Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2020 4:11 pmMarcion's gospel (or the gospel tagged as Marcionite by the usual patristic suspects) apparently lacked, based on external evidence, chapters 1-2. Luke itself apparently lacked, based on internal evidence, chapters 1-2, as well. That Luke was written with these two chapters originally and then Marcion sheared them off all of his own accord, as the church fathers would have it, seems very unlikely to me. Rather, either the two chapters had not yet been added in Marcion's time or he excised them from his own version precisely in order to line up with what he knew or thought to be earlier editions.John2 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2020 2:24 pm Regarding the idea of Marcion's version of Luke having priority over the NT Luke, while I can accept that there could have been more than one version of Luke, I suspect that they were originally all more or less from the same time period and like the NT Luke, and I still have the impression that Marcion altered the version he had access to more or less like Church writers say.
The other (admittedly smaller) indications of Marcionite priority are also awaiting explanation, to my eye.
Moreover, the Lucan prologue seems to me to be explicitly combining or reconciling different textual traditions; that one of those traditions should have been the one that Marcion inherited and (re)published ought not to come as a surprise.
All of this to say: I think that Marcion altering what he found more or less like the church fathers say is one of the least probable options on the table. That he made alterations to anything he may have found is more than fair; everybody else seems to have made alterations of their own, so why not Marcion, too? But that he made the alterations attributed to him by the church fathers is quite another matter; no way was Marcion solely and originally responsible for the removal of Luke 1-2, for example.
Well, I can live without chapters 1 and 2 being original, and I had them in mind when I said "more or less." So to clarify what I mean by "more or less," I mean that I think Luke, in all its versions from the get-go, presented Jesus like the NT Luke does (and like Mark and Matthew do), i.e., as an OT-based Messiah with an OT God.