The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
Thus the Gospel of Marcion may be Luke’s original Gospel. But there is
every reason to believe that Luke’s Gospel went through considerable
alteration, probably passed through a second edition with considerable
additions to it made by the evangelist’s own hand, before it became what
it now is, the Canonical Luke.
He may have found reason to alter the arrangement of certain incidents; to
insert whole paragraphs which had come to him since he had composed his
first rough sketch; to change certain expressions where he found a
difference in accounts of the same sayings, or to combine several.
Moreover, the first edition was published in the full heat of the Pauline
controversy. Its strong Paulinianism lies on the surface. But afterwards,
when this excitement had passed away, and the popular misconception of
Pauline sola‐fidianism had become a general offence to morals and
religion, then Luke came under the influence of St. John, and tempered his
Gospel by adding to it incidents Paul did not care to have inserted in the
Gospel he wished his converts to receive, or the accuracy of which, as
disagreeing with his own views, he was disposed to question.
Of this I shall have more to say presently. It is necessary, in the first
place, briefly to show that Marcion’s Gospel contained a different
arrangement of the narrative from the Canonical Luke, and was without many
passages which it is not possible to believe he wilfully excluded. For
instance, in Marcion’s Gospel: “And as he entered into a certain village,
there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: and they
lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. And
when he saw them, he said unto them, Go, show yourselves unto the priests.
And it came to pass, that as they went, they were cleansed. And many
lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them
was cleansed saving Naaman the Syrian. And one of them, when he saw that
he was healed,” &c. Here the order is Luke xvii. 12, 13, 14, iv. 27, xvii.
15. Such a disturbance of the text in the Canonical Gospel could serve no
purpose, would not support any peculiar view of Marcion, and cannot
therefore have been a wilful alteration. And in the first chapter of
Marcion’s Gospel this is the sequence of verses whose parallels in St.
Luke are: iii. 1, iv. 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 16, 20 21, 22,
23, 28, 29, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44.
Thus the order of events is different in the two Gospels. Christ goes
first to Capernaum in the “Gospel of the Lord,” and afterwards to
Nazareth, an inversion of the order as given in the Gospel of St. Luke.
Again, in this instance, no purpose was served by this transposition. It
is unaccountable on the theory that Marcion corrupted the Gospel of Luke;
but if we suppose that Luke revised the arrangement of his Gospel after
its first publication, the explanation is simple enough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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