said: "Absolute completeness in regard to that which Marcion's Gospel did not contain is not to be reckoned upon in his Scholia. He has certainly not intended to pass over anything, but in the eagerness which so easily renders men superficial and blind much has escaped him."(l)
Hahn bears similar testimony to the incompleteness of Epiphanius. "It was not his purpose," he says, "fully to notice all falsifications, variations, and omissions, although he does mark most of them, but merely to extract from the Gospel of Marcion, as well as from his collection of Epistles, what seemed to him well suited for refutation."(2) But he immediately adds: "When he quotes a passage from Marcion's text, however, in which such falsifications occur, he generally,—but not always,—notes them more or less precisely, and he had himself laid it down as a subsidiary object of his work to pay attention to such falsifications."(3) A little further on he says: "In the quotations of the remaining passages which Epiphanius did not find different from the Gospel of Luke, and where he therefore says nothing of falsification or omission, he is often very free, neither adhering strictly to the particular words, nor to their arrangement, but his favourite practice is to give their substance and sense for the purpose of refuting his opponent. He presupposes the words known from the Gospel of Luke."(4)
It must be stated, however, that both Volkmar(5) and Hilgenfeld(6) consider that the representations of
Tertullian and Epiphanius supplement each other and enable the contents of Marcion's Gospel to be ascertained with tolerable certainty. Yet a few pages earlier Volkmar had pointed out that: "The ground for a certain fixture of the text of the Marcionitish Gospel, however, seems completely taken away by the fact that Tertullian and Epiphanius, in their statements regarding its state, not merely repeatedly seem to, but in part actually do, directly contradict each other."(1) Hahn endeavours to explain some of these contradictions by imagining that later Marcionites had altered the text of their Gospel, and that Epiphanius had the one form and Tertullian another;(2) but such a doubt only renders the whole of the statements regarding the work more uncertain and insecure. That it is not without some reason, however, appears from the charge which Tertullian brings against the disciples of Marcion: "for they daily alter it (their Gospel) as they are daily refuted by us."(3) In fact, we have no assurance whatever that the work upon which Tertullian and Epiphanius base their charge against Marcion of falsification and mutilation of Luke was Marcion's original Gospel at all, and we certainly have no historical evidence on the point.(4)
The question even arises, whether Tertullian, and indeed Epiphanius, had Marcion's Gospel in any shape before them when they wrote, or merely his work the
"Antitheses."(1) In commencing his onslaught on Marcion's Gospel, Terlullian says: "Marcion seems (videtur) to have selected Luke, to mutilate it."(2) This is the first serious introduction of his "mutilation hypothesis," which he thenceforward presses with so much assurance, but the expression is very uncertain for so decided a controversialist, if he had been able to speak more positively.(3) We have seen that it is admitted that Epiphanius wrote without again comparing the Gospel of Marcion with Luke, and it is also conceded that Tertullian at least had not the Canonical Gospel, but in professing to quote Luke evidently does so from memory, and approximates his text to Matthew, with which Gospel, like most of the Fathers, he was better acquainted. This may be illustrated by the fact that both Tertullian and Epiphanius reproach Marcion with erasing passages from the Gospel of Luke, which never were in Luke at all.(4) In one place Tertullian says: "Marcion, you must also remove this from the Gospel: 'I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,'(3) and: 'It is not meet to take the children's bread, and give it to dogs,'(6) in order, be it known, that Christ may not seem to be an Israelite."(7) The "Great African"
