Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Among the most annoying things in scholarship is the arbitrary 'identification' of the Marcionite gospel as 'the passages mentioned or cited in Tertullian Book Four' (= T4) + 'the passages mentioned or cited in Epiphanius' (= E). Who the hell hypnotized the academic community into accepting 'the gospel of Marcion' as T4 + E? There are dozens of citations in Adamantius and Ephrem and other sources that get excluded from this arbitrary demarcation. The rest of us should just call the gospel of Harnack, DeBuhn, Detering, Roth and the rest of these folks 'the gospel of T4 + E' and ignore what follows. No one in antiquity ever identified 'the gospel of T4 + E' as the gospel of Marcion. No one ever thought that this 'Transformers-like' incarnation where bits and pieces of a totality rise up from different bodies to form one totality had any reality. The real question is why do we moderns have this 'blind spot' for the non-existence of T4 + E? Why do we treat it as a real phenomenon. What is wrong with our psychological make up that we pretend texts that live in academic isolation (like 'Q') have a real existence in the world when they are nothing more than academic distractions living wholly in the scholarly laboratory?

Tentatively I would reconstruct Marcion's gospel as simple as: Some amount of Luke 3:1, skip to 4:31 and proceed, the rest up for grabs. In other words, aside from accurately telling us the first 3 chapters are not there, I don't see any way to tell for sure when Tert is quoting Marcion or canonical Luke and find it safer to assume he's always quoting canonical Luke because most of the time it seems that's exactly what he's doing. (Epiphanius seems to be dependent on Tert but changing a few details to hide that.) Where he gives variants like "testimony unto you" vs "testimony unto them" such a small variant is probably a mere mistake not really a difference between the two gospels. So just cut off Luke up to 4:30, start with 3:1/4:31, proceed and remove what you think doesn't match with dualism, and your reconstruction will be more accurate than one based on trying to take a finetoothed comb to Tert + Epiph. Tert leaves too much in on purpose to base his "inconsistant mutilator" ad hominem on, and Epiph continues that lie.