A lot of it is the same text, which proves a genetic relationship. One is an edit of the other. (But here someone will interject with a third possibility: that they are divergent copies of a common original. In other words, the same argument that is invoked about gMarcion and gLuke. But it’s just an empty, theoretical possibility with no substance. I think this BeDuhn-style effort to swallow Marcion’s texts with a spoonful of delusional sugar is really just wishful attachment to orthodox chronology, and a refusal of historical realism. But I digress.)
The agreements make the differences all the more important.
1) Studying and comparing the sequence of ideas, it is clear to me that the Marcionite version provides a relatively intelligible (albeit bizarre) “argument.” By contrast, canonical 4:21-31 is tortured, perverse, and bewildering at every step. Without even getting to the content, the arrangement of ideas, images, scriptures, and connections is quite different in the two versions.
2) The Marcionite version includes some critical, substantial content that is absent in the canonical. First, the identification of the first “revelation” with Jewish worship in synagogues, according to law. Second, the Ephesian exaltation language. The canonical NT applies that verse to the resurrected Christ, whereas here it is the very revelation of “the truth” that is identified with the adoption language. It is not the “Jerusalem above,” a somewhat colorless image from Jewish apocalypticism, that is our mother, but the spiritual “testament” or revelation bestowed on the “children of the free woman.” Here we see the Johannine concept of being “born from above.”
3) The use of both law and prophets in the canonical version to mount an attack, not on the Sinai revelation itself, but on the people “who want to be under the law.” In the Marcionite version, there is no attempt to co-opt, or radically redefine, the torah. The Jews are not mistaken about their own religion, but simply inferior to the children of the true one. Canonical Paul has God condemning the children of “the present Jerusalem” out their own books, as unworthy of inheriting the promise to Abraham. They are not sons at all, merely slaves, because they fail to comprehend their own Torah.
It seems to be a mystery what source Tertullian was using, and how. Scholars can’t even agree if it was a Greek original or a Vetus Latina, or maybe both.Just one question Irish: from which specific volume was Da Turtle quoting here? Just some remarkably verbatim Vetus Latina?