Luke as "Trojan Horse"

Luke–Acts is not an early, neutral piece of historiography but a late second-century, catholic “Trojan horse” written to domesticate an older, more radical gospel tradition centered on Paul and a Mark-like text. Luke 1:1-4 is read as a giveaway: the author admits that “many have undertaken to compile a narrative” and that he is only arranging what others handed down, so this gospel is explicitly non-apostolic and secondary. In contrast, the earliest notion of “gospel” is taken to be a written text belonging to the apostle Paul himself (“my gospel”), preserved in Marcionite circles. In that older usage “apostolic” simply means “of the apostle” (Paul), whereas later catholic writers redefine “apostolic tradition” to mean a diffuse chain running through the Twelve and their associates, which conveniently demotes a sharply Pauline canon and lets figures like Luke and Mark count as “apostolic” even though they are not apostles.

On this reading, the familiar story that Marcion “mutilated” Luke is a reversal of what actually happened. The four-gospel canon built around a revised Mark represents the real act of appropriation; Luke is a polished, self-consciously modest rewrite that absorbs and neutralizes a previously existing gospel used in the Marcionite tradition. Accusations that Marcion cut up Luke are seen as part of a broader orthodox topos about heretics stealing and corrupting manuscripts, even though early writers also acknowledge deliberate editing on the catholic side. An ancient witness sums up the polemical frame: Marcion, it is said, “supposing that the Scriptures were in error and that the devil had brought about additions … cut out from the Gospels necessary parts, such as the birth of the Saviour, and many others.”¹ Here, however, the “restorer of purity” may in fact preserve something closer to the original than the later, ecumenical synthesis represented by Luke and the fourfold canon.

¹Origen, Commentary on Psalm 77 (pre-third century).