(g) Marcion.—We have more exact information in regard to Marcion’s great undertaking than to these slender attempts at textual criticism. Here there is a fuller stream of testimony both in the Greek and Latin Fathers. It must be confessed, however, that hitherto attention has been directed more to his position in the matter of the Canon generally than to his work on the text of the New Testament. Here again, the works of Zahn throw most light upon the subject; in other works, like the PRE e.g., this side of Marcion’s activity is very superficially treated. Several points have already been referred to here and there in the previous part of this work, but the question must now be treated as a whole.^[205]

In the opening sentence of his examination of Marcion’s New Testament, Zahn avers that no church teacher of the second century occupies such an important position in the history of the ecclesiastical canon as does that early writer. If this is really so, it becomes all the more important for us to inquire whether traces of his influence may not be discoverable also in our witnesses to the text of the New Testament.

Marcion’s New Testament, which was at the same time his entire Bible, consisted of two books of moderate compass—viz. a Gospel-Book, which he seems to have called Εὐαγγέλιον simply, and a collection of ten Pauline Epistles called, probably by himself, τὸ Ἀποστολικὸν (sc. βιβλίον). The Epistles were arranged in an order which was evidently thought to correspond to that of their composition—viz., Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom., 1 and 2 Thess., Laodicenos (= Ephes.), Col., Phil., Phm. He was unanimously accused by the Church teachers of having mutilated the ecclesiastical Bible in the manufacture of his own, and also of having corrupted the text here and there by means of interpolations, particularly in the case of Luke, which was the only Gospel he admitted. They complained that he used not the pen but the knife (only he used it for a purpose the opposite of that for which the scissors are employed nowadays), and the sponge, and also that he deleted not words merely but whole pages. They compared his work upon the manuscripts to that of a mouse.^[206] And as for his disciples! Every day they were improving their Gospel. Seeing that he himself had not gone so far as to erase the writings of Paul altogether, his disciples continued his work, and removed whatever did not concur with their views.^[207] But according to testimony extending over a long stretch of time, their text of the Scriptures seems to have undergone fewer alterations during that period than that of the Catholic Church (Zahn, GK. i. 613). In comparing the text of these two collections “it should be clearly understood that the Church’s text, whose treatment by Marcion is in question, is not to be identified with that of our Bible Societies, or of Tischendorf, or of Epiphanius, but was such a text as Marcion found in the Catholic Church or in the Roman community about the year 150. The text of the ecclesiastical exemplar on which Marcion based his labours can no longer be restored in every word, but sufficient means are at our command to give us a general idea of the form which the text of the Pauline Epistles presented in the second century, and at the same time to ascertain in many separate instances what text Marcion had before him. It turns out in many cases that what seems strange in Marcion’s text to one who compares it with the textus receptus, or with one of our modern critical editions, without knowing much about the history of the text, is by no means peculiar to Marcion, but was pretty common in the West in early times. Now it is quite inconceivable, in view of the implacable hostility of the Church to Marcion, that his text, condemned as it was unceasingly as being heretical and spurious, should have exerted any positive influence on that of the Church.^[208] It follows, accordingly, that all those things in Marcion’s Bible that seem to the uninitiated to be peculiar to it alone, but which are attested by Catholic manuscripts, versions, and Patristic writers, were not invented by Marcion, but taken by him from the Church’s Bible of that time, or from one such Bible at all events, and were only gradually ousted from the text used by the Church.”^[209] All this, which is taken word for word, with the exception of a slight change in the last sentence, from Zahn’s dissertation of the year 1889 (p. 636), should even at that time have been self-evident, but, like Zahn’s further statements in the same place, has not yet been sufficiently attended to, especially in our commentaries on Luke and the Pauline Epistles. He points out, e.g., that Tertullian, in speaking of the change of the address “ad Ephesios” to “Laodicenos,” credits Marcion with the intention of being “et in isto diligentissimus explorator,” so that it is possible that he compared several manuscripts in order to discover the original wording.^[210] In such cases, therefore, the question may be asked whether Marcion may not really have preserved the original text, and whether his text, so far as it is corroborated by any independent tradition, should not be estimated much higher than it is by the textual critics of the present.^[211] Zahn deserves all the more credit for giving such careful attention to questions relating to the text, seeing that the subject of his investigation was merely the history of the canon. He has dealt chiefly with those passages in which Marcion’s intentional alterations have been preserved. |His “Emendations.”| Reference may be made, e.g., to the pages in the first volume of his History, entitled Minor Emendations, wherein it is shown how Marcion, in his hostility to the Old Testament with its God of Righteousness, omitted the quotations from the Old Testament altogether, or dropped the introductory formula of quotation in Rom. i. 17, xii. 19, 2 Cor. iv. 13; excluded all the references to Abraham in Galatians except in iv. 22; altered ἀγνοοῦντες τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην in Rom. x. 3 to ἀγνοοῦντες τὸν θεόν; removed the words γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικὸς, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον from Gal. iv. 4; changed the active construction into the passive in 1 Cor. iii. 17; and elsewhere strove after greater condensation, lucidity, and brevity of expression. Marcion, says Zahn, had good grounds for believing that the text of the Scriptures had not remained unchanged during the century that had elapsed since their composition, though that might be said with more truth of the Gospels and the Acts than of the Epistles; but to attempt to rid the Apostle’s text of all supposed corruptions with no regard to any sort of critical material whatever, but depending simply and solely on his own instinctive sense of what was genuinely Christian and apostolic, was the undertaking of a giant, as Irenæus calls Marcion. And his disciples, in a blind veneration of his authority, seem to have exceeded the intention of the master and editor, “just as many Lutherans at the present day look upon Luther’s translation, with all its faults, as the very word of God, and hardly capable of improvement.”

In the Appendices to his second volume Zahn has gone still more carefully into the questions relating to the criticism of the text.^[212] His main conclusions will hardly be contested. Among these are the following:—

1. That Marcion based his Gospel on that of Luke, although his text displays various elements belonging to Matthew and Mark;

2. That this mixture is found in those passages wherein the ecclesiastical texts, and especially the Western, exhibit the same or similar features;

3. That Marcion’s text shows^[213] none of those small “apocryphal additions” which we find combined with the contents of our Gospels in Justin and Tatian.

Zahn also calls attention frequently to the different manuscripts which still exhibit a text agreeing with that credited to Marcion, and which are precisely the Western witnesses, the Old Latin manuscripts, and D of the Greek.^[214] Compare, e.g., on Luke v. 14, 34, 39; vi. 25 f., 31, 37; viii. 45; ix. 6, 16, 22; x. 22, 25; xi. 20, 41; xii. 14, 31, 58 f.; xviii. 35; xx. 36; xxi. 27, 30; xxiv. 6, 26, 37. But there are also passages where Marcion parts company with D and its associates—e.g., vi. 22, 26, 29; xi. 4. In Paul, too, the number of passages displaying agreement between Marcion and D₂ G₂ preponderates: Gal. ii. 5; iii. 14b; v. 1, 14, 24; 1 Cor. i. 18; 2 Cor. v. 4; 1 Thess. iv. 16; Eph. i. 9, 13; iii. 10; iv. 6; v. 28 ff. The agreement between Marcion’s text and that of the minuscule 157 was previously emphasised by Zahn—e.g., in Luke xvi. 12, where the reading τὸ ἐμόν instead of τὸ ὑμέτερον (ἡμέτερον B L) is supported as yet by this Greek manuscript alone and three old Latin (e i l), and in xxi. 30, where only one other of the minuscules collated by Scrivener supports D 157 in reading προβάλωσιν τὸν καρπὸν αὐτῶν.^[215] In Luke xxiv. 26, D and Marcion are our only witnesses for the reading ὅτι instead of οὐχί. How is this to be explained? Zahn, e.g., holds that it is a mere coincidence that Marcion’s reading, “prophetas suos,”^[216] in 1 Thess. ii. 15 agrees with τοὺς ἰδίους προφήτας read by D₂ E₂ K₂ L₂, i.e., the representatives of the Antiochean recension, with which Marcion elsewhere very seldom agrees, seeing he founds throughout upon a Western text. In the great majority of cases the explanation seems to be simple enough. Marcion began his career at Rome, so that we may naturally expect him to give us a Western text. So far, therefore, one might be tempted simply to ignore that text as hitherto, although a text attested by Marcion and the Church in common is surely entitled, even in respect of its antiquity, to much more consideration than has been paid to it heretofore. The importance, and at the same time the difficulty, of the problem is increased by the fact that we find the same text as his, or at all events one of a similar sort, represented in a totally different quarter—viz. in Tatian.^[217]

(h) Tatian^[218] has already been referred to in a general way above (p. 97 ff.): we shall now give the testimony of the early church regarding him verbatim. If we leave out of account the somewhat doubtful reference in Hegesippus (p. 96), and an equally uncertain allusion to the title of his Harmony in Origen,^[219] the testimony from purely Greek sources is confined to a few sentences in Eusebius,^[220] a notice in Epiphanius,^[221] and a scholion in a manuscript of the Gospels.^[222]

For more exact information we are indebted solely to the Syrian church. The Greek writer Theodoret gives us most details.^[223] The notices contained in Syriac and Arabic sources are more numerous than the Greek, but they are shorter and must be omitted here.^[224] It becomes necessary, therefore, to consider very carefully whether any vestiges of Tatian’s work are preserved in our witnesses for the text, and how these may, and indeed must, be used in its criticism. I assume as having been demonstrated by Zahn, that Tatian’s Diatessaron was a Syriac work, and I take it as very probable that the Curetonian Syriac and the Lewis Syriac present us with two works based on, or at least influenced by, that of Tatian. To what extent the same is true of the Peshitto as well need not be considered here, the main problem being to elucidate the connection between Tatian and the Western witnesses. And here we are at once confronted with a matter of great uncertainty—viz., whether there might not also have been a Greek Harmony of the Gospels either antecedent to the Diatessaron or contemporary with it, which Tatian himself made or employed. Zahn thinks not, mainly because from the side of the Greek Church we have almost no notice whatever of the existence of anything of this sort, nor of Tatian’s own work either. Harnack seems not to be convinced of the correctness of Zahn’s position.^[225] He even declares that Harris’s Preliminary Study^[226] has only confirmed his “conviction that Tatian composed a Greek Harmony of the Gospels.”^[227] That treatise is accompanied by a facsimile of the fragment of Mark in Codex W^d, “the contents of which display an affinity with the text of the Diatessaron (with the original text?).”^[228] At all events Harnack is of opinion that Harris’s conclusions with regard to a Pre-Tatian and a very early Harmony of the narrative of the Passion are very premature, and in his judgment should either not have been put forward at all in a Preliminary Study or suggested with more deliberation. G. Krüger also puts “this Combined Gospel written in Syriac (Greek?)” in his History of Early Christian Literature, § 37. On the other hand, Hogg in § 12 of his Introduction,^[229] Non-Syriac Texts of the Diatessaron, says nothing of a Greek text, and in § 19, where he raises the question, “In what language was it written?”, he speaks only of the “view favoured by an increasing majority of scholars, that it was written in Syriac,” and then asks, on this view, “was it a translation or simply a compilation?” and lastly, which is the main question, “what precisely is its relation to ... the Western text generally?”

In his first work, written prior to the publication of the Arabic text, Zahn very frequently pointed to the fact that the so-called Western witnesses—i.e., Codex D and the Old Latin manuscripts, agree so often with Tatian.^[230] His explanation of this phenomenon is very simple—viz., that Tatian returned from Rome to his old home in Syria about the year 172, and took with him from the West his text, which was just the Western text. |Tatian and the Western Text.| This view would present no difficulty if it were only the case that the Diatessaron shared the peculiarities of the Western text, but is the fact not rather the converse of this—viz., that D, the leading representative of that text, shares the peculiarities of a Harmony of the Gospels, might we say, in short, of the Diatessaron? Not only are certain readings the same in both texts, but the Western text seems actually to exhibit features which can scarcely be regarded otherwise than as the outcome of a Harmony. I have given expression to this opinion ere now; it struck me forcibly when I was collating the Codex Bezae for my Supplementum Novi Testamenti Graeci. In order to afford a more convenient survey of the vast number of variants, I followed the paragraphing of Westcott and Hort’s edition. Now look at the variants there. Whereas the majority consist of quite separate and disconnected readings, I was obliged at the beginning of the pericopæ regularly to copy half a line or even a whole line from D, its text differed so much from that of our present editions at the beginnings of the pericopæ, and there only to the same extent. See, e.g., Luke v. 17, 27; vii. 1, 18; ix. 37; x. 1, 25; xi. 14; xii. 1 to the end; xxiv. 13. It is true this phenomenon is most frequently observed in Luke, where I had previously explained its appearance in another way by supposing like Blass that it was due to the author having issued two editions of that Gospel. But neither is it altogether absent from the other Gospels. It occurs most seldom, as might be expected, in Matthew, but examples may be seen in xvii. 22, 24; xx. 29. In Mark see iii. 19; iv. 1; vi. 7. There are other features besides this which are difficult of explanation on any other grounds. For these I may briefly refer to the second of the works relating to this part of the subject, The Syro-Latin Text of the Gospels, by F. H. Chase,^[231] in which a special chapter is devoted to the question of “Harmonistic Influence” (pp. 76-100). The writer calls attention there to three points, viz.:—

1. “The text of Codex Bezae shows constant indications of harmonistic influence.” This, however, is nothing new. Jerome, e.g., complains of amalgamations of this sort. But then,

2. “In such harmonized passages readings occur which we are justified by other evidence in considering as Tatianic readings.”

3. “There are other signs of the influence of Syriac phraseology in, or in the neighbourhood of, such readings due to harmonistic influence.”

I waive consideration of this last point, but as regards the second it is noteworthy, and bears out what I have said above, that Chase in this connection goes almost entirely by passages from Luke with the exception of Matt. xxi. 18; xxiv. 31 f.; xxvi. 59 ff.; and Mark viii. 10; xiii. 2; x. 25 ff. From Luke he instances iii. 23-38; iv. 31; v. 10 f., 14 f.; vi. 42; viii. 35; xi. 2; xx. 20; xxi. 7; xxiii. 45 ff.; xxiv. 1.

I should like, however, to call attention here to one passage to which Chase refers in another connection—viz., the extensive interpolation after Matt. xx. 28 (Chase, pp. 9-14). It is true, as Zahn expressly points out,^[232] that neither Ephraem nor Aphraates, who were our only sources for the Diatessaron prior to 1881, “shows any traces of this long and in part apocryphal interpolation, nor yet of Luke xiv. 7-10, from which the most of it is taken.” But in the Arabic Tatian,^[233] Luke xiv. 1-6 and xiv. 7-11, 12-15 are found after Matt. xx. 1-16 at the end of § 29 and the beginning of § 30 respectively. The verse Matt. xx. 28, regarding which Zahn was uncertain whether it was in Tatian or not, seeing that neither Ephraem nor Aphraates mentions it, is found in § 31, 5 between Mark x. 44 and Luke xiii. 22, while Matt. xx, 29a (+ Mark x. 46a) follows a little further down in § 31, 25. So far, indeed, this result is not favourable to our theory. But I ask myself in vain how else this interpolation is to be explained except as an attempt at harmonising. Now, seeing that its text is found in one Syriac, two Greek, and half a dozen Latin witnesses (the particulars are given in the critical note, p. 255), the further question arises, Whence comes it? The most ready answer will be, “it comes from the Greek, whence it passed to the Latin on the one side and to the Syriac on the other.” As for the Latin, it is certain that the majority, perhaps even all, of the Latin forms are derived from the Greek. But are the Syriac as well? Or is not rather the converse true, however strange it may seem at the first glance, that the Greek is a translation of the Syriac? There is the word δειπνοκλήτωρ, e.g., which strikes me as it did Chase, as being particularly strange. I admit that I should not care to build a hypothesis of this magnitude on this one word and this one passage alone. I would merely submit it generally as a question to be kept in view in further investigations. And I would supplement it by another question whether, in the case of the first being negatived, it may not be true after all, pace Zahn, that there was a Greek Harmony alongside the Syriac and probably going back to the same author. May not the close resemblances traceable between Tatian and the Western text be also accounted for on the supposition that instead of Tatian being influenced by the latter, it really goes back to Tatian?

I would ask this question specially in regard to the Western text of the Pauline Epistles. What is meant by the statement of Eusebius cited above as to Tatian’s treatment of these Epistles? Μεταφράσαι may certainly mean to translate, but then one translates an entire text and not φωνάς τινας merely, and, moreover, one does not translate ὡς ἐπιδιορθούμενος αὐτῶν τὴν τῆς φράσεως σύνταξιν “with a view to improving the phraseology and syntax.” Do not our Western witnesses present us with a work of this description? I am well aware that such hypotheses are like that regarding the author of the Nibelungenlied where there was a great poem without a name and one or two great names without poems, and so various combinations were made, for each of which something could be said, while none of them could be said to be proved. That may be the case here too. But at present I feel disposed to attribute a considerable share in this peculiar “Western” text to Tatian. |Syro-Latin.| And as this name “Western,” the inappropriateness of which has long been recognised, becomes on this supposition more inappropriate still, I am inclined to recommend the freer adoption of the nomenclature familiarised by the work of Chase, I mean that of “Syro-Latin.” In his preface Chase puts in a plea for its use, citing a sentence from the Dublin Review of July 1894, p. 52, in which H. Lucas says: “The time is, we hope, not far distant, when the term Western will give place to the term Syro-Latin, the only one which truly represents, in our opinion, the facts of the case.” Just as when we wish to indicate those languages and tribes that extend from the Indian to the German and Keltic we say Indo-Germanic, or Indo-Keltic, if we wish to be more exact and avoid wounding the sensibilities of the French, so the term Syro-Latin would be the best designation for a form of text whose characteristics are as distinctly traceable among the Syrians in the East as among the Greeks in the centre and the Latins in the West. But be that as it may, one thing is clear, that many problems here await solution. But they will not for ever defy methodical investigation.

The foregoing was all written before I saw the analysis given by Zahn in his Geschichte des Kanons, i. 383 ff. Reading it, I am surprised that his conclusions have not been followed up by a thorough investigation of the subject long ere now. Personally, I am precluded at this moment from even making an attempt in this direction. Zahn says: “The quotations of Aphraates frequently presuppose a different Greek text (of the Pauline Epistles) than that lying at the foundation of the Peshitto. The repeated resemblances to Western texts, Claromontanus, Boernerianus (D G), Tertullian, and other Latin witnesses are particularly striking. In the earliest Syriac Gospel the same phenomenon appears even more conspicuously. How is it to be explained? Shall we suppose that this type of text was dispersed equally throughout all parts of the Church during the second century? In that case we should have to regard it as the earliest form at which we can arrive, on the principle laid down by Tertullian: quod apud multos unum invenitur, non est erratum sed traditum. But,” says Zahn, “even those who venerate the Western tradition of the text—i.e. those who, like myself, are of opinion that it does not get nearly its due share of attention from present-day critics—will decline to assent to this proposition. Because the result of this view would be to establish the rule that the so-called Western tradition invariably deserves the preference over those others, even over our oldest Greek manuscripts themselves. Even if we limited it to those elements of the text in which the furthest East agrees with the furthest West, the result would still be a text to which no cautious critic would pin his faith. A more natural explanation of this striking condition of things is required.” Zahn finds this in the supposition that there was formerly a close intimacy between the Syrian Church and Rome. “Just as the Princes of Edessa had much direct intercourse with Rome, so to all appearance had the Church there.” In proof of this, he points to the early intrusion of Marcion’s doctrines and Bible into Mesopotamia, to the participation of the Church of Edessa in the Easter controversy and its agreement in that matter with Victor of Rome, and to the Abgar Legend which connects Edessa with Zephyrinus of Rome (199-216) by way of Antioch, and represents Peter as sending the Epistles of Paul from Rome to Edessa. “Considering the anachronisms that legends usually exhibit, may we not take this to be the expression of an historical fact, viz. that a text written in the West formed the basis of the earliest Syriac version of the Pauline Epistles? This supposition is confirmed by the earliest history of the Gospel among the Syrians—viz. by the Diatessaron.”^[234] After a most thorough discussion of all the questions relating to that book (pp. 387-422), Zahn discovers in this part also (the Gospels) an intimate connection between the text on which it is based, and the form assumed by the text of the Gospels in the West during the second century. And he believes that it will be difficult to find a more feasible explanation of the remarkable agreement evidenced by these two texts in the very matter of their textual corruption and licence than this, that this text came from Rome to Syria. And so the final question arises, “whether a connection does not exist between the first Gospel and the first text of Paul and the Acts in the Syriac, and whether the entire N. T., as the Doctrine of Addai says, was not a present which Tatian brought with him from Rome to his countrymen, and adapted for their use by means of a free translation and revision?” Zahn thinks that a positive answer cannot be given, but he refers pointedly to what Eusebius says regarding Tatian’s treatment of the Pauline Epistles, and is led to suppose that those changes were introduced on the occasion and in the form of a translation from the Greek into Syriac, and that the reason why Eusebius had such hazy notions regarding it as well as the Diatessaron, is most likely that both the books were in Syriac, and used only in the Syrian Church. A closer investigation of the Pauline Epistles in the Syriac is needed to decide these questions.

To these propositions of Zahn I have but the one objection stated above, that the expressions used by Eusebius point far too plainly to a revision of the phraseology of the Pauline Epistles, which could have been done only on the original Greek.^[235] Zahn himself points out that the words of Eusebius remind us of what is elsewhere said of the Theodotians (Eccl. Hist., v. 28, 15. 18; see above, p. 200).^[236]