stephan happy huller wrote in this thread (Nov. 19, 2013);
"But most significantly perhaps Books IV and V unfold in a very Irenaean manner (let's not forget that Irenaeus speaks of his intention to write a work against Marcion (Adv Haer I, 27, 4; III, 12, 13). I think Book IV and V of Tertullian's Against Marcion is that text."
The preface to Tertullian's Five Books Against Marcion seems to me a strange way for an author to open a five book treatise. Unless the final editor of the received text, whoever that might have been, had significant concerns that other versions of the writings could be out and about --- other versions that might prove problematic to his current iteration of the text.
The author here admits a "considerable addition" to an original tract that was "too hurriedly composed". The whole thing sounds like a school kid making excuses to the teacher that he really did finish his homework assignment on time --- but his little sister flushed it down the toilet.
I haven't read many posts beyond two or three weeks ago, so my apologies if this has been pointed out previously here.
Here's the opening of Tertullians Five Books Against Marcion (Adv Marc 1.1) ---
"Whatever in times past we have wrought in opposition to Marcion, is from the present moment no longer to be accounted of. It is a new work which we are undertaking in lieu of the old one. My original tract, as too hurriedly composed, I had subsequently superseded by a fuller treatise. This latter I lost, before it was completely published, by the fraud of a person who was then a brother, but became afterwards an apostate. He, as it happened, had transcribed a portion of it, full of mistakes, and then published it. The necessity thus arose for an amended work; and the occasion of the new edition induced me to make a considerable addition to the treatise. This present text, therefore, of my work -- which is the third as superseding the second, but henceforward to be considered the first instead of the third -- renders a preface necessary to this issue of the tract itself that no reader may be perplexed, if he should by chance fall in with the various forms of it which are scattered about."
And, just for fun, here's a gem from the inimitable Mr. T. (Adv Marc 1.8 ) ---
robert j."In the first place, how arrogantly do the Marcionites build up their stupid system, bringing forward a new god, as if we were ashamed of the old one!"
