Supernatural Religion Volume II Part 7

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said: "Absolute completeness in regard to that which Marcion's Gospel did not contain is not to be reckoned upon in his Scholia. He has certainly not intended to pa.s.s over anything, but in the eagerness which so easily renders men superficial and blind much has escaped him."(l)

Hahn bears similar testimony to the incompleteness of Epiphanius. "It was not his purpose," he says, "fully to notice all falsifications, variations, and omissions, although he does mark most of them, but merely to extract from the Gospel of Marcion, as well as from his collection of Epistles, what seemed to him well suited for refutation."(2) But he immediately adds: "When he quotes a pa.s.sage from Marcion's text, however, in which such falsifications occur, he generally,--but not always,--notes them more or less precisely, and he had himself laid it down as a subsidiary object of his work to pay attention to such falsifications."(3) A little further on he says: "In the quotations of the remaining pa.s.sages which Epiphanius did not find different from the Gospel of Luke, and where he therefore says nothing of falsification or omission, he is often very free, neither adhering strictly to the particular words, nor to their arrangement, but his favourite practice is to give their substance and sense for the purpose of refuting his opponent. He presupposes the words known from the Gospel of Luke."(4)

It must be stated, however, that both Volkmar(5) and Hilgenfeld(6) consider that the representations of

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Tertullian and Epiphanius supplement each other and enable the contents of Marcion's Gospel to be ascertained with tolerable certainty. Yet a few pages earlier Volkmar had pointed out that: "The ground for a certain fixture of the text of the Marcionitish Gospel, however, seems completely taken away by the fact that Tertullian and Epiphanius, in their statements regarding its state, not merely repeatedly seem to, but in part actually do, directly contradict each other."(1) Hahn endeavours to explain some of these contradictions by imagining that later Marcionites had altered the text of their Gospel, and that Epiphanius had the one form and Tertullian another;(2) but such a doubt only renders the whole of the statements regarding the work more uncertain and insecure. That it is not without some reason, however, appears from the charge which Tertullian brings against the disciples of Marcion: "for they daily alter it (their Gospel) as they are daily refuted by us."(3) In fact, we have no a.s.surance whatever that the work upon which Tertullian and Epiphanius base their charge against Marcion of falsification and mutilation of Luke was Marcion's original Gospel at all, and we certainly have no historical evidence on the point.(4)

The question even arises, whether Tertullian, and indeed Epiphanius, had Marcion's Gospel in any shape before them when they wrote, or merely his work the

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"Ant.i.theses."(1) In commencing his onslaught on Marcion's Gospel, Terlullian says: "Marcion seems (videtur) to have selected Luke, to mutilate it."(2) This is the first serious introduction of his "mutilation hypothesis," which he thenceforward presses with so much a.s.surance, but the expression is very uncertain for so decided a controversialist, if he had been able to speak more positively.(3) We have seen that it is admitted that Epiphanius wrote without again comparing the Gospel of Marcion with Luke, and it is also conceded that Tertullian at least had not the Canonical Gospel, but in professing to quote Luke evidently does so from memory, and approximates his text to Matthew, with which Gospel, like most of the Fathers, he was better acquainted. This may be ill.u.s.trated by the fact that both Tertullian and Epiphanius reproach Marcion with erasing pa.s.sages from the Gospel of Luke, which never were in Luke at all.(4) In one place Tertullian says: "Marcion, you must also remove this from the Gospel: 'I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,'(3) and: 'It is not meet to take the children's bread, and give it to dogs,'(6) in order, be it known, that Christ may not seem to be an Israelite."(7) The "Great African"

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thus taunts his opponent, evidently under the impression that the two pa.s.sages were in Luke, immediately after he had accused Marcion of having actually expunged from that Gospel, "as an interpolation,"(1) the saying that Christ had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil them,(2) which likewise never formed part of it. He repeats a similar charge on several other occasions.(3) Epiphanius commits the same mistake of reproaching Marcion with omitting from Luke what is only found in Matthew.(4) We have, in fact, no certain guarantee of the accuracy or trustworthiness of their statements.

We have said enough, we trust, to show that the sources for the reconstruction of a text of Marcion's Gospel are most unsatisfactory, and no one who attentively studies the a.n.a.lysis of Hahn, Ritschl, Volkmar, Hilgenfeld, and others, who have examined and systematized the data of the Fathers, can fail to be struck by the uncertainty which prevails throughout, the almost continuous vagueness and consequent opening, nay, necessity, for conjecture, and the absence of really sure indications. The Fathers had no intention of showing what Marcion's text actually was, and their object being solely dogmatic and not critical, their statements are very insufficient for the purpose.(5) The materials have had to be ingeniously collected and sifted from polemical writings whose authors, so far from professing to furnish them, were only bent upon seeking in Marcion's Gospel such points as could legitimately, or by sophistical skill, be used against him. Pa.s.sing observations, general

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remarks, as well as direct statements, have too often been the only indications guiding the patient explorers and, in the absence of certain information, the silence of the angry Fathers has been made the basis for important conclusions. It is evident that not only is such a procedure necessarily uncertain and insecure, but that it rests upon a.s.sumptions with regard to the intelligence, care and accuracy of Tertullian and Epiphanius, which are not sufficiently justified by that part of their treatment of Marcion's text which we can examine and appreciate. And when all these doubtful landmarks have failed, too many pa.s.sages have been left to the mere judgment of critics, as to whether they were too opposed to Marcion's system to have been retained by him, or too favourable to have been omitted. The reconstructed texts, as might be expected, differ from each other, and one Editor finds the results of his predecessors incomplete or unsatisfactory,1 although naturally at each successive attempt, the materials previously collected and adopted have contributed to an apparently more complete result.

After complaining of the incompleteness and uncertainty of the statements of Tertullian and Epiphanius, Ritschl affirms that they furnish so little solid material on which to base a hypothesis, that rather by means of a hypothesis must we determine the remains of the Gospel from Tertullian.(3) Hilgenfeld quotes this with approval, and adds, that at least Ritschl's opinion is so far right, that all the facts of the case can no longer be settled from external data, and that the general view regarding the

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Gospel only can decide many points.(1) This means of course that hypothesis is to supply that which is wanting in the Fathers. Volkmar, in the introduction to his last comprehensive work on Marcion's Gospel, says: "And, in fact, it is no wonder that critics have for so long, and substantially to so little effect, fought over the protean question, for there has been so much uncertainty as to the very basis (Fundament) itself,--the precise text of the remarkable doc.u.ment,--that Baur has found full ground for rejecting, as unfounded, the supposition on which that finally-attained decision (his previous one) rested."(2) Critics of all shades of opinion are forced to admit the incompleteness of the materials for any certain reconstruction of Marcion's text and, consequently, for an absolute settlement of the question from internal evidence,(3) although the labours of Volkmar and Hilgenfeld have materially increased our knowledge of the contents of his Gospel.

We must contend, however, that, desirable and important as it is to ascertain as perfectly as possible the precise nature of Marcion's text, the question of its origin and relation to Luke would not by any means be settled even by its final reconstruction. There would, as we shall presently show, remain unsolved the problem of its place in that successive manipulation of materials by which a few Gospels gradually absorbed and displaced the rest. Our own synoptics

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exhibit unmistakable traces of the process, and clearly forbid our lightly setting aside the claim of Marcion's Gospel to be considered a genuine work, and no mere falsification and abbreviation of Luke.

Before proceeding to a closer examination of Marcion's Gospel and the general evidence bearing upon it, it may be well here briefly to refer to the system of the Heresiarch whose high personal character exerted so powerful an influence upon his own time,(1) and whose views continued to prevail widely for a couple of centuries after his death. It was the misfortune of Marcion to live in an age when Christianity had pa.s.sed out of the pure morality of its infancy, when, untroubled by complicated questions of dogma, simple faith and pious enthusiasm had been the one great bond of Christian brotherhood, into a phase of ecclesiastical development in which religion was fast degenerating into theology, and complicated doctrines were rapidly a.s.suming that rampant att.i.tude which led to so much bitterness, persecution, and schism. In later times Marcion might have been honoured as a reformer, in his own he was denounced as a heretic.(2) Austere and ascetic in his opinions, he aimed at superhuman purity, and although his clerical adversaries might scoff at his impracticable doctrines regarding marriage and the subjugation of the flesh, they have had their parallels amongst those whom the Church has since most delighted to honour; and at least the whole tendency of his system was markedly towards the side of virtue.(3) It would of course be foreign to our

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purpose to enter upon any detailed statement of its principles, and we must confine ourselves to such particulars only as are necessary to an understanding of the question before us.

As we have already frequently had occasion to mention, there were two broad parties in the primitive Church, and the very existence of Christianity was in one sense endangered by the national exclusiveness of the people amongst whom it originated. The one party considered Christianity a mere continuation of the Law, and dwarfed it into an Isrealitish inst.i.tution, a narrow sect of Judaism; the other represented the glad tidings as the introduction of a new system applicable to all and supplanting the Mosaic dispensation of the Law by a universal dispensation of grace. These two parties were popularly represented in the early Church by the Apostles Peter and Paul, and their antagonism is faintly revealed in the Epistle to the Galatians. Marcion, a gentile Christian, appreciating the true character of the new religion and its elevated spirituality, and profoundly impressed by the comparatively degraded and anthropomorphic features of Judaism, drew a very sharp line of demarcation between them, and represented Christianity as an entirely new and separate system abrogating the old and having absolutely no connection with it. Jesus was not to him the Messiah of the Jews, the son of David come permanently to establish the Law and the Prophets, but a divine being sent to reveal to man a wholly new spiritual religion, and a hitherto unknown G.o.d of goodness and grace. The Creator [------],

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the G.o.d of the Old Testament, was different from the G.o.d of grace who had sent Jesus to reveal the Truth, to bring reconciliation and salvation to all, and to abrogate the Jewish G.o.d of the World and of the Law, who was opposed to the G.o.d and Father of Jesus Christ as Matter is to Spirit, impurity to purity. Christianity was in distinct antagonism to Judaism, the Spiritual G.o.d of heaven, whose goodness and love were for the Universe, to the G.o.d of the World, whose chosen and peculiar people were the Jews, the Gospel of Grace to the dispensation of the Old Testament. Christianity, therefore, must be kept pure from the Judaistic elements humanly thrust into it, which were so essentially opposed to its whole spirit.

Marcion wrote a work called "Ant.i.theses" [------], in which he contrasted the old system with the new, the G.o.d of the one with the G.o.d of the other, the Law with the Gospel, and in this he maintained opinions which antic.i.p.ated many held in our own time. Tertullian attacks this work in the first three books of his treatise against Marcion, and he enters upon the discussion of its details with true theological vigour: "Now, then, ye hounds, yelping at the G.o.d of truth, whom the Apostle casts out,(1) to all your questions! These are the bones of contention which ye gnaw!"(2) The poverty of the "Great African's"

arguments keeps pace with his abuse. Marcion objected: If the G.o.d of the Old Testament be good, prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did he allow man, made in his own image, to be deceived

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by the devil, and to fall from obedience of the Law into sin and death?(1) How came the devil, the origin of lying and deceit, to be made at all?(2) After the fall, G.o.d became a judge both severe and cruel; woman is at once condemned to bring forth in sorrow and to serve her husband, changed from a help into a slave; the earth is cursed which before was blessed, and man is doomed to labour and to death.(3) The law was one of retaliation and not of justice,--lex talionis--eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe.(4) And it was not consistent, for in contravention of the Decalogue, G.o.d is made to instigate the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians, and fraudulently rob them of their gold and silver;(5) to incite them to work on the Sabbath by ordering them to carry the ark for eight days round Jericho;(6) to break the second commandment by making and setting up the brazen serpent and the golden cherubim.(7) Then G.o.d is inconstant, electing men, as Saul and Solomon, whom he subsequently rejects;(8) repenting that he had set up Saul, and that he had doomed the Ninevites,(9) and so on. G.o.d calls out: Adam, where art thou? inquires whether he had eaten the forbidden fruit; asks of Cain where his brother was, as if he had not yet heard the blood of Abel crying from the ground, and did not already know all these things.(10) Antic.i.p.ating the results of modem criticism, Marcion denies the applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies. The Emmanuel of

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Isaiah (vii. 14, cf. viii. 4) is not Christ;(1) the "Virgin" his mother is simply a "young woman" according to Jewish phraseology;(2) and the sufferings of the Servant of G.o.d (Isaiah lii. 13--liii. 9) are not predictions of the death of Jesus.(3) There is a complete severance between the Law and the Gospel, and the G.o.d of the latter is the Ant.i.thesis of that of the former.(4) "The one was perfect, pure, beneficent, pa.s.sionless; the other, though not unjust by nature, infected by matter,--subject to all the pa.s.sions of man,--cruel, changeable; the New Testament, especially as remodelled by Marcion,(5) was holy, wise, amiable; the Old Testament, the Law, barbarous, inhuman, contradictory, and detestable."(6)

Marcion ardently maintained the doctrine of the impurity of matter, and he carried it to its logical conclusion, both in speculation and practice. He, therefore, a.s.serting the incredibility of an incarnate G.o.d, denied the corporeal reality of the flesh of Christ. His body was a mere semblance and not of human substance, was not born of a human mother, and the divine nature was not degraded by contact with the flesh.(7) Marcion finds in Paul the purest promulgator of the truth as he understands it, and emboldened by the Epistle to the Galatians, in which that Apostle rebukes even Apostles for "not walking uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel," he accuses the other Apostles of having depraved the pure form of the Gospel doctrines delivered to them by

5 We give this quotation as a resume by an English historian and divine, but the idea of the "New Testament remodelled by Marcion," is a mere ecclesiastical imagination.

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Jesus,(1) "mixing up matters of the Law with the words of the Saviour."(2)

Tertullian reproaches Marcion with having written the work in which he details the contrasts between Judaism and Christianity, of which we have given the briefest sketch, as an introduction and encouragement to belief in his Gospel, which he ironically calls "the Gospel according to the Ant.i.theses;"(3) and the charge which the Fathers bring against Marcion is that he laid violent hands on the Canonical Gospel of Luke, and manipulated it to suit his own views. "For certainly the whole object at which he laboured in drawing up the 'Ant.i.theses.'" says Tertullian, "amounts to this: that he may prove a disagreement between the Old and New Testament, so that his own Christ may be separated from the Creator, as of another G.o.d, as alien from the Law and the Prophets.

For this purpose it is certain that he has erased whatever was contrary to his own opinion and in harmony with the Creator, as if interpolated by his partisans, but has retained everything consistent with his own opinion."(4) The whole hypothesis that Marcion's Gospel is a mutilated version of our third Synoptic in fact rested upon this accusation. It is obvious that if it cannot be shown that Marcion's Gospel was our Canonical Gospel merely garbled by the Heresiarch for dogmatic reasons in the interest of his system,--for there could not be any other conceivable

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reason for tampering with it,--the claim of Marcion's Gospel to the rank of a more original and authentic work than Luke's acquires double force.

We must, therefore, inquire into the character of the variations between the so-called heretical, and the Canonical Gospels, and see how far the hypothesis of the Fathers accord with the contents of Marcion's Gospel so far as we are acquainted with it.

At the very outset we are met by the singular phenomenon, that both Tertullian and Epiphanius, who accuse Marcion of omitting everything which was unfavourable, and retaining only what was favourable to his views, undertake to refute him out of what remains in his Gospel.

Tertullian says: "It will then be proved that he has shown the same defect of blindness of heresy both in that which he has erased and that which he has retained."(1) Epiphanius also confidently states that, out of that which Marcion has allowed to remain of the Gospel, he can prove his fraud and imposture, and thoroughly refute him.(2) Now if Marcion mutilated Luke to so little purpose as this, what was the use of his touching it at all? He is known as an able man, the most influential and distinguished of all the heretical leaders of the second century, and it seems unreasonable to suppose that, on the theory of his erasing or altering all that contradicted his system, he should have done his work so imperfectly.(3) The Fathers say that he endeavours to get rid of the contradictory pa.s.sages which remain by a system of false interpretation; but surely he would not have allowed himself to be driven

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to this extremity, leaving weapons in the hands of his opponents, when he might so easily have excised the obnoxious texts along with the rest?

It is admitted by critics, moreover, that pa.s.sages said to have been omitted by Marcion are often not opposed to his system at all, and sometimes, indeed, even in favour of it;(1) and on the other hand, that pa.s.sages which were retained are contradictory to his views.(2) This is not intelligible upon any theory of arbitrary garbling of a Gospel in the interest of a system.

It may be well to give a few instances of the anomalies presented, upon this hypothesis, by Marcion's text. Some critics believe that the verses Luke vii. 29--35, were wanting in Marcion's Gospel.(3) Hahn accounts for the omission of verses 29, 30, regarding the baptism of John, because they represented the relation of the Baptist to Jesus in a way which Marcion did not admit.(4) But as he allowed the preceding verses to remain, such a proceeding was absurd. In verse 26 he calls John a prophet, and much more than a prophet, and in the next verse (27) quotes respecting him the words of

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Malachi iii. 1: "This is he of whom it is written: Behold I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee." It is impossible on any reasonable ground to account for the retention of such honourable mention of the Baptist, if verses 29, 30 were erased for such dogmatic reasons.(1) Still more incomprehensible on such a hypothesis is the omission of Luke vii. 31--35, where that generation is likened unto children playing in the market-place and calling to each other: "We piped unto you and ye danced not," and Jesus continues: "For John is come neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil (34). The Son of Man is come, eating and drinking; and ye say: Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." Hahn attributes the omission of these verses to the sensuous representation they give of Jesus as eating and drinking.(2) What was the use of eliminating these verses when he allowed to remain unaltered verse 36 of the same chapter,(3) in which Jesus is invited to eat with the Pharisee, and goes into his house and sits down to meat? or v.

29--35,(4) in which Jesus accepts the feast of Levi, and defends his disciples for eating and drinking against the murmurs of the Scribes and Pharisees? or xv. 2,(5)

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where the Pharisees say of him: "This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them?" How absurdly futile the omission of the one pa.s.sage for dogmatic reasons, while so many others were allowed to remain unaltered.(1)

The next pa.s.sage to which we must refer is one of the most important in connection with Marcion's Docetic doctrine of the person of Jesus. It is said that he omitted viii. 19: "And his mother and his brethren came to him and could not come at him for the crowd," and that he inserted in verse 21, [------]; making the whole episode in his Gospel read (20): "And it was told him by certain which said: Thy mother and thy brethren stand without desiring to see thee: 21. But he answered and said unto them: Who are my mother and brethren? My mother and my brethren are these," &c. The omission of verse 19 is said to have been made because, according to Marcion, Christ was not born like an ordinary man, and consequently had neither mother nor brethren.(3) The mere fact, however, that Marcion retains verse 20, in which the crowd simply state as a matter fully recognized, the relations.h.i.+p of those who were seeking Jesus, renders the omission of the preceding verse useless,(4) except on the ground of mere redundancy.

Marcion is reported not to have had the word [------] in x. 25,(5) "so that the question of the lawyer simply ran: