I have "liberated" the book review here (avert your eyes, if you wish).
Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. By M arkus V inzent
Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels. By Markus Vinzent . Pp. xi + 353. (Studia Patristica Supplements, 2.) Leuven : Peeters , 2014. isbn978 90 429 3027 8 . Paper €78.
Dieter T. Roth
J Theol Studies (2015) 66 (2): 800-803.
I n his 2011 monograph, Christ’s Resurrection in Early Christianity and the Making of the New Testament , Markus Vinzent raised the question ‘might it be the case that Marcion neither found, nor used, nor edited the Gospel, but produced it in his Roman classroom?’ (p. 86) and went on to posit that this indeed was the case. Though this hypothesis was only briefly discussed in his 2011 work, in the volume presently under review, Vinzent seeks to further this view in four chapters of widely varying length, ultimately contending that Marcion wrote the very first Gospel and that all four canonical Gospels used Marcion’s Gospel as a source.
In chapter 1, ‘Marcion, his Gospel and the Gospels in the Sources’ (158 pp.), Vinzent provides an overview of his readings of the sources for Marcion and his Gospel, along with a section devoted to the history of research on Marcion’s Gospel. Vinzent’s intention here is to demonstrate that ‘an outright denigration of Marcion as a “heretic” or even “arch-heretic” is anachronistic’ in that ‘not all of the many writings of the second century on Marcion … are hostile to Marcion’ and ‘the writings with clear defamatory intentions are younger ones’ (p. 7). Though helpful observations are made in this chapter, many readings of the sources struck me as idiosyncratic, often debated or debatable, and in some instances simply indefensible, a point to which I return below. Chapter 2 is entitled ‘Dating the Synoptic Gospels – the Status Quaestionis ’ (56 pp.) and contains succinct overviews of the myriad proposals for the dating of the Synoptic Gospels as well a cursory summary and criticism of various proposed solutions to the Synoptic Problem. Here also, I fear that advocates of the particular, criticized solutions will not view their positions as adequately or accurately portrayed. In chapter 3, ‘Re-Dating the Gospels’ (62 pp.) Vinzent argues that the New Testament papyri do not make a dating of the canonical Gospels to the time of Marcion impossible and that ‘the fact that the Gospels are not quoted or referred to in Paul or in other early Christian literature prior to Marcion speaks in favour of a dating of these texts to the time of Marcion’ (p. 224). In addition, in n. 188 of this chapter, Vinzent finally lets the reader know that the novel numbering of Marcion’s Gospel he has been employing is taken from his yet to be published Marcion’s Gospel: A Synoptic Commentary. I did not, however, find any indication of the source for the reconstructed text of Marcion’s Gospel that Vinzent cites (sometimes at great length) in his monograph. Chapter 4, entitled ‘Marcion’s Gospel – An Inspirational New Literary Genre’ (6 pp.), contains Vinzent’s conclusions that ‘Marcion, who created the new literary genre of the “Gospel” and also gave the work this title, had no historical precedent in the combination of Christ’s sayings and narratives’ (p. 277) and that this Gospel was, ‘through combining prefaces of Acts and Luke , put under the name of Luke. Luke was complemented by Mark, Matthew and John ’ (p. 282).
Though Vinzent’s voice and views are important to consider within the contemporary resurgence of interest in Marcion and Marcion’s Gospel, much of the argumentation in this volume is problematic and, at least to my mind, insufficiently nuanced and ultimately unconvincing. Certainly, part of the problem is that Vinzent is undertaking a massive redating and revisioning of all early Christian Gospels in a relatively slender volume. Though he often indicates and bemoans that he is only able to provide overviews of complex issues, it is not the summary nature of many arguments that I find to be most problematic. Rather, it is the inadequate and inaccurate references made to other scholars and to the ancient sources that are of greatest concern. In the interest of space, I will mention only two examples. First, with regard to a modern scholar, Vinzent summarizes the ‘internal evidence’ adduced by John Knox that Marcion’s Gospel is not an edited version of canonical Luke. On pp. 256–8 Vinzent presents one element of this evidence, namely the linguistic arguments, set forth by Knox in his 1939 article ‘On the Vocabulary of Marcion’s Gospel’ and in his 1942 monograph Marcion and the New Testament. Though Vinzent claims that Knox ‘came up with results that not even his critics have been able to dispute’ (p. 256), it is unfortunate that Vinzent does not mention that though Knox continued to support the position of the priority of Marcion’s Gospel, Knox himself disputed his own arguments based on style and vocabulary in his 1987 contribution to the Festschrift for William R. Farmer, Jesus, the Gospels, and the Church , entitled ‘Marcion’s Gospel and the Synoptic Problem’. In n. 6 of that essay, Knox stated that he now thinks that he ‘should not have attempted to build any positive argument for Marcion’s priority on so meager and uncertain a basis as the recoverable text of his [Marcion’s] Gospel provides (that is in its detail)’. In essence, Knox came to recognize that until the text of Marcion’s Gospel is more critically established, arguments based on style and vocabulary, including the ones he himself set forth, are of minimal usefulness and, as he reiterated at the conclusion of the above-mentioned note, ‘not decisive “either for or against the traditional view”’. Second, with regard to an ancient source, one of Vinzent’s contentions regarding Tertullian’s views of Marcion is that ‘Consistently, discussing Paul’s concepts of the “new covenant” and of “newness”, Tertullian asserts that with his Gospel Marcion introduced a nova forma sermonis , a literary innovation, that there is in Christ a novel style of discourse, when he sets forth similitudes, when he answers questions’ (p. 92). In support of this point, Vinzent offers a citation from Marc. 4.11.12, which is the only place in Adversus Marcionem where there is a reference to a nova forma sermonis. His quotation of Tertullian in a footnote reads: forma sermonis in Christo nova, cum similitudines obicit, cum quaestiones refutat (p. 92, n. 352). The glaring problem, however, is that this citation is taken completely out of context and used by Vinzent to say precisely the opposite of what Tertullian actually states. Following comments that though the Gospel is different from the Law it is nevertheless in no way opposed to the Law, Tertullian goes on to say Nec forma sermonis in Christo nova. Cum similitudines obicit, cum quaestiones refutat, de septuagesimo venit psalmo: Aperiam, inquit, in parabolam os meum, id est similitudinem; eloquar problemata, id est edisseram quaestiones. Such troubling use of the statements of others, and unfortunately these are not the only examples in this volume, are a significant impediment to this monograph’s intention of advancing contemporary scholarship and discussion on Marcion’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels.
In sum, in this volume Vinzent provides the reader with a helpful collection of many of the relevant ancient and modern sources for scholarship on Marcion’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels even as his presentation and interpretation of those sources are at times less than satisfactory. For this reason it seems unlikely to me that this attempt to alter fundamentally the scholarly understanding of early Christian Gospels will find a receptive audience.
