In the opening sentence of his examination of Marcion’s New Testament, Zahn avers that no church teacher of the second century occupies such an important position in the history of the ecclesiastical canon as does that early writer. If this is really so, it becomes all the more important for us to inquire whether traces of his influence may not be discoverable also in our witnesses to the text of the New Testament. [Sidenote: His New Testament.] Marcion’s New Testament, which was at the same time his entire Bible, consisted of two books of moderate compass—viz. a _Gospel-Book_, which he seems to have called Εὐαγγέλιον simply, and a collection of _ten Pauline Epistles_ called, probably by himself, τὸ Ἀποστολικὸν (_sc._ βιβλίον). The Epistles were arranged in an order which was evidently thought to correspond to that of their composition—viz., Gal., 1 and 2 Cor., Rom., 1 and 2 Thess., Laodicenos (= Ephes.), Col., Phil., Phm. He was unanimously accused by the Church teachers of having mutilated the ecclesiastical Bible in the manufacture of his own, and also of having corrupted the text here and there by means of interpolations, particularly in the case of Luke, which was the only Gospel he admitted. They complained that he used not the pen but the knife (only he used it for a purpose the opposite of that for which the scissors are employed nowadays), and the sponge, and also that he deleted not words merely but whole pages. They compared his work upon the manuscripts to that of a mouse.[206] And as for his disciples! Every day they were improving their Gospel. Seeing that he himself had not gone so far as to erase the writings of Paul altogether, his disciples continued his work, and removed whatever did not concur with their views.[207] But according to testimony extending over a long stretch of time, their text of the Scriptures seems to have undergone fewer alterations during that period than that of the Catholic Church (Zahn, _GK._ i. 613). In comparing the text of these two collections “it should be clearly understood that the Church’s text, whose treatment by Marcion is in question, is not to be identified with that of our Bible Societies, or of Tischendorf, or of Epiphanius, but was such a text as Marcion found in the Catholic Church or in the Roman community about the year 150. The text of the ecclesiastical exemplar on which Marcion based his labours can no longer be restored in every word, but sufficient means are at our command to give us a general idea of the form which the text of the Pauline Epistles presented in the second century, and at the same time to ascertain in many separate instances what text Marcion had before him. It turns out in many cases that what seems strange in Marcion’s text to one who compares it with the _textus receptus_, or with one of our modern critical editions, without knowing much about the history of the text, is by no means peculiar to Marcion, but was pretty common in the West in early times.