Robert Eisler on Marcion as the Secretary of John the Evangelist

[From the Enigma of the Fourth Gospel ]
The most striking feature about Fortunatian's preface to the Fourth Gospel is the assertion - differing from the statement in the anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke - that John did not write his Gospel as he was supposed to have penned the Apocalypse, but dictated it to a secretary.

We have seen at the end of our chapter xxviii that this important fact must have been known to Irenaeus and before him to Papias, otherwise neither of the two could have believed for one moment that the two books, so different linguistically and stylistically were the work of one and the same author. It follows, that the prologue-writer's quotation from Papias does not end with the assertion that John's gospel was published during his lifetime, but extends at least over the sentence which tells the reader that the Evangelist had dictated the book to a clerical assistant. Being derived from Papias, who had known John, the information is prima facie worthy of the most serious consideration, much more so than the obviously baseless assertions of a certain Greek preface to Tetraevangel pretending for the transparent purpose of exaggerating the direct apostolic authority of the two subapostolic Gospels that Mark's and Luke's evangels had been 'dictated by St. Peter and St Paul' to these writers.

To offer some information about the secretary who took the author's dictation is in itself by no means an unusual or unheard of feature in Greek bio-bibliographical notices. The public seems to have manifested a certain interest in these humble collaborators of famous men, and critics have sometimes not refrained from circulating malicious stories about the more than clerical assistance given by the secretary to his master.

The vita Ciceronis would have recorded the help he received from his faithful clerk Tiro, even if it had not been written by this efficient secretary-stenographer of the great orator himself. We happen to know from Diogenes Laerte that the philosopher Lykon's secretary was a certain Chares. The anonymous Life of Euripides attached to the manuscript of his tragedies has a good deal to say about 'ink-blackened Kephisophon,' suspected of being more than a mere secretary, indeed an unavowed collaborator of the dramatist and a paramour of his wife. The philosopher Epicure throws it into the face of the famous and, in his later life, very rich and conceited sophist Protagoras, that he was once a humble secretary of the philosopher Democritus. The Rhapsodies of Orpheus the Divine - the theologos of the foremost Greek mystery-religion - were believed to have been dictated by the severed head of the martyred prophet to his disciple Musaeus.

In view of these and other parallels it is not all surprising that we should be told who it was that penned the Evangel dictated by John. But is it possible that the author of the Greek anti-Marcionite preface to John translated by Fortunatian can have read either in Papias' books or anywhere else that it was Papias himself who had been John's secretary? Yet this is what we find quite clearly and unambiguously stated both in the 'Lucinian' preface and - in Greek - in the prologue to a patristic chain-commentary on the Fourth Gospel, which Balthasar Cordier published in Antwerp in 1630 from a manuscript in possession of Queen Christina of Sweden, formerly in possession of Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus, written in the monastery of St. John Prodomos in Constantinople. This preface, too, said:

'As the last (of the Evangelists) ... at that time, when terrible heresies had developed, John dictated his Evangel to his disciple Papias.'

The parallelism of this text, not so much with Fortunatian's prologue mentioning only the one heretic Marcion as with the 'Lucinian' prologue, representing the Evangel as John's reply to the heresies of Cerinthus and the Ebionites, is quite unmistakable.

Ever since the main part of the 'Lucinian' prologue had been printed in Wordsworth and White's edition of the Latin New Testament, this statement - accepted as true by Zahn - was contemptuously disregarded as fantastic by the more critical theologians, in spite of the Greek text supporting it and although nobody has ever been able to explain how it could have originated and why anybody should have invented such a story.

For this sceptic attitude there was, indeed, a very good reason. Harnack was obviously right when he said 'Eusebius could hardly have omitted to quote these words, if had read them in Papias.'

This argument is irrefutable. It is absolutely impossible that Eusebius or Irenaeus read anywhere in Papias' five volumes anything suggesting that the author had written the Fourth Gospel under John's dictation. Had Eusebius found such an assertion in Papias, he could not possibly have been so blind as to say that Papias 'surely meant the Evangelist' where he speaks of the John, enumerated with 'James, Matthew and the other disciples of the Lord.' Having demonstrated on the basis of Papias' own words to his own and to his reader's satisfaction, that John had not known personally the Apostle John from among the Twelve, but had been a hearer of John the Zebedaid, the brother of James, but where he speaks of the Elder John - if he had found anywhere in Papias' books the plain statement that 'John dictated his Gospel to Papias'. If he had noticed such a most important assertion, he could not possibly have passed over in silence a passage, which gave the lie direct to his own words concerning the Apostle whom Papias believed to have written the Gospel of John, without exposing himself to the most crushing refutation.

Even if it were permissible to suppose the Eusebius chose to suppress a statement of Papias about the clerical assistance which the Hieropolitan had been privileged to render to his master John, because he wanted to belittle the simple-minded champion of primitive milleniarism, who on earth would be prepared to believe that Irenaeus, bent on emphasizing the close personal contact between the Evangelist John and his disciples Papias and Polycarp, could have failed to mention the proud claim of Papias to have been John's secretary, if such a claim had ever been made anywhere by the honest collector and interpreter of the Lord's sayings?

This is the reason why Bousset and others after him have branded the quotation from Papias in our preface as 'fraudulent.' They have not, however, been able to point out what conceivable purpose anybody could have hoped to attain by invoking the authority of Papias for an assertion, which the Hierapolitan exegete himself had never put forward. Moreover, it created a very serious chronological difficulty for all those who believed and taught on the basis of John xxi.24, that the Fourth Evangelist had been an eyewitness to the Crucifixion and a partaker of the Last Supper, not to speak of those who identified the Fourth Evangelist with John the son of Zebedee, martyred according to the same Papias, together with his brother James, long before the lifetime of this witness Papias known to have been a 'companion of Polycarp' (d. A.D. 156).

There is also a further point which militates against the supposition that anybody would have invented a statement of Papias to the effect that the Hieropolitan himself had been the scribe who took down the Fourth Gospel from John's dictation. A close comparison of the two different version of the anti-Marcionite preface to the Fourth Gospel on our Folder 1 or 3 shows that the longer version has been obliged, for a very cogent reason, to drop an essential feature of the shorter, namely, the statement that John dictated the Gospel 'correctly' (evangelium dictante iohanne recte). Seeing that Marcion had accused the Evangelists of having falsified the true Gospel of Jesus, it was clearly of the utmost importance to assert that 'John dictated the Gospel correctly.' This, however, could not be proved by appealing to the testimony of Papias, even if Papias had himself been the scribe who took down the text at John's dictation. All that the scribe could attest would be that John had dictated the Gospel to him and that he had taken it down correctly. He would not be in a position to say whether or not John had 'dictated correctly' the words which Jesus had actually uttered. If the scribe was only supposed to testify to his own painstaking care in 'writing exactly' what the Evangelist dictated, we should expect the preface to say: 'descripsit vero recte evangelium dictante iohanne' instead of our present 'descripsit vero evangelium dictante iohanne recte.'

Moreover, an assertion of this kind would have carried very little weight. For what could it matter whether or not the scribe had 'correctly written down' what John dictated, when the whole point at issue was whether or not John had 'dictated correctly' the evangel of Jesus? Besides, it stands to reason that the followers of Marcion would not have attached any great importance to the testimony of a scribe whom they would have naturally have suspected as an aider and abetter in the alleged crime of falsifying the authentic gospel of Jesus. In their eyes, such a witness would have deserved no more consideration than an unsupported statement of the accused in his own defense.

All that Papias could be expected to have witnessed was the identity of the author who had dictated the Fourth Gospel. He could testify that it was John and nobody else. That might have been useful evidence in the discussion against Epiphanius' Alogoi of Asia Minor or against the Roman presbyter Gaius who asserted that this Gospel had been written by the Gnostic Cerinthus. But Fortunatian's preface does not mention Cerinthus or Gaius or the Alogoi. It speaks of Marcion, who did not, as far as we know, deny that it was John who wrote the Gospel circulated under his name, but who did, on the contrary, accuse the evangelist John of having written yet falsified the evangel taught by Jesus.

The scribe of John, however, could not possibly know whether or not the Gospel dictated by John had correctly reproduced the sayings of Jesus. He could testify that he, the scribe, had taken down the dictation correctly (recte), but this would be utterly irrelevant from the point of view of the dispute between the Marcionite sect and the anti-Marcionite orthodox church.

Why then, should any anti-Marcionite preface-writer go to the trouble of inventing a testimonial which could not possibly help his cause, but could only create the obvious and serious chronological difficulties for the defender of the contested apostolic authority and authenticity of the Fourth Gospel which have shocked every modern interpreter of these lines?

All these arguments seem to make it extremely unlikely that Fortunatian's preface really meant to tell the reader that it was Papias who wrote the gospel of John under the direction of the Evangelist. As a matter of fact it does not say so directly. The sentence, 'Descriptsit vero evangelium dictante Johanne recte' has no subject, although it would have been so easy to say: 'Descripsit ipse' 'Descripsit iste' or 'ille evangelium dictante Johanne'. It is left to the reader to infer from the context who wrote what John dictated. The crucial phrase 'He wrote, however, the evangel, John dictating it correctly' appears to be one of those sentences which everyone happens to write occasionally only to find out afterward that some correction or addition is necessary to make it clear to the reader to whom the pronoun 'he' refers.

This correction has, indeed been applied to our clause by the editor, who expanded Fortunatian's preface before he inserted it into the Hispanic Bible-manuscripts.

There must have been good reason for altering.

Descripsit vero evangelium dictante Johanne recte

to

qui hoc evangelium Johanne sibi dictante conscripsit

It is plain that the editor who inserted the relative qui wanted to get rid, first of all, of the adversative conjunction vero, which he did not understand and which is, indeed, difficult to understand, although we can guess that the original writer wanted to say: 'the book was published in the author's lifetime, not by somebody else after his death. It is true (vero) that it was not written manu propria, but dictated to a secretary'.

He wanted further to delete the full stop dividing the subject-less sentence 'Descripsit vero ...' from the preceding mention of Papias, the author from whose book all this information is alleged to have been derived. By linking the clause with the preceding one, a subject is given to it which it did not have from the start. The question is, whether the corrector who tried to better what St. Jerome called Fortunatian's 'rustic style' did not make an egregarious mistake by removing the full stop before the sentence without subject and thus linking the phrase to what precedes, instead of cancelling the full stop at the end of the sentence after 'dictante Johanne recte' and joining the line to what follows.

If we have to agree with Harnack and Bousset and Walter Bauer that Papias cannot possibly have pretended to have been the scribe who wrote the Gospel of John under his dictation, the conclusion is simply that the editor who corrected and expanded Fortunatian's 'rustic speech' cannot have been right and that the whole trouble is somehow due to the punctuation of the text.

A corruption of that sort - suspected long ago, but unfortunately not emended with any plausibility by B.W. Bacon - is easy to heal. Even if there were no imperative material reasons for disregarding the cola et commata of our manuscripts, all the justification we need for this attitude could be found in Alcuin's letter to Charlesmagne explaining to the great king that 'although the divisions and subdivisions by punctuation may be a most beautiful ornament (!) of the sentences, their use has been almost entirely abandoned by the writers, because of their boorish lack of education'. This means that Visigothic and Merovingian scribes did not habitually use the signs introduced by the learned Greek grammarians and rhetoricians for the purpose of facilitating intelligent reading of the text was restored by Carolingian revisers, possibly after a punctuated model manuscript, which may have been considerably older.

The stops and full stops which one of them inserted into Fortunatian's sermo rusticus, written after the manner of his time without any division of the words, let along of the sentences, are no more binding upon the modern editor than his rather unfortunate correction 'id est in extremis' for the corrupt 'id est in extrenis', itself a transposition of 'in externis' or a misreading of 'in extraneis.' On the contrary, the only proper course to take is to print the text in undivided uncial capitals, as if we had the papyrus autograph of Fortunatian, and then divide it ourselves as to make sense of it:

EVANGELIUMJOANNISMANIFESTA
TUMETDATUMESTECCLESIISAIO
ANNEADHUCINCORPORECONSTITU
TOSICUTPAPIASHIERAPOLITANUS
DISCIPULUSIOANNISCARUSINEXE
GETICISQUINQELIBRISRETULIT
DESCRIPSITVEROEVANGELIUM
DICTANTEIOANNERECTEVERUM
MARCIONHERETICUSCUMABEO
FUISSETIMPROBATUSEOQUOD
CONTRARIASENTIEBATABIECTUS
ESTABIOANNEISVEROSCRIPTA
VELEPISTULASADEUMPERTULERAT
AFRATRIBUSQUIINPONTOFUERUNT

No modern epigraphist or papyrologist, unaware of or unconcerned about the peril of scandalizing our 'weaker brethren', would ever have divided the text as it has been done by the 'most holy and blessed' reviser, whom we shall introduce to our readers in the next chapter.

This text simply does not say that Papias was John's secretary. On the contrary, it say with perfect clearness why Marcion had to be mentioned in a preface to the Fourth Gospel.

Neither is this preface composed of two logically disconnected halves, nor does it quote from Papias what Irenaeus and Eusebius could not have omitted to reproduce had they found it in the five exegetical books of the Hieropolitan.

All these difficulties are entirely imaginary, purely caused by wrong punctuation, and disappears like last year's snow in the spring sun as soon as we read what Fortunatian meant to write:

Evangelium Iohannis manifestatum et datum
est ecclesiis ab Iohanne adhuc in corpore constituto
sicut Papias nomine hieropolitanus,
discipulus Iohannis carus
in exegeticis quinque libris retulit.
Descripsit vero evangelium, dictante Iohanne recte verum,
Marcion haereticus. Cum ab eo fuisset improbatus, eo quod
contario sentiebat, abiectus est ab Iohanne.
Is vero scripta vel epistulas ad eum
pertulerat a fratribus qui in Ponto fuerunt.

The Gospel of John was revealed and given
to the Churches by John whilst he was still alive in the body,
as Papias, called the Hieropolitan,
the beloved disciple of John,
has reported in his five books of 'Exegetics'.
But (he who) wrote down the Gospel, John dictating correctly the true (evangel) (was)
Marcion the heretic. Having been disapproved by him for
holding contrary views, he was expelled by John.
He had, however, brought him writings, or letters,
from the brethren who were in the Pontus.

It is by an exceptional piece of good luck that we seem to know even the name of the corrector who placed the full stop in the middle of Fortunatian's preface into the wrong line. In the Codex Latinus Monacensis 6212 (N) - one of the two MSS which contain the summaries by Fortunatian and all the three earliest Latin Gospel prologues, among them the preface to John in the older and shorter form - the following note is to be found at the top of the prologue to Luke (f, 40):

Evangelium secundum Marcum explicit. Incipit secundum Lucam.
Precipiente sanctissimo ac beatissimo Ecclesio preposito meo ego Patricius, licet indignus, Christi famulus, emendavi et distinxi

End of the Gospel of Marc. Beginning of the Gospel of Luke
According to the instructions of my most holy and blessed provost Ecclesius, I Patricius, albeit an unworthy servant of Christ emended and punctuated (this).

'The name Pratricius,' says Dom de Bruyne, 'is not rare and cannot offer us any guidance. But who is this praepositus Ecclesius?'

The question to which even Dom de Bruyne could not suggest a reply, has just been answered by the erudition of Dr Bernhard Bischof, discussing the problem with Dom Germain Morin, who kindly called my attention to a 'Patricius presbyter' going to Rome at the head of the clergy of Ravenna together with their Archbishop Ecclesius (d. July 22, 532) in order to defend him against the accusation of the discontented among his flock (Monumenta Germaniae, Scriptores Rerum Langobardorum p. 321, 15).

The connexion of the two names - one of them so rare - in this passage and in the above-quoted note cannot possibly be a mere coincidence. There is no doubt, that the presbyter Patricius of Ravenna, acting under the instructions of Archbishop Ecclesius of Ravenna, is the man who punctuated the Ravenna manuscript of the African text of the Latin New Testament to which the African summaries discovered by Dom de Bruyne in Codex Latinus Monacensis 6212 and in the Barnerinus Vaticanus 637 were prefixed.

The title sanctissimus et beatissimus, from which the present writer concluded in 1930 that the 'most holy and blessed provost' had died when Patricius, complying with his instructions, revised and punctuated the parent manuscript the parent manuscript of C.L.M. 6212, is nothing but an example of 'Byzantinism' such as one would expect in Ravenna. Dom Germain Morin refers me to the record of a donation made by a Gothic lady Hildevara, during the lifetime of Ecclesius had not even ascended the episcopal throne of Ravenna, but was still a mere praepositus of the church or convent of which Patricius was a presbyter, when the latter revised the manuscript in question under his instructions.

This copy had no punctuation and needed emendation rather badly - as we could see from the corruption of in exegeticis to in exotericis and even of the gloss in externis to in extrenis and finally to in extremis. This corruption - which proves that the Ravenna manuscript, corrected by Patricius under the reign of Theoderic the Great, the king of the Ostrogots, was at least four stages removed from the original text of Fortunatian (c. A.D. 313) - occurs in exactly the same form also in the Spanish so-called Visigothic Bibles.

If we suppose that Fortunatian the African brought his African text of the Tetraevangel with his Breves - prefaces and summaries - prefixed to it to Italy, when he became patriarch of Aquileia; that the Church of Ravenna got a copy of this edition from Aquileia and that the subsequent corruptions of the text of the preface to John happened in Ravenna, we should have to conclude that the expanded version of the so-called anti-Marcionite prefaces found in the Spanish so-called Visigothic Bibles, which show the same corruption 'exotoricis, id est in extremis' as the Munich C.L.M 6212 derived from a Ravenna parent MS and which interpret Fortunatian's text in the same way as Patricius punctuated it, so as to put the orthodox Papias into the place of John's secretary from which the heretic is ousted, came to Spain from Italy via southern France. As a matter of fact, the expanded form of the prologues is found in a French manuscript (Perpignan I, saec. XII) and in two Italian ones (Vatic. 6083, saec. XI, our Pls. IVf. and Vatic. I, saec. XV). But they are decidedly younger than the Spanish Bibles, the oldest of which - the famous Toletanus of Sevilla - is an 8th century codex.

Therefore, Dom de Bruyne, very plausibly, considered the French and the Italian copies of this type to be dependent on a Spanish archetype, not vice versa.

If this is the case we must suppose that the Church of Ravenna did not obtain its African text of the Latin New Testament from Aquileia and that the above-mentioned characteristic corruption did not occur in Italy, but already in Africa, before the edition with Fortunatian's Breves prefixed to it was imported into Spain and into Italy.

Anyhow, the reverend Patricius was a rather indifferent corrector, and certainly a very poor Greek scholar, since the Monacensis 6212 has the worst form of this corruption 'in exotoricis' which could easily have been emended 'in exotericis.'

As to his punctuation, it was actuated in the crucial line discussed above (p. 154 ff.) not so much by an impartial desire to find out the real meaning of the sentence, as by a conscious anxiety to hide or a subconscious reluctance to admit such an embarrassing fact as the unfortunate secretarial collaboration of the heretic Marcion with the Fourth Evangelist.

But we must not criticize Patricius of Ravenna too severely. If the Spanish manuscripts are independent of the Ravenna copy, the same interpretation of Fortunatian's text to which he gave expression by inserting that fatal full stop in the wrong place was put upon the admittedly difficult text by the Hispanic author of the expanded version who altered the text instead of merely punctuating it.

In any case, it is certain that St. Jerome, who knew and used Fortunatian's Breves, who calls Papias 'a hearer of John' (Johannis auditor) and who would have been only too pleased to repeat the story of the Hieropolitan 'bishop' having taken John's dictation, did not understand the text as it was punctuated by Patricius of Ravenna or as it was 'interpreted' by the editor of the 'Lucinian' text of the Vulgate New Testament in Spain. [Robert Eisler, The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel p. 149 - 160]

[I will transcribe the next chapter in Eisler tomorrow; if I don't spend some time with my wife she will surely divorce me]