This issue appears to be related to the issue of whether canonical Luke/Acts knew Josephus’ Wars and Antiquities. As Steve Mason argues, I believe persuasively, canonical Luke/Acts takes an earlier form of the text and expands it. The expansion seems clear in some places, such as a re-write of 3:1 to include details that make no sense in context.[1] In other places Luke exhibits a more “primitive” text, which is ascribed to the earlier form of the text “Luke” is working with. Since Josephus didn’t publish Antiquities until about 94 CE, this places Luke/Acts to the late 1st century at the earliest. Some argue for a later date, noting that there is no third-party witness to Luke until at least the second half of the 2nd Century CE. No matter when you date canonical Luke within this window, you have the possibility of two manuscripts circulating within it: an earlier form and the canonical form.

It appears that Marcion enters the picture in Rome sometime around 140 CE in possession of a gospel. He is exposed to another gospel in Rome, and declares that his gospel has been corrupted, then publishes his gospel, together with some Pauline letters.

The majority view, that Marcion took what is canonical Luke and excised large sections to conform it to his theological views, principally his theory of the “Evil Creator,”[2] strikes me as the least likely position to be true. BeDuhn has the better argument on this, in my opinion.

As noted above, we now have at least 3 reconstructions of Marcion’s gospel, and these range from 3,000 to 11,000 words. Unless we find a full text, I don’t see how we can possibly know which is correct. My gut tells me Klinghardt includes too much, but gut feelings are worthless in these debates.

The relevant late 1st to early 2nd century manuscripts don’t provide clear proof one way or the other. Whether you are looking at P4, P75 or P69, you can’t be sure you are looking at Marcion’s text or the Lukan text unless you find in them something that later defenders of the Lukan text explicitly say Marcion redacted. In fact, at least one scholar, Claire Clivaz, argues that P69 is the Marcionite text.

Further, if you accept the possibility that the Lukan text and the earlier text could be circulating at the same time, finding a mid-first century manuscript that is clearly Lukan would not solve any questions presented in this dispute.

I frankly don’t understand how anyone who spends any time on this could find any of the competing views to be wacky. Outisde of the mainstream, perhaps, but not wacky.

[1] The claim that Chapters 1 and 2 are an addition to the text has nothing to do with Jospehus.

[2] Litwa’s book The Evil Creator is a great resource on this.

@ Robert. When you get down in the weeds of some of the claims that Klinghardt and people like Markus Vinzent have made, for example that Marcion was the original gospel author and that all cononical gospels are based on his gospel, I agree that is whacky. I don’t see why they felt the need to go there at all.

@ Porphyry. It’s not a typo, and I didn’t make it up, but I don’t recall my source offhand, so I will have to make the effort to find it.

Sorry, was busy trying to find my source. I apologize for the ambiguity, but I did mean that Marcion’s gospel disagreed with the version he found in Rome, that he claimed the version he found in Rome was a corruption of the one he brought with him and that he published his own version to compete, as it were, with the Roman version. My source for the claim is BeDuhn, The First New Testament p. 32 of the paperback version.

@ Robert. Fair enough. But lets take that observation further. Suppose that the inauthentic gospel adhered to by the Roman community was oral. Couldn’t that push back the date of the written Lukan gospel to after 140?

One can imagine that once Marcion published his collection of the Evangelion and the Apostolikon there would be pressure on competing groups to publish their own versions, so it needn’t require going much past 140 for canonical Luke to appear. Even if doesn’t appear until 150, Irenaeus was only about 20 then, which gives him a 50 year window to write. Also, some scholars view the fact that the heresiologists were writing as some indication that the battles had not yet been won at the time.

For the record, I have no dog in this fight. I think viewing canonical Luke as a re-written form of Maricon’s gospel is plausible. Alternatively it could be that Luke existed when Marcion arrived in Rome, and that he and Marcion both rely on an earlier form of the text. Or it could be something altogether different. I do not buy that Marcion was the author of his gospel, but maybe he wrote down the oral form of the gospel he brought with him from Sinope. We are in the black box of history here.

One thing we do not know, at all, is how quickly manuscripts could spread among the cultural elites that produced and consumed them. I suspect, admittedly with no evidence, that it was a lot faster than we currently imagine.