Chapter II. The testimonies of the Church Fathers

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Chapter II. The Testimonies of the Church Fathers concerning the Character of Marcion’s Gospel

The first witness through whom we receive knowledge of the holy writings in use by Marcion

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is Irenaeus.¹ He expresses the definite accusation, that Marcion mutilated the Gospel of Luke, in the following passages of his writing adversus haereses [Against Heresies], book I, 29: Id quod est secundum Lucam evangelium circumcidens, et omnia quae sunt de generatione domini conscripta auferens, et de doctrina sermonum domini multa auferens, in quibus manifestissime conditorem hujus universitatis suum patrem confitens dominus conscriptus est, semetipsum esse veraciorem, quam sunt hi, qui evangelium tradiderunt, Apostoli, suasit discipulis suis, non evangelium (that is, the four Gospels) sed particulam evangelii tradens suis. [Cutting down the Gospel that is according to Luke, and taking away everything written about the Lord’s birth, and taking away much from the teaching of the Lord’s discourses, in which the Lord is recorded as most openly confessing the Creator of this universe to be his Father, he persuaded his disciples that he himself was more truthful than are those who handed down the Gospel, the apostles, handing down to his own followers not the Gospel but a fragment of a Gospel.] Book III, 11: Marcion id, quod est secundum Lucam (evangelium) circumcidens, ex his, quae adhuc servantur penes eum, blasphemus in solum exsistentem deum ostenditur. [Marcion, cutting down that which is according to Luke (the Gospel), is shown from the things still preserved in his possession to be a blasphemer against the only existing God.] — Marcion totum rejiciens evangelium, imo vero se ipsum abscindens ab evangelio, partem gloriatur se habere evangelii. [Marcion, rejecting the whole Gospel, or rather cutting himself off from the Gospel, boasts that he possesses a part of the Gospel.] Book III, 12: Et apostolos quidem adhuc, quae sunt Judaeorum, sentientes annunciasse evangelium, se (Marcionem) autem cum suis sinceriores et prudentiores apostolis esse. Unde et Marcion et qui ab eo sunt ad intercidendas conversi sunt scripturas, quasdam quidem in totum non cognoscentes, secundum Lucam autem evangelium et epistolas Pauli decurtantes haec sola legitima esse dicunt quae ipsi minoraverunt. [And that the apostles, still feeling what belongs to the Jews, announced the Gospel, but that he (Marcion), with his own followers, was more sincere and more prudent than the apostles. Hence both Marcion and those who are from him, having turned to the cutting up of the Scriptures, and not acknowledging some of them at all, but cutting down the Gospel according to Luke and the epistles of Paul, say that only those things are legitimate which they themselves have made smaller.] Another passage in book I, 29 likewise plainly refers to Marcion: — solus manifeste ausus est circumcidere scripturas et impudorate super omnes obtrectare deum. [He alone has openly dared to cut down the Scriptures and shamelessly to disparage God above all men.]

This accusation is also so firmly assumed and

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presupposed by Tertullian (in the writing adversus Marcionem [Against Marcion], books IV and V) that he almost never takes the trouble to express it definitely. There can, however, be no doubt at all that it lies at the basis of the discussion in which Tertullian seeks to refute the reliability of the Marcionite Gospel by asserting the higher antiquity of the canonical Luke (book IV, 2–5). What would this proof have accomplished, and to what end would he have laid down the principle, In quantum falsum corruptio est veri, in tantum praecedat necesse est veritas falsum [Inasmuch as what is false is a corruption of what is true, truth must to the same degree precede what is false] (chapter 4), if the case before us had not been one of a falsification? It is therefore only a superficial understanding of Tertullian’s whole argumentation when Löffler and Eichhorn, as was remarked above, understood Tertullian’s words, ex his commentatoribus, quos habemus, Lucam videtur Marcion elegisse, quem caederet [From these commentators whom we have, Marcion seems to have chosen Luke as the one he would cut down] (chapter 2), as if he were expressing the accusation of the mutilation of Luke only as a conjecture. The whole context from which they have torn the sentence refutes them. I hesitate, however, to copy out the whole section from Tertullian here, since I shall return to it later. In any case, another utterance of Tertullian contains that accusation with the greatest definiteness: — epistolas Pauli proinde mutilatas etiam de numero, forma jam haeretici evangelii praejudicasse debebit [the form of the heretic’s Gospel will already have to have prejudged the epistles of Paul, likewise mutilated even in their number] (book V, 1, at the end). And accordingly one must for the present understand that passage also, in which the videtur is not necessarily to be regarded as an expression of uncertainty, but may very well be regarded as an expression of the greatest certainty.²

Epiphanius too, who knew from his own inspection the Gospel used by Marcion, expresses himself in agreement with the two preceding writers (Heresy 42, p. 309 C, D, Petavius’s edition): οὗτος γὰρ ἔχει εὐαγγέλιον

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μόνον τὸ κατὰ Λουκᾶν περικεκομμένον ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς διὰ τὴν τοῦ Σωτῆρος σύλληψιν καὶ τὴν ἔνσαρκον παρουσίαν. οὐ μόνον δὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν ἀπέτεμεν, — ἀλλὰ καὶ τέλους καὶ τῶν μέσων πολλὰ περιέκοψε τῶν τῆς ἀληθείας λόγων· ἀλλὰ καὶ παρὰ τὰ γεγραμμένα προστέθεικε. μόνῳ δὲ κέχρηται τούτῳ τῷ χαρακτῆρι τῷ κατὰ Λουκᾶν εὐαγγελίῳ. [For this man has a Gospel, only the one according to Luke, cut off from the beginning on account of the Savior’s conception and the incarnate coming. He cut off not only the beginning, but he also cut out many things of the end and of the middle, from the words of the truth; and he has also added things beyond what is written. And he uses only this writing, the Gospel according to Luke.] This declaration is not the only one of its kind in Epiphanius. The others, however frequent they are, only repeat all the notices of this one.

None of the Church Fathers departs from this judgment. They repeat it the more decidedly, the less probable it is that they had themselves come to know Marcion’s Gospel directly. So Origen, Ephraem Syrus, Chrysostom, Jerome, Theodoret, whose testimonies are collected by Hahn, in the work cited above, pp. 25–43.

However heavily these testimonies of the Fathers, which nowhere contradict one another, do indeed fall into the scale of the view represented chiefly by Hahn — especially since Irenaeus still reaches up into Marcion’s age, and it is not impossible that he had historically secure information about the origin of that Gospel — I am nevertheless moved, by the way Tertullian treats this matter, to deny his testimony, and with it all these testimonies, their historical worth entirely. There are two chief points on which Tertullian grounds his charge of falsification of the canonical Luke against Marcion, and which Hahn has accepted as historical truth: 1, that Marcion himself had given himself out as the improver of the Gospel; 2, that he must have known the genuine canonical Luke.

As for the first point, there is nothing against assuming that the predicate Emendator evangelii a Tiberianis usque ad Antoniniana tempora eversi [improver of the Gospel overturned from the times of Tiberius all the way to those of Antoninus] (book IV, 4, p. 192) was applied to Marcion either by himself or by his followers. It is likewise sufficiently attested by Tertullian’s citations that Marcion

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charged the apostles themselves with the corruption of the Gospel,³ and appealed for this to the Epistle to the Galatians.⁴ Indeed, it was the chief purpose of the Antitheses to demonstrate and to censure the falsification of the Gospel produced by mixture with the law.⁵ But what, then, is this evangelium [Gospel], or this evangelii veritas [truth of the Gospel] — expressions which also alternate with praedicatio Christi [the preaching of Christ],⁶ regula [rule],⁷ and veritas [truth],⁸ and are synonymous with them? It is Christianity itself, as teaching and as a way of life, of which Marcion asserted that it had been disfigured by Peter and his companions, against the intention of Christ and against the efforts of Paul, with admixtures of a Jewish way of conceiving and of living — admixtures which Marcion at last intended to do away with again. A reference of the forgery and of the improvement to a Gospel writing lies, on no condition, in these expressions. It has been imported into them only by Tertullian. For if he draws, from Marcion’s intention of cleansing Christianity from the falsifications of the apostles, the inference that by that very act Marcion rejects and disparages the Gospel

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writings of the apostles,⁹ that is not in Marcion’s sense. Even if it be granted that, if Marcion rejected the prevailing mode of teaching, the documents containing it had at the same time to fall, Tertullian’s presentation is nevertheless skewed in this, that he presents the latter as Marcion’s chief intention. From the statements cited above concerning Marcion’s tendency it is by no means to be gathered that he sought, say, with the Gospel writing he used, to displace others that were in circulation in the Church. Tertullian therefore committed a grievous misunderstanding. This has in him a deeper ground, namely in his catholic, unhistorical standpoint. From this standpoint he failed to recognize not only the deeply penetrating difference between Paul and the other apostles, so that, wholly contrary to the Epistle to the Galatians, he assumed a dependence of Paul on the original apostles,¹⁰ whereas Marcion grasped these relationships much more correctly. He also could not conceive otherwise than that in the apostolic office the intention and the duty of composing written Gospels were necessarily

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contained.¹¹ And in this Tertullian goes so far as to assume that Paul had been enlightened by the same written instruction of the apostles which afterward continued to hold good in the Church as well, thus, say, by the Gospels of Matthew and John.¹² Since, then, he could not at all separate the composition of the definite canonical Gospels from the apostolic activity, he saw in every opposition to the form and shape of Christianity that derived from the apostles an intentional opposition to the ecclesiastical Gospels; and since only things of the same kind can form an opposition to one another, Marcion had to have wished to combat the prevailing Gospels with his own and to displace them. The assumption, then, that Marcion himself had given himself out as the improver of a Gospel writing, to which Hahn (in the work cited above, pp. 232 f.) accords the greatest approval, proves to be a misunderstanding, flowing from Tertullian’s unhistorical presuppositions, of the admittedly ambiguous word evangelium;¹³ and if from this result we cast a glance at the statements of Irenaeus cited above, we shall at least discover traces that he is in the same case as Tertullian. When Irenaeus cites, in Marcion’s sense, Apostolos adhuc, quae sunt Judaeorum, sentientes, annunciasse evangelium [that the apostles, still feeling what belongs to the Jews, announced the Gospel],

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then a Gospel writing cannot after all be understood by this, but the complex of the rules of life and of faith. As the opposite of this, however, it is not merely stated, se (Marcionem) cum suis sinceriores et prudentiores apostolis esse [that he (Marcion), with his own followers, was more sincere and more prudent than the apostles], but, in order to show the actual content of this prudence, it is at once added: unde ad intercidendas conversi sunt scripturas [hence they turned to the cutting up of the Scriptures]. But that Irenaeus too brings the composition of written Gospels into the closest connection with the apostolic office, and imputes the same view to Marcion, is proved by the manner in which, in book I, 29, he lends Marcion the words: semetipsum esse veraciorem quam sunt hi, qui evangelium tradiderunt, apostoli [that he himself was more truthful than are those who handed down the Gospel, the apostles], where evangelium plainly means the canonical Gospel book. Thus Irenaeus too has without doubt, in the assessment of Marcion’s intention, committed the same paralogism as Tertullian. With this I believe I ward off the objection that might be made against the discussion above, that it is incomprehensible that Irenaeus, independently of Tertullian, could commit the same error. If both had the same premises — the catholic view of the Gospels, hatred of heretics, and the ambiguity of the word evangelium — the same error was very natural in both.¹⁴

If, then, Marcion did not wish to be the Emendator of a Gospel writing at all, then certainly not the Emendator of Luke either. With this agrees the circumstance that the statement of the author was lacking from his Gospel. We shall consider this point further before we pass to the examination of the proof, promised by Tertullian, of the

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high antiquity of the canonical Luke. Tertullian says: Marcion evangelio suo nullum adscribit auctorem [Marcion ascribes no author to his Gospel] (book IV, 2, p. 187), and cannot suppress his astonishment at this, since he is just about to prove the dependence of that Gospel on Luke. He does not, however, allow a doubt about his view to arise on that account. He beats it down within himself, and if possible in others as well, by the spiteful remark: quasi non licuerit illi titulum quoque effingere, cui nefas non fuit ipsum corpus evertere [as though it had not been permitted to him to fashion a title as well, when it was no crime for him to overturn the text itself]. From whom Marcion derived the origin of his Gospel cannot, therefore, be determined, since one must hesitate to presuppose in him, without further ado, the view of the later Marcionites.¹⁵ [Corrected in Ritschl’s errata: printed Für] Hahn’s view, “that Marcion derived it, with the oldest Church Fathers, from Paul, believing only that it had been apprehended by Luke, the companion of the apostle, not altogether purely, but disfigured by Jewish admixtures and additions, and that he therefore purified it” (p. 234, n. 5), lacks all foundation. Gratz too (in the work cited above, p. 17) wrongly appeals, for the claim that Marcion had held Paul to be the author, to Tertullian’s testimony.¹⁶ Eichhorn (in the work cited above, p. 73) has for this reason appealed to the anonymity of that Gospel, in order to ward off the charge that Marcion mutilated Luke; for if this were the case, there would indeed be no ground for concealing or denying its authorship. Against this Gratz (p. 83) has objected, and Hahn (p. 275) repeats it, “that Marcion presumably did not accept the Gospel of Luke for Luke’s sake, whose Acts of the Apostles he

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rejected without hesitation,¹⁷ but because he held its foundation to be the Gospel of Paul, which had been disfigured by Luke through Judaizing additions.” Even if we grant this case as well, it is still far from the case that this explanation would be free of internal contradictions. Whence, then, did Marcion get the opinion that Luke, known from the Epistle to the Colossians and by unanimous tradition as a Paulinist, was a Judaizer? If he received a Gospel under that name, nothing prompted him to separate the Pauline character of the writing from that name: the name vouched for the character. He could not attribute Jewish additions to him. We should therefore also find the name Luke [Printed Lucss.] even before the writing that had been purified of Judaism, if that hypothesis were correct; and that objection of Eichhorn’s against it is fully justified. The men named above have let themselves be misled into that expedient, as weak as it is artificial, by Tertullian’s statement about Marcion’s relationship to the Acts of the Apostles, whose worth will presently appear.

Nevertheless, that circumstance, that Marcion himself did not give Luke out as the author of his Gospel, would not yet by itself refute Tertullian’s view of it, if he proved in a sufficient way the priority of the canonical Gospel over the heretic’s Gospel, so similar to it. This is the second point which we must subject to an examination. Tertullian’s proof of the authenticity of Luke and of the falsification of the Marcionite Gospel is, in brief, the following. He declares that, since each party declared the other’s Gospel falsified (in what sense alone Marcion meant and expressed this has been shown above), then naturally only the higher antiquity could decide the authenticity of one of the two. The higher antiquity, however, was not on the side of the falsification, for falsification presupposes integrity;

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integrity does not presuppose the falsification.¹⁸ This is the negative side of the proof. But what is the character of the conclusion? What is to be proved is already presupposed. For if the whole piece of reasoning is to find application to Marcion’s writing, the conclusion, “Marcion’s Gospel is of later origin,” is the result of the major [major premise], “Everything false is of later origin,” and of the suppressed minor [minor premise], “Marcion’s Gospel is falsified.” If the complete nullity of the proof already shows itself in this, one need not, in addition, with Semler, call into question the truth of the major premise, who recalls in this connection “that heathenism and Judaism are earlier than Christianity.”¹⁹ That Hahn (p. 235) wrongly appeals to the words of the passage cited above, Marcion meum evangelium affirmat adulteratum [Marcion affirms that my Gospel has been adulterated], as evidence that Marcion knew Luke, has, it is to be hoped, been made clear by the investigation above. Rather, precisely the contrary follows: that Marcion did not give himself out as the improver of the allegedly falsified Luke follows from the fact that Tertullian seeks to reach this result only by that artful conclusion. If Marcion himself had said that he had first restored Luke to its integrity, Tertullian would not have needed to prove this to him by tracing the character of falsification back to the difference of temporal origin, and this back to the relationship of the true and the false. Here only the demonstration of the integrity and of the apostolic origin of his Luke could help him. He then also delivers this proof in the following form: If

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what is true is what is earlier, but what is earliest is what comes from the beginning, from the apostles, then the Gospel of Luke accredited by the apostles is the true one over against the Marcionite Gospel.²⁰ Thus the authority of the so-called apostolic tradition is for Tertullian the final court of appeal concerning the antiquity of Luke, a court of appeal over which the honest Semler burst out in the words, “There, all at once, is the excessive auctoritas ecclesiae [authority of the Church], which suppresses all freedom of Christians” (in the work cited above); and which we at least cannot hold to be a support of historical certainty. Hahn’s objection (p. 22, n. 27), that “the whole Church would have had to be quite blinded, if it let itself be talked by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement, and others, all at once, into the 4 Gospels, and let itself imagine that these Gospels, which had just come to light, were the authentic catholic ones,” cannot convince us that a spark of historical investigation and certainty is to be found behind that syllogism of Tertullian’s. First, those Church Fathers are, if one will, truly blinded in historical matters; and once one of their traditions — for example, the oil-martyrdom of John in Tertullian, and the Johannine description of the thousand-year kingdom — has fallen under doubt, we shall have to be on our guard not to believe them in such matters for which dogmatic certainty, instead of historical certainty, sufficed even for them. And second, the Church really has not been so blinded as Hahn thinks,

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so as to let the canonical Gospels, recommended in good faith by those Church Fathers, entirely displace those that had been customary until then. Rather, examples of the use of old non-canonical Gospels, even within the catholic Church, are found well down into the 4th century.²¹ But third, one ought, as a Protestant, to hesitate to regard such dogmatic traditions of the catholic Church, as the one cited above is, as the chief supports of our Christianity,²² and to conceal their actually unhistorical character from oneself by all sorts of turns of phrase.

To that proof of the antiquity of the Gospel of Luke Tertullian adds another, very specious one. A letter of Marcion’s, which was very widely circulated among his followers, is supposed to testify to Marcion’s acquaintance with that Gospel. This proof too, however, is at once brought to nothing when we look at it more closely.²³ In that letter Marcion stated nothing further than that he had earlier belonged to the catholic Church; and only Tertullian, on his view that the catholic Church was founded by the apostles and the 4 Gospels composed at the same time, could read into that utterance the acceptance of the Gospel of Luke. If, now, that view of Tertullian’s is in any case unhistorical, and if the Christian Church really existed for a time without definite Gospels, and without the 4 definite Gospels, Tertullian’s opinion about that mark of the catholic faith cannot

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hold for Marcion’s time. Marcion could very well have belonged to the catholic Church without knowing the Gospel of Luke; and if other grounds for his acquaintance with it are not to be found, one cannot infer that acquaintance from the confession of that letter. Just as little is there a proof of Marcion’s acquaintance with Luke in the following words: Si enim id evangelium, quod Lucae refertur penes nos, (viderimus — sc. non curamus — an et penes Marcionem) ipsum est, quod Marcion per Antitheses suas arguit, ut interpolatum a protectoribus Judaismi etc. [For if that Gospel which is reported as Luke’s in our possession (we shall see — that is, we do not care — whether also in Marcion’s possession) is the very one which Marcion accuses, through his Antitheses, of having been interpolated by the protectors of Judaism, and so on.] (Book IV, 4, p. 191, at the end.) What is established is that in the Antitheses Marcion charged the evangelium, namely the Christianity of that time, with falsification by Judaism. Since, however, for Tertullian Christianity in general coincided with its presentation in one, or in all, of the Gospels, he gives that evangelium meant by Marcion, in his own sense, the predicate “Gospel of Luke,” in order then to draw from this the desired result, that Marcion knew Luke (non potuisset arguere, nisi quod invenerat [he could not have brought the accusation except against what he had found]). Among all the citations of the Antitheses in Tertullian there is also no trace of a polemic against the Gospel of Luke.²⁴

If, therefore, the view that Marcion must have known the Gospel of Luke also rests on Tertullian’s dogmatic prejudice, his judgment that Marcion reworked the Gospel of Luke according to his system and mutilated it²⁵ has no further ground in its favor; and to the proof which Eichhorn has already advanced, from the anonymity of the Marcionite Gospel

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writing, for its independence, no historically accredited testimony to the contrary stands opposed. In our eyes, then, Hahn’s view has no advantage over Eichhorn’s in agreement with history. Hypothesis stands against hypothesis, and only consistent executability and inner probability will give the preference to the one or to the other.

Some further errors concerning Marcion’s acquaintance with other books of the canon remain to be corrected. Hahn is of the opinion that Marcion also knew the Gospels of Matthew and [Printed nud.] John (p. 23) and the Acts of the Apostles (p. 236), but rejected them nonetheless. Tertullian does, to be sure, say: Itaque et de his Marcion flagitandus, quod omissis eis (ceteris evangeliis) Lucae potius institerit, quasi non et haec a primordio apud ecclesias fuerint, quemadmodum et Lucae. [And so Marcion is also to be pressed about these: why, having omitted them (the other Gospels), he applied himself rather to Luke’s, as though these too had not been in the churches from the beginning, just as Luke’s was.] (Book IV, 5.) He also gives the ground of this assertion: eadem auctoritas ecclesiarum apostolicarum ceteris quoque patrocinabitur evangeliis. [The same authority of the apostolic churches will also defend the other Gospels.] (In the same place [l. c.].) Of the Acts of the Apostles he says: Acta apostolorum cur respuatis, jam apparet. [Why you reject the Acts of the Apostles is already plain.] (Book V, 2, p. 376.) The same concerning the Apocalypse: Etsi Apocalypsin Marcion respuit, ordo tamen episcoporum ad originem recensus, in Joannem stabit, auctorem. [Even if Marcion rejects the Apocalypse, the order of bishops, reckoned back to its origin, will still stand firm in John, its author.] (Book IV, 5, p. 193.) All these utterances are, however, of the same character as the proof of the antiquity of Luke examined above. They contain no historical certainty, but only a dogmatic one. Because the catholic Church, with its canon, stood firm for Tertullian from the beginning, he could not conceive at all of an ignorance of the latter. Ignorance of individual ones among these books counted for him as decided rejection, and this even if Marcion, as is probable, never mentioned any of these books. Thus those testimonies of Tertullian too have no historical worth.²⁶

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Marcion’s acquaintance with the writings named cannot otherwise be made probable; and against the assertion of its possibility there stands, with equal right, the possibility that he did not know them. From that way of looking at things on Tertullian’s part, however, yet another circumstance is explained which has led some theologians astray: namely, that in going through Marcion’s Gospel he frequently charges him with having struck out passages which stand only in Matthew, although he does, after all, mean to compare that Gospel only with Luke. Thus he charges Marcion with having withdrawn from the true Gospel the story of the visit of the magi (Matthew 2:1 ff.);²⁷ with having expunged, as a false addition, the word of Christ about the fulfillment of the law (Matthew 5:17);²⁸ with the same on account of the saying that God lets it rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45);²⁹ with the same on account of the saying in Matthew 15:24;³⁰ and to these passages collected by Hahn (p. 264) is added Matthew 16:17.³¹ It is clear that in

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all these cases Tertullian does not presuppose that these passages actually stood in Luke,³² but the evangelium from which, in his opinion, Marcion had withdrawn those passages means for him, as for Irenaeus (III, 11, totum rejiciens evangelium [rejecting the whole Gospel], see above [s. o.]) and Origen (ἡ εὐαγγελική [the evangelical (writing)], in Eusebius, H. E. [Ecclesiastical History] VI, 38), the Gospel book, as the complex of Christian saving doctrine.³³ If, however, one wished to infer from these passages that Marcion therefore knew Matthew, and with him rejected the passages cited, and indeed designated them as additions and falsifications,³⁴ one would be placing too much trust in those rhetorically embellished passages. Those formulas of Tertullian (erasit, detraxit, excidit ei [he erased, he withdrew, it escaped him]) are rather to be assessed in the same way as his view of Marcion’s acquaintance with all the canonical Gospels. Because he, Tertullian, thought nothing other than that these had been in existence since the beginning of the Church, he regarded Marcion’s silence about them as an intentional rejection of them, and spun this notion out into the most specific detail — indeed so far that, in the rejection of individual passages about which Marcion had certainly never expressed himself, he even imputed to him, and put into his mouth, the pretext that such passages were Judaizing additions. He proceeded by the same method also in the case of textual differences between Marcion’s Gospel and the Gospel of Luke, in that, purely out of that circle of ideas, he put into Marcion’s mouth charges against the canonical reading, to which, therefore, we have no cause at all to assign a historical worth.³⁵