Note 400 — Chapter V
Neil Buchanan translation
Footnote 400:
(return)
On Marcion's Gospel see the Introductions to the New Testament and Zahn's Kanonsgeschichte, Bd. I., p. 585 ff. and II., p. 409. Marcion attached no name to his Gospel, which, according to his own testimony, he produced from the third one of our Canon (Tertull, adv. Marc. IV. 2, 3, 4). He called it simply ευαγγελιον (κυριου), but held that it was the Gospel which Paul had in his mind when he spoke of his Gospel. The later Marcionites ascribed the authorship of the Gospel partly to Paul, partly to Christ himself, and made further changes in it. That Marcion chose the Gospel called after Luke should be regarded as a makeshift; for this Gospel, which is undoubtedly the most Hellenistic of the four Canonical Gospels, and therefore comes nearest to the Catholic conception of Christianity, accommodated itself in its traditional form but little better than the other three to Marcionite Christianity. Whether Marcion took it for a basis because in his time it had already been connected with Paul (or really had a connection with Paul), or whether the numerous narratives about Jesus as the Saviour of sinners, led him to recognise in this Gospel alone a genuine kernel, we do not know.