According to Sebastian Moll’s The Arch-Heretic Marcion (Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 26-41), the one more or less reliable date we have is that Marcion came to and settled in Rome 144/5 AD. Allowing for the possibility that he wrote his Gospels in the next few years, or perhaps in the few years prior, it seems like his Gospel must have been composed somewhere around 135-150 AD.
Did he compose it or did he receive it? Since all the Synoptic gospels are interrelated, he received a gospel in some form. One traditional theory is that he received a completed Gospel of Luke and he took a pair of scissors to it. (this would date the Marcion Gospel as no sooner than he became an adult, around 105 CE at the earliest, earliest, but, since he joined the Church in late 130’s, that tends to limit his contribution to the Gospel to between that and 144 CE when he was excommunicated, although, I don’t know for sure if he was using the Marcion Gospel in Rome, he did use it after that in Asia Minor, and Marcion died around 160 CE ) Another other possibility is that Luke existed in two versions before Marcion. (So, how early could Luke have been written?) In cases like this we often expect that the shorter version came first, and someone took the short version and added to it to make the longer version. In this case, Marcion could have something closer to the original gospel we now call Luke. We have three early Christian writers(Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius) who compare standard Luke to Marcion’s version and they are in close agreement with each other about what the changes are. (this gives us an end date, the Gospel of Marcion would have been in circulation for some time when Irenaeus criticized it.(c180) For example, Marcion does not have the infancy story(Christmas). That infancy material has ways it is distinct, for example, Luke chapters 1 and 2 contain four “songs”. Mary, Zechariah, angel chorus and Simeon. We don’t get that in the rest of Luke. But on the other hand, standard Luke starts in Jerusalem, but the action moves to Nazareth. This ties well with the Lukan theme of Jesus setting his face to Jerusalem. So, these literary features aren’t conclusive.
In fact, the argument of the polemicists who attacked Marcion (Irenaeus etc) was based on using Marcion’s gospel against Marcion’s theology. If Marcion had highly edited a gospel of Luke, or largely composed the gospel, one would expect it to be more consistent with Marcion’s theology.
The idea of which gospel came before which other gospel, has many possible routes. Jason BeDuhn suggests that what we call the Marcion gospel could have been the first and oldest Gospel. Others ( Matthias Klinghardt ) argue that the Gospel of Marcion could reflect an expansion of Mark that then influenced both Luke and Matthew.
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