Priority of the Gospel of Marcion

Short description: Biblical hypothesis about the gospel of Marcion

Template:Infobox synoptic hypothesis

Marcion priority is the hypothesis that the Gospel of Marcion preceded the other gospels and is an attempted solution to the synoptic problem. This hypothesis claims that the first produced or compiled gospel was that of Marcion and that this gospel of Marcion was used as inspiration for some, or all, of the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

German theologian Matthias Klinghardt is a modern proponent of this hypothesis. The majority of scholars agree that this gospel was a later revised version of the Gospel of Luke rather than with Marcionite Priority.[1]

## Contents

* 1 Context
* 2 Gospel of Marcion as Preceding Canonical Luke
* 3 Gospel of Marcion as the first of all gospels
* 4 Criticism
* 5 Notes
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading

## Context

See also: Gospel of Mark § Authorship, date and genre

Marcion of Sinope (c. 85 – c. 160) is considered to be the founder of an early Christian movement called Marcionism. He is regarded by numerous scholars as having produced the first New Testament canon which included a gospel, called the Evangelion (or Euangelion), which he either acquired or significantly developed; or even fully wrote. Some have called it or even still call it the Gospel of Marcion.[2][3][4][5][6]

Some Church Fathers said that the Marcionite Evangelion was a revision of the gospel of Luke with some passages expunged from it to fit Marcion's theology; this hypothesis on the relationship between the gospels of Marcion and of Luke is called the patristic hypothesis. However, some scholars have argued that the Marcionite gospel preceded the gospel of Luke and that the gospel of Luke is a revision of the Gospel of Marcion: the Schwegler hypothesis. Others argue that the Marcionite Evangelion and the gospel of Luke are two independent versions of another, prior gospel-text, with the gospel of Marcion being 'more faithful' to such a source than the gospel of Luke, or even being an unaltered version of that proposed source (the Semler hypothesis).[4] Some go further and propose that the Gospel of Marcion was the very first gospel ever produced, preceding all others including the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John[5][6] (the Marcion priority hypothesis).

"[T]here has been a long line of scholars" who, against what the Church Fathers said, claimed "that our canonical Luke forms an enlarged version of a 'Proto-Luke' which was also used by Marcion. This dispute [...] was especially vivid in nineteenth century German scholarship". In 1942, John Knox published his, Marcion and the New Testament, in which he proposed that the gospel of Marcion had the chronological priority over Luke. No defence of this theory was made again until two 2006 articles: one by Joseph Tyson, and one by Matthias Klinghardt. "Knox and Tyson believe that Marcion used and falsified 'Proto-Luke'", while Klinghardt, who, at that time, did not propose that the gospel of Marcion was the very first gospel ever produced, asserted "that Marcion used Proto-Luke as he found it, that is, Marcion's Gospel and 'Proto-Luke' are identical".[7]

## Gospel of Marcion as Preceding Canonical Luke

Some scholars argue the Gospel of Marcion predates the version of Luke present today. Judith Lieu argues that Marcion had access and edited a work extremely similar to the Canonical Gospel of Luke, though this older work would have lacked certain passages. As such the currently extant Gospel of Luke would have appeared after the Gospel of Marcion.[8]

## Gospel of Marcion as the first of all gospels

In his 2013 book, The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon, Jason BeDuhn said he considers that the gospel of Marcion was not produced or adapted by Marcion, but instead that the Gospel of Marcion was a preexisting gospel adopted by Marcion and his movement.[9] He believes that: "On the whole, the differences between Luke and the Evangelion [i.e. the Gospel of Marcion] resist explanation on ideological grounds, and point instead toward Semler's original suggestion 250 years ago: the two gospels could be alternative versions adapted for primarily Jewish and primarily Gentile readers, respectively. In other words, the differences served practical, mission-related purposes rather than ideological, sectarian ones. Under such a scenario, the Evangelion would be transmitted within exactly the wing of emerging Christianity in which we can best situate Marcion’s own religious background". Semler's hypothesis being that "the Evangelion and Luke are both pre-Marcionite versions going back to a common original".

In his 2014 book Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, Markus Vinzent proposed, based on his interpretation of aspects of Tertullian's Against Marcion (and other works of Tertullian), that the Marcionite Evangelion was first written as a document "for his classroom (without Antitheses and perhaps without Paul's letters)," ie. not meant for publication, but which was circulated and plagiarized by the four canonical gospels authors; and that, in response to that plagiarism, Marcion wrote an Antitheses and published it along with his gospel and a ten letter collection of the Pauline epistles.[10][11][12] That is, a first edition of a Euangelion Marcion had (or even wrote) preceded the four canonical gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and that it influenced the four canonical gospel writers and hence the four canonical gospels they wrote (and that Marcion produced a second edition of his Euangelion along with his response).

In a study published in a 2015 book in German,[13] Matthias Klinghardt had changed his mind comparing to his 2008 article in which he had said that the Marcionite gospel was based on the Gospel of Mark, that the Gospel of Matthew was an expansion of the Gospel of Mark with reference to the Gospel of Marcion, and that the Gospel of Luke was an expansion of the Gospel of Marcion with reference to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.[14]: 21–22, 26 In that 2015 book (subsequently published in English), Klinghardt shared the same opinion as BeDuhn and Vinzent on the priority and influence of the Marcionite gospel.[10] Like Vinzent, he proposed that the Gospel of Marcion preceded and influenced the four canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.[15] Klinghardt and BeDuhn reaffirmed their opinions in two 2017 articles.[16]

The Marcion priority hypothesis implies the dating of the New Testament Gospels to the mid 2nd century – a thesis that goes back to David Trobisch, who, in 1996 in his habilitation thesis accepted in Heidelberg,[17] presented a thesis of an early, uniform final editing of the New Testament canon in the 2nd century.[18]

## Criticism

The majority of scholars view the Gospel of Marcion as a second century work that edited Luke rather than agreeing with arguments like Vinzent’s to the contrary.[19][20]

Christopher Hays contends that Klinghardt's 2006 case made a number of philological errors, misunderstood the nature of how Marcion is contended to have redacted Luke, and offered an inconsistent case that Luke had redacted Marcion. For example, while one argument for Marcionite priority over Luke rests on the claim that it is unlikely that Marcion deleted significant portions of Luke, rather than Luke having expanded significant portions of Marcion, Hays held that Marcion also deleted significant portions of Paul's letters to create his Apostolikon. Thus, Hays sees it as special pleading to acknowledge that Marcion edited down Paul and to also hold that Marcion did not edit down Luke.[21]

Sebastian Moll has said that all surviving sources say that Marcion is the one who edited Luke, and therefore the burden of proof is on advocates of Marcionite priority to provide the counter-argument.[7]

Dieter Roth has responded to Markus Vinzent's thesis (that Marcion was the author of the first Gospel and that the four canonical Gospels only came after it). According to Roth, Vinzent advances this thesis based on a number of misreadings of Tertullian.[22][23][24]

James Barker finds Vinzent’s case “wholly unconvincing”, citing Clare Rothschild’s review relegating his monograph to “a nonscientific genre.”[25]

## Notes

## See also

* Farrer hypothesis
* Griesbach hypothesis
* Markan priority
* Synoptic problem
* Two-source hypothesis

## References

1. ↑ Bernier, Jonathan (2022). Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. Baker Academic. ISBN 978-1-4934-3467-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=QLQ5EAAAQBAJ&dq=Rethinking+the+Dates+of+the+New+Testament+Marcion's+Gospel&pg=PT61. "According to late second- and early third-century fathers, Marcion (who was active in Rome in probably the 140s) produced a version of Luke's Gospel shorn of material that he found to be doctrinally unacceptable. For the most part, critical scholarship has been content to affirm these patristic reports."
2. ↑ Koestler, Helmut (1990). Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development. Continuum International Publishing Group. pp. 36. ISBN 978-0-334-02450-7. https://books.google.com/books?id=DGK4sIPk4PYC.
3. ↑ Price, Chris (2002). "Marcion, the Canon, the Law, and the Historical Jesus". http://christianorigins.com/marcion.html.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 BeDuhn, Jason (2013) The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Vinzent, Markus (2014) Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic gospels
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Klinghart, Matthias (2015) Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien, Francke A. Verlag; in English:  The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Peeters Publishers. 2021. ISBN 9789042943094. https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=1082886&series_number_str=41&lang=en.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Moll, Sebastian (2010). The Arch-Heretic Marcion. Mohr Siebeck. pp. 90–102. doi:10.1628/978-3-16-151539-2. ISBN 9783161515392. http://dx.doi.org/10.1628/978-3-16-151539-2.
8. ↑ Lieu, Judith. Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century. Cambridge University Press. p. 209. ISBN 978-1107029040.
9. ↑ BeDuhn, Jason (2013). The First New Testament: Marcion's Scriptural Canon. Polebridge Press. pp. 4–6, 9, 90. ISBN 978-1-59815-131-2. OCLC 857141226. "[S]tudy of Marcion’s New Testament has generally been subservient to investigations of Marcion as a theologian and key figure in Christian history. But Marcion did not compose these texts (even if there remains the separate question of whether he edited them to some degree); he collected them from a broader existing Christian movement, and bestowed them in their collected form back to living Christian communities. As we will see, there are good reasons to question the assumption that these texts were fundamentally altered for service only to Marcionite Christians.
[...]
These points of textual evidence and historical circumstance, therefore, suggest that Marcion may not have produced a definitive edition of the Evangelion after all, but rather took up a gospel already in circulation in multiple copies that had seen varying degrees of harmonization to other gospels in their transmission up to that point in time. The process of canonizing this gospel for the Marcionite community involved simply giving it a stamp of approval, acquiring copies already in circulation, and making more copies from these multiple exemplars, so that their varying degrees of harmonization passed into the Marcionite textual tradition of the Evangelion."
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Vinzent, Markus (2015). "Marcion's Gospel and the Beginnings of Early Christianity" (in en). Annali di Storia dell'esegesi 32 (1): 55–87. https://www.academia.edu/31939279.
11. ↑ BeDuhn, Jason David (2015). "Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, written by Markus Vinzent" (in en). Vigiliae Christianae 69 (4): 452–457. doi:10.1163/15700720-12301234. ISSN 1570-0720. https://brill.com/view/journals/vc/69/4/article-p452_7.xml.
12. ↑ Vinzent, Markus (2016-11-24). "I am in the process of reading your book 'Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels' ...". http://markusvinzent.blogspot.com/2016/11/i-am-in-process-of-reading-your-book.html.
13. ↑ Matthias Klinghardt (2015) Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien, Francke Verlag; Translated as Klinghardt, Matthias (2021). The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Biblical Tools and Studies, 41. 1 & 2. Leuven: Peeters Publishers. ISBN 978-90-429-4310-0. OCLC 1238089165.
14. ↑ Klinghardt, Matthias (2008). "The Marcionite Gospel and the Synoptic Problem: A New Suggestion". Novum Testamentum 50 (1): 1–27. doi:10.1163/156853608X257527.
15. ↑ Klinghardt, Matthias (2015). "IV. Vom ältesten Evangelium zum kanonischen Vier-Evangelienbuch: Eine überlieferungsgeschichtliche Skizze" (in de). Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien. A. Francke Verlag. pp. 188–231. ISBN 978-3-7720-5549-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=bk94DwAAQBAJ&q=191.
16. ↑ Gallagher, Ed (2017-03-14). "Marcion's Gospel and the New Testament". http://sanctushieronymus.blogspot.com/2017/03/marcions-gospel-and-new-testament.html.
17. ↑ David Trobisch: Die Endredaktion des Neuen Testamentes: eine Untersuchung zur Entstehung der christlichen Bibel. Universitäts-Verlag, Freiburg, Schweiz; Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996, zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 1994, ISBN 3-525-53933-9 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), ISBN 3-7278-1075-0 (Univ.-Verl.) (= Novum testamentum et orbis antiquus 31).
18. ↑ Heilmann, Jan; Klinghardt, Matthias, eds (2018). Das Neue Testament und sein Text im 2.Jahrhundert. Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter. 61. Tübingen, Germany: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. pp. 9. ISBN 978-3-7720-8640-3.
19. ↑ Keith, Chris (2020). The Gospel as Manuscript. Oxford University Press. pp. 77. ISBN 978-0199384372.
20. ↑ Bernier, Jonathan (2022). Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament. Baker Academic. ISBN 978-1-4934-3467-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=QLQ5EAAAQBAJ&dq=Rethinking+the+Dates+of+the+New+Testament+Marcion's+Gospel&pg=PT61. "According to late second- and early third-century fathers, Marcion (who was active in Rome in probably the 140s) produced a version of Luke's Gospel shorn of material that he found to be doctrinally unacceptable. For the most part, critical scholarship has been content to affirm these patristic reports."
21. ↑ Hays, Christopher M. (2008-07-01). "Marcion vs. Luke: A Response to the Plädoyer of Matthias Klinghardt" (in en). Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der Älteren Kirche 99 (2): 213–232. doi:10.1515/ZNTW.2008.017. ISSN 1613-009X. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ZNTW.2008.017/html.
22. ↑ Roth, Dieter T. (2015-01-08). The Text of Marcion's Gospel. BRILL. pp. 164, n. 366. doi:10.1163/9789004282377. ISBN 978-90-04-28237-7. OCLC 892620587. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004282377.
23. ↑ "Roth on Reading the Sources for Marcion" (in en). 2015-03-25. https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/roth-on-reading-the-sources-for-marcion/.
24. ↑ Roth, Dieter (2017-05-25). "Marcion's Gospel and the History of Early Christianity: The Devil is in the (Reconstructed) Details" (in en). Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 99 (21): 25–40. doi:10.1515/zac-2017-0002. ISSN 1613-009X. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/zac-2017-0002/html.
25. ↑ Barker, James (2025). Writing and Rewriting the Gospels. Eerdmans. ISBN 978-0802874528.

## Further reading

* BeDuhn, Jason (2013) The First New Testament: Marion's Scriptural Canon
* BeDuhn, Jason (2015) "The New Marcion: Rethinking The Arch-Heretic". Forum 3 (Fall 2015): 163–179. https://www.scribd.com/document/372002959/The-New-Marcion-Rethinking-the-Arch-Heretic#.
* Farrin, Cassandra J. (2013). "Marcion: Forgotten "Father" and Inventor of the New Testament" (in en-US). https://www.westarinstitute.org/blog/marcion-forgotten-father-inventor-new-testament/.
* Guignard, Christophe (2013). "Marcion et les Évangiles canoniques. À propos d'un livre récent" (in fr). Études théologiques et religieuses 88 (3): 347–363. doi:10.3917/etr.0883.0347.
* Klinghart, Matthias (2015) Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien, Francke A. Verlag (in German); translated in English as  The Oldest Gospel and the Formation of the Canonical Gospels. Peeters Publishers. 2021. ISBN 9789042943094. https://www.peeters-leuven.be/detail.php?search_key=1082886&series_number_str=41&lang=en.
* Klinghardt, Matthias (2018), The Oldest gospel: Klinghardt Edition, Quiet Waters Publications ISBN 978-1931475716
* Vinzent, Markus (2014) Marcion and the Dating of the Synoptic Gospels, Studia Patristica, Peeters.
* Vinzent, Markus (2015), Marcion's gospel and the Beginnings of Christianity, https://www.academia.edu/31939279
* "Quaestiones Disputatae" (in en). New Testament Studies 63 (2): 318–334. April 2017. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/issue/4FD3A1C74C33D3A7F72D8AEBE6AD1E49#. Retrieved 2020-08-01.

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Synoptic problem

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* Three-source hypothesis
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Matthaean priority|

* Two-gospel hypothesis
* Augustinian hypothesis

Lucan priority|

* Jerusalem school hypothesis

Other or no priority|

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