great supper, xiv. 15—24; the feast in the house of Levi, v. 27—32; the statements of Jesus eating with the Pharisees, vii. 36, xv. 2? If Marcion had any objection to such matters, he had still greater to marriage, and yet Jesus justifies his disciples for eating and drinking by the similitude of a marriage feast, himself being the bridegroom: v. 34, 35, "Can ye make the sons of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them: then will they fast in those days." And he bids his disciples to be ready "like men that wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding," (xii. 36), and makes another parable on a wedding feast (xiv. 7—10). Leaving these passages, it is impossible to see any dogmatic reason for excluding the others.(1)
The omission of a passage in every way so suitable to Marcion's system as the parable of the vineyard, xx. 9—16, is equally unintelligible upon the dogmatic theory.
Marcion is accused of falsifying xvi. 17, by altering [———],(2) making the passage read: "But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than for one tittle of my words to fail." The words in the canonical Gospel, it is argued, were too repugnant to him to be allowed to remain unaltered, representing as they do the permanency of "the Law" to which he was opposed.(3) Upon this hypothesis, why did he leave
x. 25 f. (especially v. 26) and xviii. 18 ff, in which the keeping of the law is made essential to life? or xvii. 14, where Jesus bids the lepers conform to the requirements of the law? or xvi. 29, where the answer is given to the rich man pleading for his relatives: "They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them"?(l) Hilgenfeld, however, with others, points out that it has been fully proved that the reading in Marcion's text is not an arbitrary alteration at all, but the original expression, and that the version in Luke xvi. 17, on the contrary, is a variation of the original introduced to give the passage an anti-Marcionitish tendency.(2) Here, again, it is clear that the supposed falsification is rather a falsification on the part of the editor of the third canonical Gospel.(3)
One more illustration may be given. Marcion is accused of omitting from xix. 9 the words: "forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham," [———] leaving merely:
"And Jesus said unto him: This day is salvation come to this house."4 Marcion's system, it is said, could not tolerate the phrase which was erased.(5) It was one, however, eminently in the spirit of his Apostle Paul, and in his favourite Epistle to the Galatians he retained the very parallel
passage iii. 7, "Ye know, therefore, that they which are of faith, these are the sons of Abraham."(1) How could he, therefore, find any difficulty in such words addressed to the repentant Zacchaeus, who had just believed in the mission of Christ? Moreover, why should he have erased the words here, and left them standing in xiii. 16, in regard to the woman healed of the "spirit of infirmity:" "and ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo! these eighteen years, to be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?" No reasoning can explain away the substantial identity of the two phrases. Upon what principle of dogmatic interest, then, can Marcion have erased the one while he retained the other?(2)
We have taken a very few passages for illustration, and treated them very briefly, but it may roundly be said that there is scarcely a single variation of Marcion's text regarding which similar reasons are not given, and which do not present similar anomalies in consequence of what has elsewhere been retained.(3) As we have already stated, much that is really contradictory to Marcion's system was found in his text, and much which either is not opposed or is favourable to it is omitted