Bernard Muller wrote:According to you, when would the canonical version be written? Before or after the Marcionite version?
My suspicion is that our current, canonical version of Luke, with its obvious attachment to the Acts and so forth, postdates the gospel that Marcion would have published in his lifetime (assuming that Marcion existed, and yada yada). But that is only part of the story, for I suspect that both Luke and the Marcionite gospel developed over time, often adding and sometimes subtracting individual passages and verses and phrases.
On your website, Bernard, you sketch out a sort of back-and-forth textual relationship between Luke and John. I personally am inclined to think that this sort of back-and-forth textual exchange of creative harmonizations and occasional deviations characterizes
all of the early Christian gospel texts. The differences between my approach and yours would be (A) that there are more layers than you propose, (B) that I doubt you or I or anybody can reconstruct the various layers as completely as you have suggested for Luke and John, and (C) that the same back-and-forth process probably also affected the noncanonical gospels, including the gospel of the Hebrews and, yes, that of Marcion.
My approach is closer to that of David C. Parker, who writes on pages 121-122 of
The Living Gospels:
I am proposing that the evidence does not permit us to attempt a documentary solution. I am not thereby denying the existence of documents. I do not attempt to deny the substantial reality of Mark. His style alone is a sufficient criterion for us to know him in bulk from Matthew or Luke. But a documentary solution requires more than the degree of detail needed to know Mark from Matthew. It requires published editions, in which every last word, syllable and letter is known. It is this discernible, published precision which is lacking. The reason for the lack is not - as it might seem I was about to conclude — that we do not have the evidence to recover precisely what the evangelists wrote. It is that the comparison of published editions assumes, in its two-dimensional diagrams, that there is a single point of contact between two texts, for example, the single contact when Matthew copied Mark, and there was an end of the matter. I am proposing a three-dimensional diagram, in which the third dimension represents a series of contacts between texts each of which may have changed since the previous contact. For example, Matthew copies bits out of Mark in reproducing a tradition; then a later copy of Mark is enriched by some of Matthew's alterations; and next a copy of Matthew (already different from the one we began with) is influenced by something from the also changed Mark. Add in Luke, and oral tradition, and any other sources that might have been available, at any points in the development that you please, and you have a process a good deal less recoverable than any documentary hypothesis. It is not at all the orderly business we had hoped, and looks instead like molecules bouncing around and off each other in bewildering fashion.
It may be that I will be considered to be offering what has been called a complex solution, in distinction to the simple solutions such as those of Streeter and Farrer. Such a solution is presented by Boismard, who discerns over a dozen documents, some existing in earlier and later forms. But there is a major difference. I am not attempting to identify and to name sources or to recover layers. I am suggesting that the evidence is not of a kind to permit one to demonstrate the existence of the many documents posited by such theories. Thus, while Boismard's solution, like Streeter's argument for Proto-Luke, along with other theories, may be close to mine in recognising more than one point of contact between the Gospels, we differ more than we agree.
The same must be said after comparing my suggestion with the Deutero-Markus theory. I agree that the copy of Mark used by Matthew will not have been identical to the copies available to us. I would add that Matthew's copy will have been different also from Mark's autograph (unless he used the autograph, which must be regarded as improbable), and that Luke's copy will have been different again. But Deutero-Mark is a document, an edition. In contrast to that, I am proposing that we should be thinking of a process, and that the solid blocks of the documentary hypotheses prove to be at best soft and crumbling rock, at worst slowly shifting sand. Let us suppose, for example, that somebody who has read newly written Matthew copies Mark from a manuscript already different from the version known to Matthew, and introduces (intentionally or inadvertently) a few Matthaeanisms, and that Luke worked with such a copy. Who is to say that such a thing is impossible? That such confusing things occurred at a later date may be demonstrated from the manuscripts. A manuscript may harmonise a passage in Luke to Matthew; when we look at the Matthaean parallel in that manuscript, we find that it has a quite different form of the text from that taken into the Lukan version. This phenomenon may be found many times in Codex Bezae, one of the most frequently harmonising manuscripts. At its most extreme, we might say that every copying of a Gospel is, in the sense required by source criticism, a separate document, for it will to a greater or lesser extent be different from any other copy.
Please note from the above that this approach does not, at its best, exploit this postulated confusion in the interests of defending certain highly specific reconstructions ("well, anything
could have happened, so this
did"). On the other hand, acknowledging the confusion also does not prevent one from suggesting certain identifiable waystations along the path of development (as Parker himself does above with the "substantial reality of Mark"), based on specific criteria, and I tend to view the Marcionite text as one of those waystations.
Ben.
