Every sentence, indeed the whole structure, arising from Marcion's impiety and profanity, I now challenge in terms of that gospel which he has by manipulation made his own. Besides that, to work up credence for it he has contrived a sort of dowry, a work entitled Antitheses because of its juxtaposition of opposites, a work strained into making such a division between the Law and the Gospel as thereby to make two separate gods, opposite to each other, one belonging to one instrument (or, as it is more usual to say, testament), one to the other, and thus lend its patronage to faith in another gospel, that according to the Antitheses. Now I might have demolished those antitheses by a specially directed hand-to-hand attack, taking each of the statements of the man of Pontus one by one, except that it was much more convenient to refute them both in and along with that gospel which they serve: although it is perfectly easy to take action against them by counter-claim,1 even accepting them as admissible, accounting them valid, and alleging that they support my argument, that so they may be put to shame for the blindness of their author, having now become my antitheses against Marcion. [Tertullian Against Marcion 4.1]
I don't know about the rest of you, but when I read this account I am not very optimistic that what follows is actually a work by someone who actually has Marcion's gospel in front of him. Yes, the first sentence makes reference to the text (in a vague sense) but what follows seems to indicate that he is working instead from some sort of 'cheat sheet' of Marcionite contentions developed from a sectarian work called 'the Antitheses.'
Now Schmid is the best scholar ever to take on the Marcionite problem. The structure of the Antitheses was a list of theses in the technical sense of the term, that is, terse single statements each serving as the heading of a reasoned development of an argument. The details and subtleties would follow the headings. Treating the headings as statements meant to be adequate on their own shows ignorance of an important ancient method of composition. The theses or headings are in fact not understandable without the development, and not meant to be understandable on their own. It seems that neither Epiphanius nor Tertullian had ever seen the booklet, only the table of contents, that is, the list of Antitheses.
So if this is the extent of Tertullian's knowledge of Marcion's gospel - how much better should we expect from his 'study' of the Apostolikon? This is where I start to blow my stack. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever from Book Five to suggest that Tertullian ever saw anything resembling the Marcionite New Testament canon. Nothing. So how is it possible that what Tertullian or Epiphanius says or implies about the Marcionite canon is an accurate reflection of the contents of the text?
Epiphanius is hopelessly inept at the best of times. This is clearest when we know his sources and we see how he butchers them or gets the information completely wrong. There certainly is a relationship between his Marcionite source and Tertullian's. I happen to think that he has something related to the Greek original behind Against Marcion Books Four and Five. Yet he has again completely misunderstood his source material and identifies 'Marcionite readings' which simply don't exist. They are implied in the sense that the original author of this material (Irenaeus?) brings forward strange readings of the Pauline letters and proceeds to demonstrate that they can only be interpreted in the Catholic manner. Yet we see Tertullian that we can't simply assume that these were the Marcionite readings. Epiphanius does of course, but Epiphanius is a fool.
Now let's see if there is anything at all in the first chapter of Tertullian's Book Five of Against Marcion which would suggest that Tertullian (or his source) had first hand knowledge of the Marcionite collection of the Pauline letters. I have cited the whole chapter to make my point absolutely explicit:
Nothing is without an origin except God alone. In as much as of all things as they exist the origin comes first, so must it of necessity come first in the discussion of them. Only so can there be agreement about what they are: for it is impossible for you to discern what the quality of a thing is unless you are first assured whether itself exists: and you can only know that by knowing where it comes from. As then I have now in the ordering of my treatise reached this part of the subject, I desire to hear from Marcion the origin of Paul the apostle (emphasis mine). I am a sort of new disciple, having had instruction from no other teacher. For the moment my only belief is that nothing ought to be believed with- out good reason, and that that is believed without good reason which is believed without knowledge of its origin: and I must with the best of reasons approach this inquiry with uneasiness when I find one affirmed to be an apostle, of whom in the list of the apostles in the gospel I find no trace. So when I am told that he was subsequently promoted by our Lord, by now at rest in heaven, I find some lack of foresight in the fact that Christ did not know beforehand that he would have need of him, but after setting in order the office of apostleship and sending them out upon their duties, considered it necessary, on an impulse and not by deliberation, to add another, by compulsion so to speak and not by design. So then, shipmaster out of Pontus, supposing you have never accepted into your craft any smuggled or illicit merchandise, have never appropriated or adulterated any cargo, and in the things of God are even more careful and trustworthy, will you please tell us under what bill of lading you accepted Paul as apostle, who had stamped him with that mark of distinction, who commended him to you, and who put him in your charge? Only so may you with confidence disembark him: only so can he avoid being proved to belong to him who has put in evidence all the documents that attest his apostleship. He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ. Clearly any man can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person's attestation. One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both claimant and witness. Besides this, you have found it written that many will come and say, I am Christ. If there is one that makes a false claim to be Christ, much more can there be one who professes that he is an apostle of Christ. Thus far my converse has been in the guise of a disciple and an inquirer: from now on I propose to shatter your confidence, for you have no means of proving its validity, and to shame your presumption, since you make claims but reject the means of establishing them. Let Christ, let the apostle, belong to your other god: yet you have no proof of it except from the Creator's archives. Even Genesis long ago promised Paul to me. Among those figures and prophetical bless- ings over his sons, when Jacob had got to Benjamin he said, Benjamin is a ravening wolf: until morning he will still devour, and in the evening will distribute food.c He foresaw that Paul would arise of the tribe of Benjamin, a ravening wolf devouring until the morning, that is, one who in his early life would harass the Lord's flock as a persecutor of the churches, and then at evening would distribute food, that is, in declining age would feed Christ's sheep as the doctor of the gentiles. Also the harshness at first of Saul's pursuit of David, and afterwards his repentance and contentment on receiving good for evil,d had nothing else in view except Paul in Saul according to tribal descent, and Jesus in David by the Virgin's descent from him. If these figurative mysteries do not please you, certainly the Acts of the Apostles have handed down to me this history of Paul, nor can you deny it. From them I prove that the persecutor became an apostle, not from men, nor by a man: from them I am led even to believe him: by their means I dislodge you from your claim to him, and have no fear of you when you ask, And do you then deny that Paul is an apostle? I speak no evil against him whom I retain for myself. If I deny, it is to force you to prove. If I deny, it is to enforce my claim that he is mine. Otherwise, if you have your eye on our belief, accept the evidence on which it depends. If you challenge us to adopt yours, tell us the facts on which it is founded. Either prove that the things you believe really are so: or else, if you have no proof, how can you believe? Or who are you, to believe in despite of him from whom alone there is proof of what you believe? So then accept the apostle on my evidence, as as you do Christ: he is my apostle, as also Christ is mine. Here too our contest shall take place on the same front: my chal- lenge shall be issued from the same stance, of a case already proven: which is, that an apostle whom you deny to be the Creator's, whom in fact you represent as hostile to the Creator, has no right to teach anything, to think anything, to intend anything, which accords with the Creator, but must from the outset proclaim his other god with no less confidence than that with which he has broken loose from the Creator's law. For it is not likely that in di- verging from Judaism he did not at the same time make it clear into which god's faith he was diverging: because it would be impos- sible for anyone to pass over from the Creator, without knowing to whom his transit was expected to lead. Now if Christ had already revealed that other god, the apostle's attestation had to follow: else he would not have been taken for the apostle of the god whom Christ had revealed, and indeed it was not permissible for a god already revealed by Christ to be kept hidden from the apostle. Or if Christ had made no such revelation about that god, there was the greater need for his being revealed by the apostle: for there was now no possibility of his being revealed by any other, and without question there could be no belief in him if not even an apostle revealed him. Such is my preliminary argument. From now on I claim I shall prove that no other god was the subject of the apostle's profession, on the same terms as I have proved this of Christ: and my evidence will be Paul's epistles. That these have suffered mutilation even in number, the precedent of that gospel, which is now the heretic's, must have prepared us to expect [Tertullian Against Marcion 5:1]
The reason I cite the whole section is because it completely demolishes the whole notion that Tertullian or his source were ever engaging in anything resembling 'textual criticism' of the Marcionite Apostolikon or for that matter had a copy of the Apostolikon before them. I would argue instead that the last section makes clear what actually follows - i.e. that Tertullian (or his source) is simply using the scriptures that are available to him to demonstrate that the Marcionite interpretation of the Apostolikon is garbage. That's it. Nothing more nothing less.
Yes to be sure there are a handful of moments during the course of the discussion where the author claims to know features of the Marcionite version of the Letters of Paul. Let's assume for arguments sake (and to avoid getting bogged down in another difficulty) that this information is generally accurate. Perhaps the Antitheses make reference to these 'features' of the Marcionite recension. How on earth can we now engage in serious 'textual criticism' from a fourth generation Latin copy of a text originally written in Greek or Syriac and hope to 'reconstruct' the Marcionite Apostolikon from this? It's ludicrous. But this nonsense gets taken seriously.
Now everyone takes seriously the Schmid's and Clabeaux's hopeless reconstruction of what amounts to literary garbage (i.e. Tertullian and Epiphanius). Yet when I 'speculate' about the above cited passage this is not taken seriously. Why so? Because I don't have the formal structure that Schmid and Clabeaux do. Yet this methodology is a distraction from the fact that the assumption are completely idiotic. It would be like developing all sorts of graphs and charts to prove that douching with Coca Cola can prevent pregnancies. The only difference of course is that the effectiveness of Coca Cola as a means of birth control can be tested where as the Marcionite Apostolikon is lost. As a result all sorts of people can write all sorts of stupid things but as long as their investigations 'appear' structured then people take them seriously.
Yet this outlook is necessarily prejudiced against skepticism. The people trying to prove something will always win out against those who think that no knowledge is possible or at least is very limited. No one will write a paper on the fact that there are no green men on Mars. But if Mars should suddenly explode tomorrow and if astronomy was so totally divorced from science as religious studies have been for the last two thousand years one could conceivably publish a PhD thesis on possible reasons for believing that there were at one time green men on Mars based on popular speculation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In any event without further apology (for at least I am not presenting garbage as something to develop a foundation for our knowledge of the Marcionite tradition) here is what I notice about the first chapter in Book Five. I notice that the first half of the discussion seems to be moving in one direction until suddenly a later editor transforms the material. Let me show you what I mean. The text actually begins as a study of what we would identify as the first line in the letter to the Galatians. Indeed it begins with the original author questioning the Marcionite assumptions about their beloved apostle:
Nothing is without an origin except God alone. In as much as of all things as they exist the origin comes first, so must it of necessity come first in the discussion of them. Only so can there be agreement about what they are: for it is impossible for you to discern what the quality of a thing is unless you are first assured whether itself exists: and you can only know that by knowing where it comes from. As then I have now in the ordering of my treatise reached this part of the subject, I desire to hear from Marcion the origin of Paul the apostle (emphasis mine). I am a sort of new disciple, having had instruction from no other teacher. For the moment my only belief is that nothing ought to be believed with- out good reason, and that that is believed without good reason which is believed without knowledge of its origin: and I must with the best of reasons approach this inquiry with uneasiness when I find one affirmed to be an apostle, of whom in the list of the apostles in the gospel I find no trace. So when I am told that he was subsequently promoted by our Lord, by now at rest in heaven, I find some lack of foresight in the fact that Christ did not know beforehand that he would have need of him, but after setting in order the office of apostleship and sending them out upon their duties, considered it necessary, on an impulse and not by deliberation, to add another, by compulsion so to speak and not by design. So then, shipmaster out of Pontus, supposing you have never accepted into your craft any smuggled or illicit merchandise, have never appropriated or adulterated any cargo, and in the things of God are even more careful and trustworthy, will you please tell us under what bill of lading you accepted Paul as apostle, who had stamped him with that mark of distinction, who commended him to you, and who put him in your charge? Only so may you with confidence disembark him: only so can he avoid being proved to belong to him who has put in evidence all the documents that attest his apostleship. He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ. Clearly any man can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person's attestation. One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both claimant and witness. Besides this, you have found it written that many will come and say, I am Christ. If there is one that makes a false claim to be Christ, much more can there be one who professes that he is an apostle of Christ.
It is at this point that "Galatians 1:1" is brought up and we might expect a line by line discussion of Galatians to immediately follow but instead the discussion goes completely off topic and the question of whether the Marcionites accept the Catholic persona of 'Paul, the repentant persecutor of Christians' is brought up. All that follows is of a completely different character and I think was introduced as a way of reconstructing the original text.
If you just read up to this point in the narrative you might even think that 'Tertullian' denies that Paul is an apostle. We are reassured by all that follows and quickly forget that Galatians 1:1 is cited here and then when we get to the next chapter Tertullian has already moved passed the superscription into the main body of the Letter to the Galatians. This is all the more unusual when we notice that once the discussion of the Letter to the Galatians ends and we move to a discussion of the next letter in the Old Syriac canon - i.e. 1 Corinthians - the narrative actually moves back to the introductory remarks about Galatians 1:1:
My introduction to the previous epistle led me away from discussion of its superscription: for I was sure it could be discussed in some other connection, it being his usual one, the same in all his epistles. I pass over the fact that he does not begin by wishing health to those to whom he writes, but grace and peace. What had he still to do with Jewish custom, if he was the destroyer of Judaism? [Tertullian Against Marcion 5:2]
This is by far one of the strangest features of the whole of Book Five and it doesn't even get mentioned by Clabeaux or Schmid. The whole question of the identity of the apostle only makes sense if the first letter of the Marcionite canon is all about the Marcionite apostle. Yet Clabeaux and Schmid essentially assume that the Marcionite version of Galatians was pretty much consistent with the Catholic text. So why does Tertullian choose to open the whole of Book Five with a citation from the first epistle of the Marcionite canon and the idea that the question of who the apostle was is unanswered from their epistle? The answer has to be that the identity of Paul was very much in doubt from the first Marcionite epistle. This has to be the answer and I don't care what protests these systematizers might come up with. It doesn't make sense that Against Marcion should introduce us with the idea of an 'unknown Paul' in the Marcionite canon.
Indeed this is one of the most curious features of Schmid's reconstruction of the Marcionite epistle to the Galatians that even Quispel picks up on. The text of Against Marcion actually emphasizes Petrine primacy in Galatians chapter 2 changing the order of the list of disciples from James first to Peter first. Is this really a feature of the Marcionite canon or the person 'reporting the news' for us (i.e. the unnamed original author of the text behind Tertullian's Latin translation of Against Marcion Books Four and Five? The answer has to be the latter and thus the whole house of cards that Schmid constructs for us falls down on itself.
But more about this later. For the moment I want to move on to another comment that Quispel makes which demonstrates that he isn't too imaginative either. For if we go back to Tertullian's original citation of Galatians 1:1 in the first chapter of Against Marcion it is incomplete. He says of Paul again that:
He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ. Clearly any man can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person's attestation. One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both claimant and witness. Besides this, you have found it written that many will come and say, I am Christ. If there is one that makes a false claim to be Christ, much more can there be one who professes that he is an apostle of Christ.
There is something obviously missing from the citation when we look at the received text which reads:
Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead
Now let's take this step by step. Tertullian (or his source) cuts off the citation at 'Jesus Christ' so we don't hear anything about
... God the Father, who raised him from the dead
Of course all of this might seem innocent if it weren't for the fact that Quispel reminds us that we know from Origen (via a Latin translation of Jerome) what the original Marcionite reading of the first line in Galatians looked like. Yet this is where the problems again start for Schmid's thesis that Tertullian is an 'honest witness' about the Marcionite canon.
We pick up our citation of Quispel's work from our last post where he notes that there might be problems with Clabeaux and Schmid's thesis that the epistles used by the Marcionite were basically the same as those used in the Roman Church in the second century. For Quispel notes:
Tertullian does not mention any variant of Marcion's text in Gala- tians 1:1: “Paul, an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father (καὶ θεοῦ πατρός), who raised him from the dead.
However, in his Commentary on Galatians, Jerome writes: sciendum quoque in Marcionis apostolo non esse scriptum “et per deum patrem” volentis exponere Christum non a deo patre sed per semetipsum suscitatum. (In Gal., ad loc)
One should know that in the Pauline corpus of Marcion the words “and through God the Father” have not been written, because he wanted to stress his point that Christ has not been raised by God the Father, but arose spontaneously through his own strength. This is a very trustworthy tradition. As a Christo-monistic thinker, Marcion wanted to underline that Jesus rose from the dead without any help from the inferior demiurge.
We may be sure that Marcion intentionally omitted the words καὶ θεοῦ πατρός from his text of Paul's Letter to the Galatians. On the other hand, it is not a priori completely impossible that even at this early date (before 144 CE), doctrinal corrections had been introduced into this pre-Western text of Paul's letters. In his Epistle to the Galatians (2:9), the apostle declares that James, the brother of the Lord, and Peter (Ἰάκωβος καὶ Κηφᾶς), and also John, agreed with Paul and Barnabas that the Antiochenes should go unto the Gentiles, and they (the Jerusalemites) should go to the Jews.
When discussing the text of Marcion in the fifth book of Adversus Marcionem, Tertullian writes:
bene igitur, quod et dexteras dederunt Petrus et Jacobus et Johannes. . . . (adv.Marc. V,3,6)
Therefore it is good that Peter and James and John gave the right hands ...
The sequence of the names has been inverted: instead of James, it is Peter who is mentioned in the first place. As Schmid observes, elsewhere Tertullian enumerates: Peter and John and James (adv.Marc. IV,3,3; Praesc. 15,2). This was obviously the reading Tertullian preferred, the text of his own Latin Bible, the Afra. This same variant is transmitted by Marius Victorinus.
We may be sure that the sequence “Peter and James” was the variant of Marcion himself. At the same time, it was a typically Western reading, evidenced by the Western manuscripts DFG, the Itala manuscripts ab, several manuscripts of the Vulgate, the minuscules 629 and 1175, and Latin authors like Ambrosiaster and Pelagius.
Here we face a conundrum: Marcion was no friend of Peter, a “Judaist”; why, then, should he have changed this text in order to give primacy to Peter? Could it be that Marcion simply transmitted the variant reading which he found in the Corpus Paulinum and used in Rome ... [p. 273 - 4]
I can't believe how stupid this analysis is. Why is it so clear again that "Peter and James" is the reading of the Marcionite canon? Because Against Marcion makes reference to it? I will take that up in my next post but let me just say for the moment that Clement of Alexandria's references to Galatians begin at Galatians 2:19. In other words, I think the Clementine citation demonstrates that all of this biographical garbage about Paul was inserted by a Catholic editor (Irenaeus) and unknown to Marcion and the Marcionites as well as the early Alexandrian tradition.
Now let's get back to Quispel's superficial analysis. The only intelligent thing that he has to say is to notice that Origen is a good source and he mentions the variant reading of Galatians 1:1 which is not explicitly referenced in Tertullian. This demonstrates quite clearly that Against Marcion is not a 'study' of Marcionite variants. As such Claribeaux and Schmid's conclusion that the Marcionite text resembled the Old Latin text says more about what Against Marcion is - i.e. a polemic developed from the Catholic text of the Bible against Marcion - rather than anything about the constitution of the Marcionite canon.
Yet let's go beyond showing how stupid scholars are to something substantive. It is not as if Tertullian doesn't know that this variant exists. It's just that the text is corrupt and the original author was so busy reacting against its claims that people have lost sight of the reference. Let me highlight the appropriate section in chapter 1 of Book Five of Against Marcion:
He himself, says Marcion, claims to be an apostle, and that not from men nor through any man, but through Jesus Christ. Clearly any man can make claims for himself: but his claim is confirmed by another person's attestation. One person writes the document, another signs it, a third attests the signature, and a fourth enters it in the records. No man is for himself both claimant and witness. Besides this, you have found it written that many will come and say, I am Christ. If there is one that makes a false claim to be Christ, much more can there be one who professes that he is an apostle of Christ.
The Marcionite reading was again:
Paul, an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ who raised him from the dead.
Don't you see what these blowhards have failed to grasp. It is Jerome who says that the Marcionite passage is about Jesus resurrecting himself from the grave. Why? Because Jerome can only assume that 'Christ' here is Jesus. But the original text of Against Marcion makes clear that Paul was the subject of the sentence:
No man is for himself both claimant and witness. Besides this, you have found it written that many will come and say, I am Christ. If there is one that makes a false claim to be Christ, much more can there be one who professes that he is an apostle of Christ.
In other words, the second part of the sentence may not be explicitly mentioned but the original controversy here is whether or not the Marcionites were correct in identifying Paul as the Paraclete (= menachem, the name of the messiah cf. Origen Homilies on Luke 25,5). The Marcionites then identified their apostle as the 'Christ' who was resurrected from the dead by Jesus.
Now let's take this one step further. It becomes plain then that from the Marcionite perspective Galatians is placed first in the canon, not because it is shows the most hostility to Judaism (Romans is arguably more hostile) but because the Catholics added a lot of biographical information to counter this Marcionite claim that Paul was the Paraclete. Once again, I don't believe that Galatians was the original text of the Marcionite Apostolikon and I think Against Marcion provides a clue what the original text was - i.e. 1 Corinthians. For Tertullian as noted he 'interupted' his original discussion of this line (= Gal 1:1) and only resumes it again in his discussion of 1 Corinthians:
My introduction to the previous epistle led me away from discussion of its superscription: for I was sure it could be discussed in some other connection, it being his usual one, the same in all his epistles. I pass over the fact that he does not begin by wishing health to those to whom he writes, but grace and peace. What had he still to do with Jewish custom, if he was the destroyer of Judaism?
Yet 'grace and peace' just happens to be the line which follows the superscription in Galatians and 1 Corinthians:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. [Gal 1:3 - 5]
and 1 Corinthians:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. [1 Corinthians 1:3 - 6]
Which 'grace and peace' is Tertullian referring to? I think that the original text behind Against Marcion actually began with a discussion of 1 Corinthians and was later rearranged to suit the Old Syriac canon. This is the 'apostate' mentioned at the beginning of Against Marcion 1:1. There are many instances where the author cites a 1 Corinthians first canon in Against Marcion.
Yet I have to stop here. My half hour is up ...
dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."