Abstract:
In his huge and ambitious study Das älteste Evangelium und die Entstehung der kanonischen Evangelien Matthias Klinghardt undertakes a large scale effort at integrating the literary and the textual history of the canonical gospel tradition. A crucial part in this study is the reconstruction and the assessment of the Gospel from Marcion’s canon. Contrary to what the Church Fathers claim Klinghardt takes Marcion’s Gospel as the most important witness to the earliest gospel writing ever. In his analysis the three main sources for Marcion’s Gospel (Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Adamantius) represent three different copies of the Marcionite gospel text and are as such indicative of a text tradition that spans close to 200 years. Klinghardt studies the textual developments between the three copies and finds that where there is overlapping text between them they differ in 60% of the cases. Moreover, he claims that this level of disparity is also found in the canonical text tradition. The present paper examines this claim by studying seven manuscripts of canonical Luke (P45, P75, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05) from the same period and finds that the average level of agreement between any three is about 78%. Even the three manuscripts that are the textually most unique (P45, 01, 05) agree on average about 62% of the times. Hence, a level of agreement between the three witnesses to Marcion’s Gospel as reconstructed by Klinghardt of less than 50% is unparalleled.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
