The Gospel of Marcion and "Secret Mark"

The surviving data about Evangelion fits best if Marcion’s gospel is not an earlier source used by the synoptics, nor simply an abridged Luke, but a consciously edited reconstruction of an earlier gospel made from Luke and Matthew together. When the pericopes of Luke are divided into four categories—triple tradition, double tradition, Mark–Luke parallels, and special Luke—the percentage of passages attested in Evangelion is highest in triple and double tradition, much lower in Lukan Sondergut, and very low in Mark–Luke only material. This pattern matches the expectation for an editor who is comparing Matthew and Luke to recover what they hold in common and who largely distrusts material found in only one of them. On this view Marcion (or the circle behind Evangelion) is a kind of second-century source critic, trying to peel away what they regarded as Judaizing or corrupt accretions in Matthew and Luke in order to get back to a purer gospel, possibly imagined as a Mark-like original that had since been obscured—one reason the Marcionite gospel could be referred to as “according to Mark” and why Marcion’s own name may echo Mark. If so, then the Marcionites were not blindly mutilating an established Luke but were making historically shrewd choices that, in several respects (no infancy narrative, suspicion of later Jewish-Christian elements), line up uncannily with modern judgments about what is secondary in the synoptic tradition. The broader implication is that early Christians already thought in terms of an “original” gospel text behind divergent canonical forms, much as Celsus complained that “some believers, as though from a drinking bout, alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times,” and that Marcion’s project can be seen as one radical attempt to restore that lost original rather than as a simple rival narrative.