Why I Don't Believe the Church Fathers About Marcion
Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2019 9:25 pm
Here is the state of affairs in point form
1. Irenaeus says the fourfold gospel is part of a perfect canon that has to be read together in order to know the truth
2. Irenaeus says the heretics were so-called because the 'chose' to ignore the whole of the scriptures and picked only a smaller part which they agreed with
3. Irenaeus says Marcion seized Luke and corrupted it according to his beliefs
4. Tertullian says Marcion stole Luke and corrupted it and cites from Luke against the Marcionites
5. Tertullian implies that Marcion had Acts before him but chose to ignore it
6. Tertullian says Marcion stole his collection of the Pauline letters we know from other sources was called 'the Apostolic' and cites Galatians-first collection of the Pauline letters against the Marcionites
7. Irenaeus and Tertullian designate Luke as an 'apostolic,' a subordinate figure to a full apostle
8. Epiphanius explicitly says the Marcionite canon was Galatians-first and says that he has that text in his possession
9. Tertullian never explicitly says that he is citing from the Marcionite canon.
10. Tertullian says that he will cite from the orthodox canon because that way it will be easy to show what the Marcionites corrupted
11. Irenaeus twice makes ambiguous statements which seem to dovetail with (10) for instance - "Marcion, mutilating that according to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God, from those [passages] which he still retains" (3.9.11) and " Marcion and his followers have betaken themselves to mutilating the Scriptures, not acknowledging some books at all; and, curtailing the Gospel according to Luke and the Epistles of Paul, they assert that these are alone authentic, which they have themselves thus shortened. In another work, however, I shall, God granting [me strength], refute them out of these which they still retain."
12. What is odd about Irenaeus's statement is that it echoes the line of attack in Tertullian's Against Marcion - "Let Marcion's eraser be ashamed of itself: except that it is superfluous for me to discuss the passages he has left out, since my case is stronger if he is shown wrong by those he has retained (5.4) "And how is it that this severe critic of the Galatians retains the rule of the law by premising that in three witnesses every word shall be established" (ibid) "That is Isaiah's: and what follows is from that same prophet's indenture: For who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor? Who hath offered a gift to him, and it shall be recompensed to him again ?g When you took away so much from the scriptures, why did you retain this, as though this too were not the Creator's? (5.14) and in the previous book "that gospel of Luke which we at this moment retain has stood firm since its earliest publication, whereas Marcion's is to most people not even known (4.5) "certainly that is why he has expunged all the things that oppose his view, that are in accord with the Creator, on the plea that they have been woven in by his partisans; but has retained those that accord with his opinion. These it is we shall call to account, with these we shall grapple, to see if they will favour my case, not his, to see if they will put a check on Marcion's pretensions. Then it will become clear that these things have been expunged by the same disease of heretical blindness by which the others have been retained." (4.6)
13. Most scholars see a connection between (11) and (12). However many of them merely say that Tertullian 'completed' the work that Irenaeus only promised to make. But we have no reason to believe that Irenaeus's didn't write that work. Surely he wrote lots of treatises that didn't survive. As such the easiest way to explain the similarity between (11) and (12) is that Irenaeus wrote that work and it was incorporated into Tertullian's Against Marcion.
14. If Tertullian borrowed from Irenaeus's lost work then we have to take a careful look at the formula again from (11). I will refute them out of the passages which they still retain. For most people this statement implies that Irenaeus had someway of determining what passages from Luke Marcion retained. As such we say 'it must have been the case' that Irenaeus had before him Marcion's canon. Otherwise he couldn't know if they retained them or not.
15. But Tertullian hardly says that Marcion erased anything from the orthodox canon and in most cases he refers to things from Matthew and Mark. So it would stand to reason by this logic that aside from the beginning of Luke and three or four other instances Marcion's gospel is exactly like Luke.
16. The difficulty here is that the list of things deleted in Tertullian and Epiphanius don't match. So in no way can we understand that Tertullian tells us or even knows all of the differences that exist between Luke and the gospel of Marcion. How then does Irenaeus and by implication Tertullian promise us even a rough approximation of 'those passages which Marcion still retains.' As Schelling suspects Tertullian must have simply gone through Luke and the Pauline Epistles and guessed or assumed which passages might have served Marcion's purposes.
17. It is worth noting that the idea that a group established their gospel by means of stealing another communities text was first established by Clement of Alexandria when he writes "Carpocrates, instructed by [demons] and using deceitful arts, so enslaved a certain presbyter of the church in Alexandria that he got from him a copy of the secret Gospel, which he both interpreted according to his blasphemous and carnal doctrine and, moreover, polluted, mixing with the spotless and holy words utterly shameless lies. From this mixture is drawn off the teaching of the Carpocratians." At the very least the idea that a community stole their gospel from the 'orthodox' is a common trope in the age. It is interesting to note that it is difficult to know whether or not Clement actually knows to what degree they altered the text of Secret Mark.
18. We must imagine that both Irenaeus and Tertullian approached the situation with regards to the Marcionite gospel and Luke in the same way. They simply assumed there must have been corruptions and so identified passages they may have corrupted or taken an interest in or - as in the case with Secret Mark - were responding to things Marcionites said or things people said the Marcionites declared about their gospel.
19. The perfect parallel is the many times Tertullian accuses Marcion of erasing things from Matthew and Mark. On the one hand, if the text of Against Marcion ultimately came from something Irenaeus wrote it would stand to reason that the argument develops from the notion that because Marcion only 'chose' (i.e. the etymological root of 'heresy') Luke at the expense of the others, he 'expunged' this or that saying from Matthew or Mark. If that is the case then we can see how a person making this sort of argument wouldn't have to had the Marcionite canon in his possession. 'Expunged' here is the equivalent to 'ignored' or 'had to ignore.'
20. Compare that Clement says about the first passage he cites from Secret Mark - "After these words follows the text, "And James and John come to him", and all that section. But "naked man with naked man," and the other things about which you wrote, are not found." So in this case Clement does not have the Carpocratian gospel in his possession. He is responding to someone telling him what the Carpocratians say about Secret Mark. He earlier accused the Carpocratians of tampering with the text but clearly has no idea what is in the Carpocratian gospel. So how can he say they stole the gospel or how can he say that they altered its contents? Church Fathers are unreliable.
21. Any time a Church Father says that a rival tradition 'stole' a text originally held by them it is unlikely the other tradition stole the text. Whenever a Church Father accused another tradition of tampering with a text it is unlikely that they had access to that text so it is unlikely they will be able to produce all of the differences that exist between their text and those of their opponents. The Samaritans had no idea what was in the Jewish Pentateuch and vice versa. The rabbinic references to the LXX are laughable. It is unlikely that anyone in antiquity would get a hold of a rival traditions scripture and spend the time to go through that text. It just never happens in antiquity. The ancients were content to ridicule their opponents and argue out of their own texts.