Weighing the Silences

Every reconstruction of Marcion's Gospel rests on three ancient writers: Tertullian, Epiphanius and the Dialogue of Adamantius. Between them they tell us about most of Luke's 1,149 verses, either quoting a verse from Marcion's text or saying it was missing. About the other 342 they say nothing at all, and every editor has had to guess.

This page tries to do better than a guess, and says plainly how far it gets. Tertullian answered Marcion's Gospel passage by passage, in order, and wherever Epiphanius says a passage was missing, Tertullian is almost always silent across it. That agreement is real. The model then assumes that a long silence in Tertullian is more likely to hide a missing passage than a short one, and on that assumption it gives every verse of Luke a percentage: the chance that it stood in Marcion's Gospel. The witnesses do not prove that assumption, and the page shows why.