Gospel of Marcion
The Gospel of Marcion, called by its adherents the Gospel of the Lord, was a text used by the mid-2nd-century Christian teacher Marcion of Sinope to the exclusion of the other gospels. The majority of scholars agree the gospel was an edited version of the Gospel of Luke.
Although no manuscript of Marcion's gospel survives, scholars such as Adolf von Harnack and Dieter T. Roth have been able to largely reconstruct the text from quotations in the anti-Marcionite treatises of orthodox Christian apologists such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius.
Contents
Like the Gospel of Mark, Marcion's gospel lacked any nativity story. Luke's account of the baptism of Jesus was also absent. The gospel began, roughly, as follows:Other Lukan passages that did not appear in Marcion's gospel include the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
While Marcion preached that the God who had sent Jesus Christ was an entirely new, alien god, distinct from the vengeful God of Israel who had created the world, this radical view was not explicitly taught in Marcion's gospel. The Gospel of Marcion is, however, much more amenable to a Marcionite interpretation than the canonical Gospel of Luke, because it lacks many of the passages in Luke that explicitly link Jesus with Judaism, such as the parallel birth narratives of John the Baptist and Jesus in Luke 1-2.
Relationship to the Gospel of Luke
Scholars have entertained three possible hypotheses concerning the relationship between Marcion's gospel and the Gospel of Luke. The traditional view, espoused by early Church Fathers in their polemics against Marcion, is that the Gospel of Marcion was produced by removing passages from Luke that contradicted Marcion's theological views. The two other possibilities are that Luke was created by adding anti-Marcionite passages to Marcion's gospel, or that both Luke and Marcion's gospel are edited versions of some lost prior gospel. Those who espouse this last view usually maintain that the Gospel of Marcion is closer to the original than canonical Luke.As a revision of Luke
wrote, and Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman agree, that Marcion edited Luke to fit his own theology, Marcionism. The late 2nd-century writer Tertullian stated that Marcion, "expunged all the things that oppose his view... but retained those things that accord with his opinion".According to this view, Marcion eliminated the first two chapters of Luke concerning the nativity, and began his gospel at Capernaum making modifications to the remainder suitable to Marcionism. The differences in the texts below highlight the Marcionite view that Jesus did not follow the Prophets and that the earth is evil.
| Luke | Marcion |
| O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken | O foolish and hard of heart to believe in all that I have told you |
| They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation...’ | They began to accuse him, saying, ‘We found this man perverting our nation... and destroying the law and the prophets.' |
| I thank Thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth... | I thank Thee, Heavenly Father... |
Late 19th- and early 20th-century theologian Adolf von Harnack, in agreement with the traditional account of Marcion as revisionist, theorized that Marcion believed there could be only one true gospel, all others being fabrications by pro-Jewish elements, determined to sustain worship of Yahweh; and that the true gospel was given directly to Paul the Apostle by Christ himself, but was later corrupted by those same elements who also corrupted the Pauline epistles. In this understanding, Marcion saw the attribution of this gospel to Luke the Evangelist as a fabrication, so he began what he saw as a restoration of the original gospel as given to Paul. Von Harnack wrote that:
As an earlier version of Luke
Biblical scholars as varied as Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Albrecht Ritschl, John Knox, Joseph B. Tyson, and David Trobisch have dissented from the traditional view, arguing that the Gospel of Luke is either a later redaction of the Gospel of Marcion, or that both gospels are redactions of some prior gospel, with Marcion's text being closer to the original. Several arguments have been put forward in favor of this view.Firstly, there are many passages found in Marcion's gospel that seem to contradict his own theology, which is unexpected if Marcion was simply removing passages from Luke that he didn't agree with. has argued:
Secondly, Marcion himself claimed that the gospel he used was original, whereas the canonical Luke was a falsification. The accusations of adulteration are therefore mutual:
Thirdly, John Knox and Joseph Tyson have shown that, of the material that is omitted from Marcion's gospel but included in canonical Luke, the vast majority is unique to Luke, with no parallel in the earlier gospels of Mark and Matthew. They argue that this result is entirely expected if canonical Luke is the result of adding new material to Marcion's gospel or its source, but that it is very much unexpected if Marcion removed material from Luke.
The synoptic problem
Some proponents of the priority of Marcion's gospel have explored the implications of their view for the broader synoptic problem.In 2008, Matthias Klinghardt proposed that Marcion's gospel was based on the Gospel of Mark, that the Gospel of Matthew was an expansion of the Gospel of Mark with reference to the Gospel of Marcion, and that the Gospel of Luke was an expansion of the Gospel of Marcion with reference to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. In Klinghardt's view, this model elegantly accounts for the double tradition— material shared by Matthew and Luke, but not Mark— without appealing to purely hypothetical documents, such as the Q source. In his 2015 book, Klinghardt considers that the gospel of Marcion precedes and influenced the four gospels.