The Text of Marcion's Gospel by Dieter T. Roth (review)

Since the times of Theodor Zahn and Adolf von Harnack and up to very recently, one had to base one's reading of Marcion's gospel on the cloze that these two scholars had produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since 2013 the situation has radically changed, for Jason BeDuhn has produced his The First New Testament (2013), Matthias Klinghardt his Das älteste Evangelium (2015), and Dieter T. Roth his revised and enlarged 2009 Ph.D. dissertation (University of Edinburgh), supervised by Larry Hurtado and Paul Foster.

What makes the latter work stand out from the others is both the traditional trajectory of the Zahn-Harnack "reconstruction" of Marcion's gospel in the form of a "fill-in-the-blank text" and the assumption that this text was Marcion's abbreviation and re-working of Luke. As a result of this assumed posteriority of Marcion's gospel with regard to Luke, the value of Luke and the other Synoptic Gospels and the entire gospel manuscript tradition (including Codex Bezae, which is core to Klinghardt's reconstruction), based on Harnack, are qualified as "minimal" (46). The reconstructive work to establish the "best attainable text" of Marcion is based mainly on Tertullian's Against Marcion IV, Epiphanius's Panarion, and the Adamantius Dialogue (46).

First, after his introduction Roth gives his reading of the history of research with an emphasis on Albrecht Ritschl and Ferdinand Baur's retraction in response to the works of Gustav Volckmar and Adolf Hilgenfeld around the mid-19th century, when Ritschl stated that his earlier suggestion of Marcion's priority was "refuted" (15). This leads to Harnack's statement that one would no longer need to spend even a single word on Marcion's gospel being anything but "a falsified Luke" (24). In his third chapter Roth details his methodological approach, following Ulrich Schmid's earlier work on Marcion und sein Apostolos (1995), that one has to take into account "citation habits" of the three authors that provide readings for Marcion (47). Included are valuable lists of "attested verses" for being "present" in Marcion's gospel (49–74), for being "not present" (75–76), and "unattested verses" (76–78). Then follows the fourth chapter, which runs first through all those verses attested as present by Tertullian and which our rhetor cites in multiple forms. Only in those can Roth elucidate his "citation habits" (83–184), to then in Chapter Five run through the gospel again dealing with those verses that are only cited in Tertullian's Against Marcion (185–269). That the single citation in this work cannot be clearly distinguished from the multiple citation becomes already obvious from the very first verse in the "multiple" section, Luke 4.32, where Roth states that although this verse "is not multiply cited outside of Adversus Marcionem (this should more correctly read: is not cited at all outside of Adversus Marcionem), the citations in two different contexts" within Adv. Marc. makes him place it here, rather than into the second section. The chapters on Tertullian are followed by a chapter on Epiphanius, where, again, we read through the entire gospel (270–346), and so one does with Chapter Seven guided by the Adamantius Dialogue (347–95). This occurs again in Chapter Eight, based on the few added source providers, Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Hippolytus, Ps.-Tertullian, (Ps.-)Ephrem, Jerome, Filastrius, and Eznik (396–409). It would be possible to get lost in those five different readings through the gospel, which make it hard to relate the discussion of a verse to its context, when some of that discussion may be found only in other chapters. Therefore, the two final chapters present "the reconstruction," whereby the Greek text typographically indicates the seven levels of confidence Roth has in his reconstructed text (410–36), and a few final remarks.

As one can see from this summary, this is not a book for undergraduate students or beginners, but...