Vinzent has, in that blog-post (and probably elsewhere), reproduced Matthias Klinghardt's "reconstruction of Marcion's Gospeltext". As he says at the start -
Now Vinzent is not always a clear communicator, especially on his blog, including that blog-post, as well in his books eg. he often uses commas inappropriately and annoyingly (and he has made a silly error in enumerating a reproduction of a version of Marcion's Gospel which has irked others, to the point their attack-dog (an otherwise excellent scholar himself) beats him up for it, continually).
Jesus raises the son and gives him back to his mother. As a reaction – the crowd is seized by fear, yet also glorify God, stating that ‘a great Prophet has come forth’ and that ‘God has come to help his people’, the strongest acknowledgement of Jesus being a Μέγας προϕήτης in this Gospel by the crowd and the disciples.
Yet, in Mcn, this statement serves to contrast Jesus, the mega-prophet, with John the Baptist – and here we find the second correction of Luke who diverts the line of the story away from this confrontation. Without highlighting all the details of difference between Mcn and Luke (for example, the change from ‘Jesus’
['him' in Mcn, 7.19] to ‘Lord’ in Luke), the first major alteration is that Luke removed the bridge between the previous pericope with the raising of the boy of Nain and the new one of the encounter with John’s pupils, where Mcn introduces John the Baptist as the one who, ‘having heard his [Jesus’] works was scandalized’.
Having cut out this strong characterization of John, Luke, however, lost the framing of the entire story, as Jesus’ blessing, at the end of the debate with John’s pupils in his address to John’s and his own disciples, comes back to the opening: ‘Blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by me’
[though Lk 7:23 has '."..Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me”.'].
Having said this, and once John’s messengers had left,
[Marcion wrote about] Jesus'
details this rebuke of John even further, by admonishing the crowd who may have searched for a prophet, and
he [Marcion wrote that Jesus] does not deny that John the Baptist was a prophet, even the greatest ‘born of women’, but
he [Marcion] add
[ed] that ‘the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he [John] is’.
Again, without elaborating here on it – it is important to know that throughout the second century, Marcion was known to have contrasted Jesus with John the Baptist and, as his Gospel stated (Luke 16:16 par.), [and] as
is still [was] known
in [by] Justin and Irenaeus,
that the Law and the Prophets ended with John the Baptist:
‘The law and the prophets existed until John; since then, the kingdom of God has been proclaimed. Therefore, heaven and earth will pass away easier than one tiny stroke of a letter of the Lord’.
As Justin rightly understood, and Irenaeus reports, the law that ‘originated with Moses’ was ‘terminated with John by necessity’ (Iren.,
Adv. haer. IV 4).
The new edict of the Lord, however, was more robust than heaven and earth could ever be. And yet, again, in this instance, Luke turns Marcion upside down, in replacing ‘the Lord’ and making Jesus say that heaven and earth will pass away easier than one tiny stroke of a letter of the Law’. It, therefore, comes with no surprise that Luke adds the verses 7:29-35 to the pericope that we discussed before, in order to endorse and vindicate wisdom, the Baptist, by criticizing the criticism of John, putting him on par with the criticisms voiced against Jesus and blaming the Pharisees:
‘Now all the people who heard this, even the tax collectors, acknowledged God’s justice, because they had been baptized with John’s baptism. 7:30 However, the Pharisees and the experts in religious law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John... 7:33 For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon!’ 7:34 The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, „Look at him, a glutton and a drunk, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!“’
In sum: First,
the entire sequence not only displays entirely a theology for which Marcion is known (and sometimes blamed) already in the second century, the text is also more coherent
, [and] stringent, and
a fascinating insight into a clear narrative where Jesus is the one who acts against expectations, remains misunderstood by Israel, the crowd
: John’s and Jesus’ own disciples. Second, if one had reconstructed the last pericope on the basis of Marcion’s theology, one would have added the contrasting statements that in Luke set the sinner against the Pharisee, sharpening Jesus’ reaction against Simon Peter. However,
as Matthias Klinghardt shows from the manuscript evidence, only the parts of the verses which are attested for Marcion’s Gospel (Luke 7:44b.45b)
display the usual variants in a series of Bible manuscripts, especially the Latin tradition (aur b f l q rl a d e ff2), while the others do not.