Only Fantastically Amazing People Think We Have The Ur-Canon

[Stephan Huller]

Peter Head commented on my blog post "it's long."

[Stephan Huller]

I have cleaned up the information and reduced everything down to clickable links which I think is much easier to read along with a 'novel' introduction

http://stephanhuller.blogspot.com/p/the ... nites.html

[Adam]

Excellent work, Stephan,
Clarifying that what you theorize is indeed Diatesseron-like, and not an underlying Proto-Gospel that I started teaching in 2013. It raises the question, “Why did Tertullian accuse Marcion of mutilating Luke, when actually Marcion’s gospel so little resembled Luke and looked more like a Proto-Matthew?” Your points do not include verses we now have in Luke that were not in Marcion—was this an omission or is it correct—(can’t be, Marcion did not include Luke 1 and 2)? This would deceptively indicate to me the likelihood that Tertullian was working basically from a text of Luke and comparing it to Marcions’s later text to which M had been added (at that point a Proto-Matthew) and in addition L had been added (along with some stray verses from GJohn). As I stated above, nothing from L was “cut” by Marcion, this is not an omission by you? Or was Marcion’s gospel a basically complete GLuke to which M had already been added? (“GGospel” is format used in SBL papers I have been seeing and was used routinely at FRDB.) As for the text Tertullian regarded as the real Luke, it must have been itself an intermediate text, neither a proto-gospel, diatessaron, nor just the canonical Luke that seems implied above.
In any case you seem to be undercutting any of the hot new scholars who want to present Marcion’s gospel as preceding GLuke from which the latter was derived. That is, unless you’re saying it was a gospel from which L was cut towards GMatthew and GMark and from which M was cut towards GLuke.

Let me say again that I agree with a Proto-Gospel that preceded any of the Synoptics. It consisted of the material common to GLuke and GMark and to GLuke and GMatthew. First GLuke was formed adding L. Next Proto-Matthew was created from the same constituents, but adding M instead. The canonicals were basically completed when this text was converted to GMatthew and abridged into GMark. To fit with the Huller theory, my theory already holds that the Proto-Matthew had L added to it to form something like the Gospel according to the Hebrews, which apparently coincides with Marcion’s gospel that did not have points 25 through 40 in your list that were probably not in Proto-Matthew.
From the evidence you have presented, we can say that Marcion did not use or develop a text that became GLuke. Nor most likely did he have a Proto-Gospel, because it included too much both from M and L, a combination that had to have come later. Yet we don’t necessarily have to regard it as being as late as a Diatessaron that was formed (as by Tatian) by harmonizing our four gospels. Most likely it was a text that did combine all the gospels, but combined their intermediate phases (of GLuke and GJohn and of Proto-Matthew before GMatthew and GMark). It was neither a proto-gospel nor Diatessaron, but a diatessaron of proto-gospels. You need to clarify that GLuke does include much that is not in Marcion’s gospel, otherwise it could appear that Marcion used a complete GLuke.