The Ending of the Marcionite Gospel, the Short Ending of Mark and Clement's Letter to Theodore

The point of these last hundred posts is to demonstrate that it is not exactly true when critics of Morton Smith's discovery imply that the idea of an openly promulgated 'shortened' gospel and a secret/private 'full' gospel written by someone named 'Mark' are without precedent in early Christianity.  These people simply don't know how to look at the Patristic evidence with a critical eye. 

However as a life long 'Marcionitist' it is also fair to say that there has long been an equally reckless tendency among fellow Marcionitists.  We have tended to react rather unreasonably to those same early reports regarding Marcion's cutting of a pro-evangelium. 

It makes so sense that Irenaeus would simply invent a story that Marcion cut an early gospel.  If Irenaeus was involved in the reshaping of our New Testament canon (something of which I am absolutely convinced) there would simply be no reason for him to have invented a story about Marcionite shortening a gospel.  It must have been pre-existent and merely manipulated and transformed by Irenaeus into our present 'shortening of Luke' story. 

What was the original story?  Clearly it was something like what we read in to Theodore.  As Irenaeus admits 'other' Marcionites were attached to a version of Mark which emphasized as its most important periscope a scene where Jesus was crucified and 'Christ' eyewitnesses the Passion 'impassibly' (Irenaeus Against Heresies 3.11.7)  We can also infer from von Harnack's treatment of Epiphanius's report of a Marcionite interest in Mark 10.38 - 41 (Panarion 42.3.9) that it was from this gospel that Marcionites understood that their apostle ended up enthroned beside Christ and again it was from this gospel that they learned that their apostle was the announced Paraclete (Origen Homily on Luke 24).

So it is that if we start to think about it just as the shortened 'public' Marcionite gospel was about 'Jesus and him crucified' (1 Cor 2.2), there was necessarily 'another gospel' (Gal 1.6) for which the perfect were called.  A 'secret wisdom' (1 Cor 2.6,7) which necessarily revealed what happened after the crucifixion.  I strongly suspect that this paradigm established from the Apostolikon itself is the origin of the short and long endings of Mark. 

When you really think about it 1 Cor 2.2 explains why it was that a gospel would end just before the resurrection.  In other words, the justification must ultimately have been - the apostle established it as such.  Mark is the only gospel which fits the words 'I determined to have nothing known among you except Jesus and Him crucified.'  In the short ending of Mark Jesus's last act is to die on the cross. The narrative ends with the discovery of the empty tomb. 

Yet at the same time it is equally apparent that Clement's wording seems to suggest the same thing with regards to the gospel that Mark wrote while Peter was preaching in Rome.  We hear Clement say in to Theodore that Mark "wrote an account of the acts of the Lord, not, however, declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting what he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed."  This description of this shorter gospel as "an account of the acts of the Lord" roughly fits a narrative which ends at Mark 16.9.

One would think of course that this should run us into some difficulties with trying to square this gospel descirbed in to Theodore and 1 Cor 2.2 with that gospel Marcion is reported to have 'shortened' in Tertullian's Against Marcion.  Luke after all has a lot of information about what happened to Jesus after his crucifixion.  Yet it is quite interesting to learn that Tertullian's account of what appears in the short Marcionite gospel devotes only its last chapter to Luke chapters 23 and 24 - and most amazing of all - what Tertullian ends up telling us are the final words of the 'shortened' Marcionite gospel seem eerily similar to Mk 16.1 - 9 albeit with obvious docetic twist. 

With regards to Tertullian's record of the many things Marcion 'erased' from the gospel his last recorded statement in this regard appears in the second last chapter of Against Marcion Book Four where we read:

Then Barabbas, the most abandoned criminal, is released, as if he were the innocent man; while the most righteous Christ is delivered to be put to death, as if he were the murderer. (Luke 23:25) Moreover two malefactors are crucified around Him, in order that He might be reckoned among the transgressors. Although His raiment was, without doubt, parted among the soldiers, and partly distributed by lot, (Luke 23.34) yet Marcion has cut it all (from his Gospel), for he had his eye upon the Psalm: They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture. You may as well take away the cross itself! But even then the Psalm is not silent concerning it: They pierced my hands and my feet. Indeed, the details of the whole event are therein read: Dogs compassed me about; the assembly of the wicked enclosed me around. All that looked upon me laughed me to scorn; they did shoot out their lips and shake their heads, (saying,) He hoped in God, let Him deliver Him.   Of what use now is (your tampering with) the testimony of His garments? If you take it as a booty for your false Christ, still all the Psalm (compensates) the vesture of Christ. But, behold, the very elements are shaken. For their Lord was suffering. If, however, it was their enemy to whom all this injury was done, the heaven would have gleamed with light, the sun would have been even more radiant, and the day would have prolonged its course (Joshua 10:13) — gladly gazing at Marcion's Christ suspended on his gibbet! [Tertullian Against Marcion 42]

So this is the last time Tertullian ever specifically identifies Marcion as removing something from the gospel.  Yet it is certainly not the last difference between the Marcionite text and our canonical Luke.  This only represents last overt mention of how the two texts differed from one another.

Of course what often gets overlooked in these discussions is that some early manuscripts do not contain Luke 23.34.  In other words, the likelihood here is that someone added the material rather than Marcion erased it.  Yet let us move on and note the second last explicit acknowledgement of shared references in the Marcionite gospel and Luke.  It comes at the end of the same chapter where Tertullian notes:

He (Jesus) calls with a loud voice to the Father, Into Your hands I commend my spirit, that even when dying He might expend His last breath in fulfilling the prophets. Having said this, He gave up the ghost. [Luke 23:46] Who? Did the spirit give itself up; or the flesh the spirit? But the spirit could not have breathed itself out. That which breathes is one thing, that which is breathed is another. If the spirit is breathed it must needs be breathed by another. If, however, there had been nothing there but spirit, it would be said to have departed rather than expired. What, however, breathes out spirit but the flesh, which both breathes the spirit while it has it, and breathes it out when it loses it? Indeed, if it was not flesh (upon the cross), but a phantom of flesh (and a phantom is but spirit, and so the spirit breathed its own self out, and departed as it did so), no doubt the phantom departed, when the spirit which was the phantom departed: and so the phantom and the spirit disappeared together, and were nowhere to be seen. Nothing therefore remained upon the cross, nothing hung there, after the giving up of the ghost; there was nothing to beg of Pilate, nothing to take down from the cross, nothing to wrap in the linen, nothing to lay in the new sepulchre. Still it was not nothing that was there. What was there, then? If a phantom Christ was yet there. If Christ had departed, He had taken away the phantom also. The only shift left to the impudence of the heretics, is to admit that what remained there was the phantom of a phantom! [ibid Against Marcion 42]

The point of course is that it is impossible for us to get a precise understanding of what exactly was in the Marcionite gospel.  Those who have attempted to sort this out have ultimately misled those who accepted their interpretation because it is simply impossible to distinguish between Tertullian's overlaying of what appeared in his gospel of Luke with that which the earlier commentators witnessed was in the Marcionite text.

To this end we have to be careful not to overstep our bounds.  All that we can do is note that few passages that Tertullian actually says were preserved in some form in the Marcionite gospel and attempt to make sense of what this might imply about the text.  To this end, while the final chapter - chapter 43 - of Book Four of Against Marcion begins with the acknowledgement of "the women who resorted before day-break to the sepulchre with the spices which they had prepared" (Mark 16.1; Luke 24:1) and them not finding the body (Mark 16.5, Luke 24.3)  Now Tertullian certainly goes on to go through the material which appears in Luke 24 in what follows, however it is important to note that not once does he say that any of it appeared in the Marcionite gospel.  He is in a sense talking to himself, reinforcing that what appeared in Luke is developed in concert with the Jewish prophets.  

Tertullian literally goes line by line from Luke 24.4 in which follows in Against Marcion chapter 43, totally ignoring the Marcionite gospel - all the way down to Luke 24.25.  Then suddenly the narrative does back to the account of the women in the tomb as if rejoining Tertullian's original source:

Remember how He spoke unto you when He was yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of man must be delivered up, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. [Luke 24:6-7] Must be delivered up; and why, except that it was so written by God the Creator? He therefore upbraided them, because they were offended solely at His passion, and because they doubted of the truth of the resurrection which had been reported to them by the women, whereby (they showed that) they had not believed Him to have been the very same as they had thought Him to be. Wishing, therefore, to be believed by them in this wise, He declared Himself to be just what they had deemed Him to be— the Creator's Christ, the Redeemer of Israel. But as touching the reality of His body, what can be plainer? When they were doubting whether He were not a phantom— nay, were supposing that He was one— He says to them, Why are you troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; for a spirit has not bones, as you see me have. [Luke 24:37-39] Now Marcion was unwilling to expunge from his Gospel some statements which even made against him— I suspect, on purpose, to have it in his power from the passages which he did not suppress, when he could have done so, either to deny that he had expunged anything, or else to justify his suppressions, if he made any. But he spares only such passages as he can subvert quite as well by explaining them away as by expunging them from the text. Thus, in the passage before us, he would have the words, A spirit has not bones, as you see me have, so transposed, as to mean, A spirit, such as you see me to be, has not bones; that is to say, it is not the nature of a spirit to have bones. [ibid Against Marcion 43]

It is of course the lazy approach to reading the anti-Marcionite literature just to assume that Tertullian's obvious overlay over the original material 'must' be present in the Marcionite gospel.  This is impossible.  It defies logic and the fact that we hear that the only passage which is 'retained' by Marcionite is what appears here at the end. 

The idea that the Marcionites - who had such hostility and bitterness toward Peter - would have constructed a narrative where the women enter an empty tomb and are apparently not deemed worthy of Jesus's testimony that he has been resurrected but that Peter and the disciples were ultimately deemed worthy of that pronoucement is utterly incredible.  This is the way Catholics constructed the narrative, refashioning and reshaping an original Marcionite narrative where the women are deemed worthy of receiving this testimony.  The way the original material is still preserved in Tertullian's account makes clear that very clear. 

Indeed if we go back to Celsus - a writer whose work demonstrates an intimate familiarity with the Marcionite tradition - we see that he knew that the dominant gospel tradition of his day had Mary as the witness to Luke 24.36, 37.  After scoffing at the notion that "Jesus foretold that after His death He would rise again" Celsus adds "Come now, let us grant to you that the prediction was actually uttered. Yet how many others are there who practise such juggling tricks, in order to deceive their simple hearers, and who make gain by their deception"and then references what can only be the Marcionite gospel:

do you imagine the statements of others not only to be myths, but to have the appearance of such, while you have discovered a becoming and credible termination to your drama in the voice from the cross, when he breathed his last, and in the earthquake and the darkness? That while alive he was of no assistance to himself, but that when dead he rose again, and showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands were pierced with nails: who beheld this? A half-frantic woman, as you state, and some other one, perhaps, of those who were engaged in the same system of delusion, who had either dreamed so, owing to a peculiar state of mind, or under the influence of a wandering imagination bad formed to himself an appearance according to his own wishes, which has been the case with numberless individuals [Origen Contra Celsus 2.54,55]

The point then is our reconstruction of the ending of the short 'public' gospel of the Marcionite gospel already bears a striking resemblance to the short ending of Mark.  The narrative ends with 'Christ' demonstrating that he has returned from the dead with marks on his hands and feet (I will avoid delving into the mystical meaning here). 

When we look back at the short ending of Mark - and all other canonical gospel conclusions for that matter - it becomes very apparent that it is little more than an attempt to distract from the obvious implications of the original Marcionite narrative.  As we noted, Jesus no longer speaks to Mark directly and he is made to reveal himself to the 'true head' of the Church - Peter.  The Ignatian Letter to the Smyrnaeans have an even more pronounced version of the formulation.  But the point is that they are all deliberate manipulations of an original revelation to Mary.  The Marcionites had to the original version and the Catholic canonical texts go out of their way to force Peter into the equation.  

NOTE - Origen tells us in no uncertain terms that Celsus identifies 'Mary Magdalene' as the half-frantic woman to whom Christ first showed his stigmata "speaking next of the statements in the Gospels, that after His resurrection He showed the marks of His punishment, and how His hands had been pierced, he asks, "Who beheld this?' And discrediting the narrative of Mary Magdalene, who is related to have seen Him, he replies, 'A half-frantic woman, as ye state.' And because she is not the only one who is recorded to have seen the Saviour after His resurrection, but others also are mentioned, this Jew of Celsus calumniates these statements also in adding, 'And some one else of those engaged in the same system of deception!'" [Origen Contra Celsum 59]

Origen interestingly goes on to cite the familiar narrative of Jesus having to show Thomas his stigmata but interestingly never argues that Celsus made a mistake citing a parallel witness to Mary.  This means it must have existed and more importantly Origen was aware of it but avoids saying in which gospel this is found.