Gamera

In Against Marcion Book V Tertullian makes various allegations that Marcion "erased" and "garbelled" Paul's epistles.

Doesn't anybody know exactly what texts Tertullian was looking at when he made these allegations?

Is it beleived that Marcion produced redacted versions of Paul's epistles in his canon, or is Tertullian refering to a commentary produced by Marcion about the epistles?

S.C.Carlson

Generally, yes (with a minor caveat that some of what Tertullian called redactions were actually original). Some members of the Dutch Radical School even posit that the catholic edition is the redaction and Marcion is closer to the original (if not the original itself).

I'm unaware of any scholarly support for this proposition.

Stephen

Zeichman

He's saying, if I'm not mistaken, that Marcion removed and moved verses in Paul's letters. I believe someone tried to reconstruct the Marcionitic Galatians here: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/3827/ but I cannot vouch for its accuracy. Someone also wrote a book called "The Lost Edition of the Letters of Paul : A Reassessment of the Text of Pauline Corpus Attested by Marcion," which is now out of print, but can be found on the publisher's web site for very cheap addressing this issue from an interesting perspective.

Roger Pearse would undoubtedly be the one to speak most authoritatively about this. Others, also, are far more qualified than me to talk about it.

Toto

Clabeaux, John James. The Lost Edition of the Letters of Paul: A Reassessment of the Text of Pauline Corpus Attested by Marcion (Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series No. 21) 1989 ISBN 0-915170-20-5

published 4/1/1989 by the Catholic Biblical Association of America

order form

gnosis92

You're the creator of the website? I was wondering. it's not been updated since 2001.

Bart Ehrman & co have written quite a bit about Marcion since then.

gnosis92

Bart Ehrman believes that the traditional account, that Marcion redacted existing texts is correct, in Lost Christianities.

gnosis92

I agree with Ehrman that he redacted Galatians and other texts to fit into his theology of two-Gods. One example I recall was something to the effect of

"God's mysteries disclosed to us" Marcion nicely rewords "Mysteries hidden from the God who created all things"

Gamera

Thanks folks. I find Marcion's downplaying of the Hebrew scriptures appealing, because the OT is so morally incomprehensible from a Christain perspective (though it's unclear to me whether Marcion's motives were perhaps anti-semetic, rather than ethical, in nature). The attempt to gloss the Hebrew scriptures to harmonize with the Christian scriptures seems to me a lost cause. It seems to me the gospel is fundamentally unrelated to the OT and Marcion picked up on that. It is curious, however, that he would redact Paul's epistles, given the high regard in which he held Paul. Something more must be going on (such as that Marcion thought the texts had been editted and was "restoring" them, or as Stephen points out, Marcion was in fact dealing with the original mss or at least an alternate ms tradition of Paul's works).

It just seems unlikely that Marcion would blatantly alter Paul's epistles without citing some authority for doing so.

Gamera

But given the high regard Marcion felt for Paul (Paul's epistles are the core of his canon), it seems odd he would blatantly do this without citing some authority for doing so (such as a claim that he was restoring the texts, or had the original texts, or he had a vision, etc).

I don't gather any such citing of authority from Tertullian. Tertullian seems to simply allege that Marcion was arrogant and wrong.

Zeichman

Well, someone, at sometime, had to have done such (whether it was Marcion subtracting, or proto-orthodox adding). What is wrong with the suggestion that it was Marcion?