The First New Testament by Jason BeDuhn:
“In short, the acceptance by modern researchers of the claims made about Marcion’s handling of the texts included in his New Testament is an example of uncritical adoption of polemic as history. First, Tertullian and his associates in this charge against Marcion are working from an anti-Marcionite bias that shapes their assumptions. Second, they are writing from a position in time that makes it impossible for them to have any sure knowledge of the state of either anything like a New Testament canon or its constituent books at the time of Marcion. Third, we know for a fact that several of their assumptions are incorrect: there was no New Testament canon before Marcion, from which the latter rejected parts unsuited to him; there was no larger Pauline corpus from which Marcion excised the Pastorals; there was no universal, undisputed orthodoxy from which Marcion diverged. All of these are anachronisms that Marcion’s later critics project back into the circumstances of his activity. In many cases, Tertullian and Epiphanius claim erroneously that the particular wording of the Evangelion or Apostolikon is Marcion’s invention, when in fact we find the same wording in catholic biblical manuscripts. The almost canonical status afforded the accusations made against Marcion, therefore, shows a remarkable lack of critical historical assessment among modern researchers,” (p.31).
“Adolf von Harnack, the great historian of Christianity whose 1924 study of Marcion is the chief reference point of all subsequent scholarship on the subject, helped to perpetuate this uncritical read- ing of sources hostile to Marcion, inasmuch as he sought rationales within Marcion’s ideology for the differences between Marcion’s texts and their catholic versions. Yet even he readily admitted, “No definite statements by Marcion exist concerning the grounds for proceeding as he does in his critique of individual passages from the Gospel or Apostle.” He likewise conceded that many passages were apparently in Marcion’s text that worked against his theology. A growing alertness to such issues with the evidence in the research conducted since Harnack has called into question his claim to have an accurate grasp of Marcion’s dogmatic principles when it came to handling the biblical text. Any conclusions drawn on this question must be based on the evidence of the texts themselves, not any assumptions about Marcion and his motives,” (p.31-32).
Beyond this, BeDuhn discusses how Marcion’s predates just about any of our biblical manuscripts of Luke and Paul, as well as the fact that a number of variant readings we’ve known of, from across different manuscripts, agree with Marcion’s wording exactly (which would be highly unlikely to appear in such a wide range of manuscripts if he personally had “taken a knife to scripture.” At least, so says BeDuhn). And most importantly, a lot of Marcion’s readings disagree with his own theology.
Bart Ehrman agrees as well, that there’s a good chance the first edition of Luke did not include the infancy narratives, just as Marcion’s text didn’t:
“But is there any hard evidence that a first edition began without the first two chapters? One of the reasons it is so hard to say is because we simply don’t have much hard evidence. Our two earliest manuscripts of Luke, P75 and P45, are fragmentary, lacking portions of Luke, including the first two chapters. We can’t say whether they originally had them or not. Our first manuscript with portions of the opening chapters is the third-century P4. But our earliest patristic witness is over a century earlier. As it turns out, the witness is the heresiarch Marcion, and as is well known he didn’t have the first two chapters… I used to think that an adoptionistic Christology was more or less second-rate: Jesus only was adopted, he wasn’t the “real thing.” But a recent book that I’ve read by Michael Peppard, and that I’ve mentioned on this blog, The Son of God in the Roman World, has made me rethink the issue. Peppard points out that in the Roman world, adopted sons frequently had a higher status than natural sons; if an emperor had sons, but adopted someone else to be his heir, it was the adopted son who would become the next emperor, not the natural sons. The adopted son was seen as more powerful and influential, as indeed he was. So for Jesus to be adopted to be the son of God would be a big deal. I mention this because without the first two chapters, in particular, Luke can be read as having an adoptionist Christology. In part, that hinges on how you understand the voice that comes from heaven to him at his baptism (the first think that happens to him in this Gospel). In most manuscripts the voice says: “You are my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased” (an allusion to Isa. 42:1, probably). But in a couple of manuscript witnesses the voice says something completely different: “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (a quotation of Psalm 2:7). I have a lengthy discussion of this passage in my book Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, where I argue (at some length) that this latter quotation of Ps. 2:7 is what the text originally said, and that it was changed by scribes who did not like its adoptionistic overtones. If that’s right, and if that was the beginning episode of this Gospel, then it is indeed easy to see how an adoptionist would have read it in line with his or her particular theological views.”
https://ehrmanblog.org/is-there-evidence-that-luke-originally-did-not-have-the-story-of-jesus-birth/
It has not seemed clear to me at all that modern scholars agree with Irenaeus and later fathers that Marcion “mutilated” Paul and Luke. More often I run into statements like this one from Judith Lieu in “Marcion and the Making of a Heretic” (Cambridge, 2015): “in many cases it is probative that Marcion was simply following the text available to him; on the other hand, it would not be surprising if he did make textual changes or choices, for accidental or conscious changes are a widespread feature of scribal transmission. It is not impossible that some readings original to Marcion made their way into the wider textual tradition.”
Harry Gamble makes much the same point 20 years earlier in “Books and Readers in the Early Church”: “it needs to be emphasized that in his time Marcion’s editorial activity was not unique. During the second century scriptural texts were still relatively fluid and subject to revision, even in mainline Christian circles…Moreover, Marcion’s textual revisions were rather less numerous and extensive than was once supposed. Many readings once regarded as Marcionite are now recognized as variants steming from an earlier non-Marcionite tradition. What is too little recognized is that Marcion’s editorial activity did not arise from caprice, nor from an overbearing ideology, but from critical scholastic judgment, however idiosyncratic that may have been. He had a theory of the history of texts, and not unlike modern critics, he suspected that the texts had been contaminated by glosses, interpolations, and redactions, that obscured their original sense. His revisions aimed a nothing less than a critical reconstitution of a pure text. Although the results of his effort are unsatisfactory by modern standards, Marcion’s attitude and approach were continuous with well-established traditions of philological criticism in Greco-Roman antiquity.”
http://vridar.org/2012/09/09/the-marcionite-gospel-and-the-synoptic-problem-a-new-suggestion/
Leave a Reply