out how Marcion supplemented that procedure by a forced interpretation of the passages that had been left standing. (P. 263.)

Olshausen²² had, at the same time, come to the same results as Hahn. His investigation, even if it yields nothing that is not also to be found in Hahn’s writing, recommends itself highly by a successful and well-rounded presentation.

Both investigations are distinguished from those of the rationalistic school on the same point by this: that they enter upon all the remains of the Marcionite Gospel in Tertullian as well as in Epiphanius. In them the right point of view for the assessment of the worth of the two accounts is for the first time established, and, by the exact return both to the ecclesiastical tradition and to the specific statements about the form of the Gospel in question, a direct test of the results is given.

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From this it is to be explained that, since then, the view of the mutilation of Luke by Marcion has for a prolonged time become an almost universal theological prejudice, and the opposition of criticism has fallen entirely silent. To that assumption of Hahn’s, Credner,²³ de Wette,²⁴ and Gieseler,²⁵ among others, have also attached themselves.

A completely divergent view, which, similarly to Griesbach’s, stands between the two chief views, has been advanced by Paulus.²⁶ In order, namely, to concede to the one party that Marcion had possessed Luke, and yet, with the other, to ward off from him the charge of mutilation, Paulus assumes that in Tertullian’s reports there is no question at all of a separate Gospel, but only of Marcion’s Antitheses, into which sections from Luke had been inserted, and on which Marcion had demonstrated the opposition of law and Gospel which he asserted. If, then, he had presented only the sections usable for his dogmatic purpose, the claim to find the whole Gospel of Luke in his possession would fall away of itself. Hahn has already refuted this view in a fully satisfactory way.²⁷ I will repeat his grounds briefly, since no opportunity will later present itself to return to that view of Paulus. Tertullian, namely, distinguishes in the most definite manner Marcion’s dogmatic work, the Antitheses, from the Gospel which Marcion used. The former he already combats in the first three books against Marcion.²⁸

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In the fourth book he then turns to the Gospel, in order to refute his opponent from this as well.²⁹ That what is at issue in Tertullian is really a Gospel, and not an “exegetical polemic” founded on individual sections, is proved also by the whole subsequent deduction of the Church Father, who compares the anonymous writing used by Marcion with the canonical Gospels that bear apostolic names.³⁰ The Antitheses formed only an adjunct to the Gospel.³¹ However probable it now is that, besides the Antitheses work proper, the Marcionite Gospel too was furnished at certain passages with antithetical remarks (a point to which we shall return more exactly below), these were nevertheless not the main thing; and from all the passages of evidence which he cites, Paulus too has in fact been able to develop nothing else than that the Antitheses are added to the text. Paulus’s hypothesis, however, does not fit at all the statements of Epiphanius, who definitely had a Gospel writing before him, which he held to be a mutilation of the canonical Luke, and from which he expressly distinguishes Marcion’s own writings.³²

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This hypothesis was therefore not suited to oppose with success the traditional view that was rising again. Recently, however, the Semler–Eichhorn view has again been set over against the one represented by de Wette and Hahn, by Schwegler.³³ Schwegler grounds his opposition chiefly on two arguments, of which the first was already advanced by Semler, but entirely ignored by Hahn and Olshausen: namely, that Tertullian’s proof of the original character of the canonical Luke is not a historical one, and is therefore not credible. The other argument is new, and lets us see into the regular progress of the investigation, which gradually takes up all possible cases of explanation and accordingly produces results that contradict or agree with one another. I have several times above called attention to the rationalists’ chief argument against the traditional assumption: namely, that Marcion must have proceeded very inconsistently in the mutilation of Luke, since he would have left so many passages that contradicted him. Hug, Gratz, Hahn, Olshausen, and de Wette had rejected this argument with the remark that Marcion had subjected these passages that remained to his view by forced explanations. Schwegler, however, turns this latter circumstance back against the mutilation hypothesis. He remarks that if Marcion helped himself, in the case of the passages that contradicted his system, with violent exegesis, he did not need to apply yet another means in order to render the Gospel harmless for himself. From this it is clear that the newest critic does not merely occupy the standpoint of the older Semler–Eichhorn school, which had taken no account at all of Marcion’s violent explanations, but that through him the investigation has reached a new phase.

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For the rest, he himself is not of the opinion that he has grounded Eichhorn’s view of Marcion’s Gospel again in an exhaustive way. He rather entertains doubts whether our sources made a conclusive investigation possible, in that he recalls the difficulty of bringing the remains in Tertullian and in Epiphanius into harmony, since the copy of the latter already exhibited more alterations than the one which lay before Tertullian. If, therefore, Schwegler’s intention was only to make Eichhorn’s hypothesis probable again, the arguments he adduces are of the highest importance. For the complete refutation of Hahn’s hypothesis it is not sufficient, however, to point out in general and in particular that Marcion retained passages analogous to those which he is supposed to have struck out, and only explained them by force. Such analogies will not be found for every case. It is necessary, rather, to examine more closely the sections which the Gospel of Luke has in advance of the Marcionite Gospel, although in this the distinction, drawn from the Acts of the Apostles, between Petrine and Pauline interest will not, as Schwegler thinks, be able to give the highest decision concerning the original character of the pieces. We shall be entitled to such a comparison of the two Gospels only when the doubts about the worth of the ecclesiastical tradition show themselves to be well-founded.³⁴