Verse 25: “O fools and sluggish-hearted in believing all those things which he said to you,” in place of, “in believing all those things which the prophets spake.”[449]
Verse 27 was omitted.
Verse 32: “And while he opened to us the Scriptures,” omitted.
Verse 44: “These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you.” What follows in St. Luke, “that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms, concerning me,” was omitted.
Verse 45 was omitted.
Verse 46 ran: “That thus it behoved Christ to suffer,” &c.; so that the whole sentence read, “These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, That thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.”
Verses 52 and 53 were omitted.
I shall now make a few remarks on some of the passages absent from Marcion's Gospel, or which, in it, differ from the Canonical Gospel of St. Luke.
1. It was not attributed to St. Luke. It was Τὸ Εὐαγγέλιον, not κατὰ Λουκᾶν. Tertullian explicitly says, “Marcion inscribes no name on his Gospel,”[450] and in the “Dialogue on the Right Faith” it is asserted that he protested his Gospel was the Gospel, the only one; and that the multiplicity of Gospels used by Catholics, and their discrepancies, were a proof that none of these other Gospels were genuine. He even went so far as to assert that his Gospel was written by Christ,[451] and when closely pressed on this point, and asked whether Christ wrote the account of his own passion and resurrection, he said it was so, but afterwards hesitated, and asserted that it was probably added by St. Paul.
This shows plainly enough that Marcion had received the Gospel, probably from the Church of Sinope, where it was the only one known, and that he had heard nothing about St. Luke as its author; indeed, knew nothing of its origin. He treated it with the utmost veneration, and in his veneration for it attributed its authorship to the Lord himself; supposing the words of St. Paul, “the Gospel of Christ,”[452] “the Gospel of his Son,”[453] “the Gospel of God,”[454] to mean that Jesus Christ was the actual author of the book.