Ask a churchgoer to name one parable, and the answer will almost always be the prodigal son. A young man demands his inheritance, wastes it in a far country, comes to himself among the pigs, and walks home rehearsing an apology. His father sees him a long way off, runs to him, and throws a feast. It has been painted by Rembrandt, preached from countless pulpits, and set to music again and again. For many Christians it is the whole Gospel in a single story.
It was not in Marcion’s Gospel. The two parables that come just before it in the church’s Luke, the lost sheep and the lost coin, were. That difference is one of the best-attested facts we have about the text of the Evangelion, and it leaves our scripture with a picture of the Father that is worth looking at closely.
Two Witnesses, One Gap
Epiphanius, who copied excerpts from his own copy of Marcion’s Gospel into his Panarion around 375, records the absence in plain words. In his scholia on the Gospel he writes that Marcion had cut out the whole parable of the two sons, the one who took his share of the property and spent it wastefully, and the other (Panarion 42.11.6, Scholion 42). The charge that Marcion cut it is Epiphanius’s. The report that it was not there is the evidence.
Tertullian, writing some 170 years earlier, says the same thing by saying nothing. In the fourth book of Against Marcion he works through Marcion’s Gospel in order. He takes up the lost sheep and the lost coin and argues from both (4.32). Then he moves straight on to the dishonest manager and the saying about serving two masters (4.33). The twenty-two verses of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11 to 32, go by without a word, and they are exactly the twenty-two verses Epiphanius reports missing.
Tertullian’s silence here is not the silence of a writer who did not care about the parable. In another work, On Modesty (chapters 7 to 9), he discusses the lost sheep, the lost coin and the prodigal son at length. He knew the story well. When he answered Marcion’s Gospel passage by passage, he said nothing about it. His silence fits what Epiphanius reports: there was nothing in Marcion’s text to answer.
The two witnesses agree like this throughout. From Luke 3:21 on, Epiphanius reports 111 verses of Luke missing from Marcion’s Gospel. Tertullian reports about half of the verses from that point on as present in Marcion’s text, so if the two writers had nothing to do with each other, he would have reported about 54 of those 111 as present. He reports two. The prodigal son is the clearest single case of that agreement, and the reconstructions agree on it: Harnack and Zahn, and among the modern editions Klinghardt, Litwa, BeDuhn and Roth, none of them includes the parable in Marcion’s Gospel. The Greek True Testament Critical Edition grades all twenty-two verses “absence attested”.
What We Do Not Know
Epiphanius says Marcion cut the parable. He gives no reason for it. August Hahn suggested that the feasting offended Marcion’s discipline, which is a guess. Matthias Klinghardt has argued the opposite direction: that Marcion’s Gospel is the older text and the church’s Luke an expanded version of it, so that the passages it lacks, the prodigal son among them, would have been added later rather than removed. Whether the parable was taken out of the Evangelion or never stood in it is a historical question, and the witnesses do not settle it.
Our Systematic Theology holds a firm rule here: no doctrine rests on an absence alone, even a reported one. So this article does not argue that the parable was absent because it teaches something false, and it does not build anything on why it is missing. What follows is about the text we have, the two parables our Evangelion does keep, and what they say.
What Our Evangelion Keeps
In our Evangelion the two parables of the lost stand side by side:
“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Wouldn’t you leave the ninety-nine out in the wilderness and go looking for the lost one until you find it? And when you do find it, you lay it on your shoulders and rejoice.” (Evangelion 10:1 to 10:2 TT)
“Or suppose a woman has ten coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in God’s presence over one wrongdoer who has a change of heart.” (Evangelion 10:4 to 10:5 TT)
Between them stands the application to the first: “I tell you, in a similar way there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to repent!” (Evangelion 10:3 TT). And straight after the coin, where the church’s Luke goes on to the two sons, our text goes on to the manager: “Jesus said to his disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager. Word came to him that the manager was wasting his property.” (Evangelion 10:6 TT).
One small difference in the second parable deserves notice. The church’s Luke has joy “in the presence of the angels of God”. Ours has “joy in God’s presence”, with no angels. Harnack judged the absence of the angels not in doubt, and Tertullian’s argument assumes it: he argues about whose joy this is, and he means God’s own. In our text the joy belongs to God himself.
Tertullian is our only witness for these two parables, and he does not quote them word for word, so our edition reads them for their sense. He summed that sense up himself: the one who sought found, and the one who found rejoiced. Seeking, finding, rejoicing. That sequence is attested.
Two Pictures of a Father
Set the parables our Evangelion keeps beside the one it does not include, and the difference is plain.
In the lost sheep and the lost coin, the one who has lost something goes out. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine and goes looking “until you find it”. The woman lights a lamp, sweeps the house and searches “until she finds it”. The lost thing does nothing at all. A sheep cannot find its way home, and a coin does not roll back into the light. All the seeking is done by the one who lost them, and the search ends only when it succeeds.
In the prodigal son, the father stays home. The son leaves of his own will, spends everything, “comes to himself” in the far country, decides to return, and sets out. Only when the son is already on the road does the father see him and run. It is a moving picture of welcome, and Kenneth Bailey and many others have argued how much the father’s running would have cost him in the world of the story. But the turning point of the story is the son’s own decision to come back.
Our Evangelion keeps the joy over the lost. What it does not have is the lost son’s initiative. In the parables it keeps, the lost are not waited for. They are gone after.
The rest of our Evangelion points the same way. When Zacchaeus receives Jesus, the scene ends with the saying that names the purpose of the whole mission: “Jesus said, “Today rescue has come to this house, because the Son of Man came to rescue what was lost.”” (Evangelion 12:18 to 12:19 TT). Tertullian calls Zacchaeus a foreigner, allophylus, and our text has no word about him being a son of Abraham. The one to whose house rescue came had no claim to be found.
In the parable of the great banquet, when the invited guests refuse, the church’s Luke says the master was angry. Ours, following Tertullian’s motus, says he was moved: “Then the homeowner was moved and told his slave, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, those with disabilities, those who cannot see, and those who cannot walk.’” (Evangelion 9:24 TT). The host does not wait for the poor to come to his door. He sends for them.
And Paul describes those the Father reaches in the same terms. They “were in that time apart from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ you, who were once far off, have been brought near by his blood.” (Laodiceans 2:12 to 2:13 TT). The far country is not left behind by the strangers’ own effort. They are brought near.
“Who Lost It?”
Tertullian saw where this was heading, and he raised the strongest objection there is. The shepherd has a hundred sheep; the woman has ten coins. What is lost was theirs before it was lost. So, he argued, whoever goes looking for the sheep must be the one who owned it, and human beings belong to no one but the Creator. The seeker in Marcion’s own parables, he concluded, is the Creator.
The objection deserves a real answer, and our Systematic Theology gives it. The parables begin “Suppose one of you”. They argue from what any of us would do for something we had lost, and so how much more the Father will do. A parable’s details are not doctrines, and nothing in our text has the shepherd call the sheep “mine”. Paul, in words the witnesses quote, says the opposite of Tertullian’s conclusion: the Son was sent “so that he might purchase those under Law, that we might receive adoption.” (Galatians 4:5 TT). No one purchases what is already his own, and no one adopts his own children. The Father’s search is the search of one who buys strangers out and makes them his children, not of an owner recovering his property.
A second objection is that both parables tie the joy to repentance, so the sinner must do something after all. But a sheep and a coin cannot repent. In both parables, “repents” and “has a change of heart” name what being found looks like from the side of the found. The one whose mind changes is the wrongdoer. The Father does not wait for that change before he sets out. He goes looking for him.
The Parable That Remains
Readers who love the prodigal son do not need to stop loving it. It is a beautiful story, and the welcome at its end is real. But it was not in the Gospel Marcion published, and the two witnesses who saw that scripture agree on this as closely as they agree on anything.
What our Evangelion gives instead is not a smaller hope but a different one. You do not have to come to yourself in a far country before anyone comes for you. The Father is not standing at the gate waiting to see whether you will make it home. In the parables our Evangelion keeps, he has already gone out, and he does not stop “until” he finds what he is looking for. When he finds it, the joy is his own.
You can see the evidence for every verse in Luke 15 on our research pages: in Weighing the Silences, where the twenty-two verses of the prodigal son stand in a single block that Tertullian passes over and Epiphanius reports missing, and in Compare Reconstructions, where every edition from Hahn to Litwa can be compared verse by verse.