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)
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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
Marcion, following St. Paul, declared that the Judaizing Church had
“corrupted the word of God,”(406) meaning such “logia” as, “I am not come
to destroy the Law or the Prophets.” “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot
or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, till all is
fulfilled.”(407) These texts would naturally find no place in the original
Pauline Gospels used by the Churches he had founded. In St. Luke’s Gospel,
accordingly, the Law and the Prophets are said to have been until John,
and since then the Gospel, “the kingdom of God.”(408) But the following
verse in St. Luke’s Gospel is, “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass,
than one tittle of the Law to fail”—a contradiction of the immediately
preceding verse, which declares that the Law has ceased with the
proclamation of the Gospel. This verse, therefore, cannot have existed in
its present form in the original Gospel of St. Luke, and must have been
modified when a reconciliation had been effected between Petrine and
Pauline Christianity.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that the verse should read
differently in Marcion’s Gospel, which contains the uncorrupted original
passage, and runs thus “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than
for one tittle of my words to fail;” or perhaps, “It is easier for heaven
and earth to pass, than one tittle of the words of the Lord to fail;” for
in this instance we have not the exact words.(409)
But though Marcion certainly endured the presence of texts in his Gospel
which militated against his system, he may have cut out other passages.
Passages, or words only, which he thought had crept into the text without
authority. This can scarcely be denied when the texts are examined which
are wanting in his Gospel. No strong conservative attachment to any
particular Gospels had grown up in the Church as yet; no texts had been
authoritatively sanctioned. As late as the end of the second century (A.D.
190), the Church of Rhossus was using its own Gospel attributed to Peter,
till Serapion, bishop of Antioch, thinking that it contained Docetic
errors, probably because of omissions, suppressed it,(410) and substituted
for it, in all probability, one of the more generally approved Gospels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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