The problem with most academic literature on Marcion is that it suffers from superficiality. No one seems to ask why the Church Fathers (Irenaeus and Tertullian principally) are so fixated on textual criticism with respect to Marcionism. For the rest of the so-called "heresies" we get catalogues of accusations of sexual perversion, mythopoesis and latent pagan tendencies. Marcion is different and to be fair the Germans who first fixated on Marcion recognized that. Unfortunately they made Marcion into an ancient precursor of themselves - i.e. an emblem of the broader "protest" against "institutional Christianity."
Germans are so unlike people of other cultures that it is hard to imagine a Greek speaker from the second century "resembling" Luther let alone Germans generally so Marcionite studies was off to a bad start already by having this culture "finger" a disproportionate amount of the research into this historical figure.
But there is something else wrong which continues through the modern studies of Marcion - the failure to get past the Church Fathers textual critical reporting on Marcion.
I was watching a 1977 Burt Bacharach concert from Edmonton for some reason last night and all I could think about was deciding whether or not he was wearing a toupee. No one else at the concert was thinking this in 1977. But YouTube allows us a certain degree of detachment when watching from the comfort of our own pajamas. The experience of the live music has to a large extent been replaced by the experience of choosing THIS video (as opposed to a video of dog tricks or what celebrities look like now). It's the same concert (in a way) but it's not the same.
In the same way, the Church Fathers only wanted to tell us about Marcion's deviation from the Gospel of Luke. The modern scholarship on Marcion turns this into all sorts of questions. Is Luke really older than Marcion's gospel? Is Marcion's gospel Mark or something older than Mark. These are all "our concerns" being transposed on to the evidence (in the same way that I was watching the Burt Bacharach video looking at his hairline).
The real question should have been why doesn't any daylight get out from Irenaeus and Tertullian about Marcionism beyond the claim that Marcion "stole" Luke ("stole" Luke from where? from what scriptorium - even that isn't answered by our sources).
I have a theory about this. But that isn't the point of this post. Instead I am just pointing out how awful the Marcionophiles are. Who cares about their stupid theories? Why is this put to the front of the line? Why are we offered a free "sample" of Marcion (i.e. who the Church Fathers say he is) in order to get dragged into a lengthy discussion of what they - the Marcionophiles - think the "gospel before the gospels" looked like?
Is it really likely that we can reconstruct what the Hanging Gardens of Babylon looked like from the fragmentary references that have come down to us? Why should anyone care about any attempt to reconstruct "Marcion's gospel" based on the scraps of information that Tertullian and Epiphanius tell us about the text? It's ludicrous.
Why can't we just let the original texts of Tertullian and Epiphanius stand as what they really are - a claim that "followers of Marcion" (whoever they are) had a corrupt copy of Luke which different in ultimately trivial ways from "canonical Luke" in 180 CE (whatever that was)? Why do we have to go into all this nonsense about a "proto-gospel" that existed before the canonical gospels and the like?
I will tell you what happens if we act like responsible scholars - rather than creative writing majors: we are left with the inescapable conclusion that the reason Irenaeus and Tertullian are referencing "Marcionites" who still in some way belonged to the Church. Of course there are allusions still to Marcionism being housed in "separate synagogues." But Irenaeus uses the plural of synagogue to describe the Valentinians too. The "Marcionites" were part of the same Church that Irenaeus belonged to in the manner in which Arius and his followers won Nicaea in historical reality but not according to Epiphanius and Theodosius's "remembered" history in 381 CE.
Marcionites belonged to the same church as Irenaeus in the same way as the excommunicated churches of Asia Minor were in communion with Rome. It was all a big jumbled mess.
We should stop playing into Irenaeus's original hyperbole (augmented further by Tertullian). Irenaeus says (through Tertullian) that Marcion falsified Luke alone of the four gospels. This implies that "Marcionites" used all four gospels or lived in a Church where all four were bound together as a set. They likely preferred a certain gospel which was called "Luke" or was identified as canonical Luke (in its pure state).
Yes there is a sense in the third century that Marcionites "only used" Luke. And? Even by the Church Father's standards, much of what was written about the exclusive use of Luke was written three generations after Justin's original reporting on Marcion. Irenaeus says Polycarp "saw" Marcion in the middle of the second century. Irenaeus doesn't seem to ever see him.
Was the original entry for Marcion in Book One "there" originally in the earliest copies of Irenaeus's treatise? It is difficult to imagine a scenario where the author of the Philosophumena goes on to exact details of what Irenaeus said about the Marcosians (after members who clearly belonged to the same Church as Irenaeus and the author complained about their portrait in Adversus Haereses likely through their "bishop") and a wholly different entry for the Marcionites exist in place of chapter 27 in the Philosophumena.
The entry for the Marcosians is the same but edited, the entry for the Carpocratians is basically the same, as are many other heresies. The account of the Marcionites in the Philosophumena imagines they used a version of the Gospel of Mark with added references to the mystical doctrine of Empedocles. Could the author of the Philosophumena have just "decided" to remove Irenaeus's claims about the centrality of Marcion's falsifying of Luke and added this "Mark-based" gospel reference? I think not.
But even if we assume the opposite - i.e. that Irenaeus wrote what he wrote about Marcion's falsifying of Luke in chapter 27 and the author of the Philosophumena and erased it all and replaced it with a mystic gospel of Mark, where does that leave us? It leaves us in the very same place, a longer version of Mark that in some way roughly resembled Luke.
The idea that we can "know" what the Marcionite gospel of Luke looked like merely by "adding up" all the gospel variants in Tertullian is silly and unworthy of serious consideration.
