Now it is quite inconceivable, in view of the implacable hostility of the Church to Marcion, that his text, condemned as it was unceasingly as being heretical and spurious, should have exerted any positive influence on that of the Church.[208] It follows, accordingly, that all those things in Marcion’s Bible that seem to the uninitiated to be peculiar to it alone, but which are attested by Catholic manuscripts, versions, and Patristic writers, were not invented by Marcion, but taken by him from the Church’s Bible of that time, or from one such Bible at all events, and were only gradually ousted from the text used by the Church.”[209] All this, which is taken word for word, with the exception of a slight change in the last sentence, from Zahn’s dissertation of the year 1889 (p. 636), should even at that time have been self-evident, but, like Zahn’s further statements in the same place, has not yet been sufficiently attended to, especially in our commentaries on Luke and the Pauline Epistles. He points out, _e.g._, that Tertullian, in speaking of the change of the address “ad Ephesios” to “Laodicenos,” credits Marcion with the intention of being “et in isto diligentissimus explorator,” so that it is possible that he compared several manuscripts in order to discover the original wording.[210] In such cases, therefore, the question may be asked whether Marcion may not really have preserved the original text, and whether his text, so far as it is corroborated by any independent tradition, should not be estimated much higher than it is by the textual critics of the present.[211] Zahn deserves all the more credit for giving such careful attention to questions relating to the text, seeing that the subject of his investigation was merely the history of the canon. He has dealt chiefly with those passages in which Marcion’s intentional alterations have been preserved. [Sidenote: His “Emendations.”] Reference may be made, _e.g._, to the pages in the first volume of his History, entitled _Minor Emendations_, wherein it is shown how Marcion, in his hostility to the Old Testament with its God of Righteousness, omitted the quotations from the Old Testament altogether, or dropped the introductory formula of quotation in Rom. i. 17, xii. 19, 2 Cor. iv. 13; excluded all the references to Abraham in Galatians except in iv. 22; altered ἀγνοοῦντες τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ δικαιοσύνην in Rom. x. 3 to ἀγνοοῦντες τὸν θεόν; removed the words γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικὸς, γενόμενον ὑπὸ νόμον from Gal. iv. 4; changed the active construction into the passive in 1 Cor. iii. 17; and elsewhere strove after greater condensation, lucidity, and brevity of expression. Marcion, says Zahn, had good grounds for believing that the text of the Scriptures had not remained unchanged during the century that had elapsed since their composition, though that might be said with more truth of the Gospels and the Acts than of the Epistles; but to