Last time I thought a bit with Robert M Price about a late date for the gospels thinking about topics like Marcion. It seemed that Mark and Matthew alluded to the Jewish revolt (though Mark was a bit of a stretch), and that all synoptics seemed to be post-Plutarch with the key allusion to the death of Cleomenes III. Let’s shake that up a little with Dennis R MacDonald.

Marcion’s gospel has traditionally been interpreted as an abridged version of the Gospel of Luke (e.g., by Tertullian).  It contains an abridged gospel of Luke, and instead of Acts it has some modified Pauline epistles.  We don’t have physical copies of Marcion’s gospel, but we do have it from writings of his opponents.  The current debate is whether Marcion abridges Luke, or whether Marcion’s gospel is earlier than Luke. 

Dennis MacDonald argues the synoptic gospels are heavily indebted to Greek poetry.  Mark and Luke are the masters of this.  From Patristic sources we know Marcion never intended to have anything beyond his first text except the epistles of Paul – no Acts of the Apostles.  MacDonald argues Acts are a rival to the Aeneid by Vergil.  If Marcion’s priority is right someone had to come along and expand him with Acts that has all these Homeric imitations in it.  Marcion’s gospel issues from around 140-170 CE.  Around that time, nobody is concerned about rivalry with the Aeneid.  People were interested in the Aeneid when Luke was writing under Vespasian and Trajan.  Marcion’s gospel also didn’t include the first two chapters of the gospel of Luke.  But the infancy narrative also imitates the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite from Greek poetry – and there are other imitations throughout Luke.  Marcion’s gospel seems to inadvertently preserve stories that indirectly imitate Homer. 

To maintain Marcion priority you have to say canonical Luke saw Marcion’s gospel and decided to do full blown Homeric imitation, or by contrast Marcion didn’t like these Homeric imitations and decided to truncate or remove them entirely in order to promote the project he was working on.  Marcion seems to, as Tertullian thought, abbreviated Luke for theological reasons.  It also would have been very expensive for the early church to be dealing with so many texts.  And so what is likely is Marcion saw this huge corpus of texts and became selective with them.  He simplified the stories in order to get to the punchline.  Marcion’s gospel has stories that have echoes of Greek poetry that readers wouldn’t recognize, so they are probably leftover traces from when Marcion abridged Luke.  For example, Luke has Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth that we find in shorter version in Mark and Matthew and Luke has expanded it patterned it after Odyssey 1 and 2.  Marcion still has slights hints of the Greek allusions. 

Luke has also reworked the Homeric allusion to polyphemus in Mark’s account of the Gerasene Demoniac.   Absent in Marcion are references to a boat, the demoniac living in a cave, his great strength, etc, but the story still comes from Homer.  Mark creates the demoniac story imitating Homeric epics, and Luke expands on this in his own way, and Marcion has tried to remove the references to Greek poetry though echoes of it are still present in Marcion.  The reasonable conclusion is Marcion abridged Luke.  Key in considering Marcion’s gospel is the sections it omits are the most heavily influenced by Greek poetry

A reason Marcion uses Luke is because Luke is more faithful in preserving the Q sayings than Matthew.  What seems to be going on is Marcion deleting parts of Luke, which makes sense as a strategy since Marcion deletes parts of Paul.  Marcion would have wanted to get rid of Acts because in his day the rivalry with Vergil wasn’t an issue.  Also, Acts contradicts Paul’s letters in a number of places so why not go to Paul as the source rather than Luke’s interpretation.  Instead of meandering Acts, why not get to the heart of the matter.  Marcion would have wanted to create a gospel that was a fraction of the size of the collection of codices.  He wanted a smaller book for people to copy that would then lead to wider distribution.  Jacob Berman makes the insightful observation that in Paul’s canonical letters that we have sometimes we seem to have multiple letters stitched together and what Marcion seems to have done is shorten and smooth out Paul to get rid of these inconsistencies, which suggests Paul preceded Marcion, not that a later writer expanded on Marcion to create a canonical Paul. 

Luke seems to not have recognized some of Mark’s Homeric imitations, in some he recognizes them and has to correct them like why there are grown men leaving their homes in order to fish for men, and in others like Mark’s Jesus reflecting the death of Hector Luke doesn’t like it so he changed it to resemble the forgiving death of Socrates.    

As far as dates, as I said last time I don’t want to date the synoptic gospels prior to Plutarch because central to Mark’s theme is going beyond/correcting Paul with an imitation by Jesus in the light of the death of Cleomenes III in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” was written over a period of time, but the bulk of the work was likely composed between approximately 96 AD and 117 AD. This was during the reign of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. As I said above, Dennis MacDonald thinks the Aeneid-engaging Acts was written by Luke under Vespasian to Trajan. (69-117) because that is when people were interested in engaging with the Aeneid in that way. This would not have been an issue in Marcion’s time. Given what I said last time about Matthew and the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 AD to 136 AD what seems to have happened is Mark wrote early in the second century, Luke came next including a more scrupulous preserving of Q than Matthew, and Matthew saw in Mark’s apocalypse hints of what would later happen with the leaflets in the revolt and so expanded this into Matthew gospel following the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

Alan Garrow’ in The Gospel of Matthew’s Dependence on the Didache and Revelation tries to make the case that Matthew was dependent on Mark and Luke. Note as I said above Luke preserves a more authentic Q than Matthew. Garrow argues that his model provides a good explanation of both the high verbatim and the low verbatim passages. High verbatim passages are the result of Matthew directly copying from Luke. They are places where Matthew has just Luke in front of him. Here, Matthew is copying Luke “without distraction.” Low verbatim passages are the result of Matthew conflating Luke with Q, i.e. places where Matthew does not agree as much with Luke because he is distracted by one of Luke’s sources, Q .As he expresses it, “High DT [double tradition] passages are best explained by Matthew’s copying of Luke without interference from any other entity.” Mark Goodacre has responded the high verbatim passages often come from Matthew and Luke using Mark. However, some passages, such as the genealogies in Matthew and Luke are too different to come from Q and yet both Matthew and Luke introducing them into the Jesus tradition seems too coincidental to be anything other than Matthew responding to Luke or Luke responding to Matthew.

I have 2 posts on the highly sophisticated theology of the 2 genealogies in Matthew and Luke here (though the ideas have been updated in this post):

Christmas and Genealogies: The Adoption of Jesus by Joseph in Matthew and Luke

Merry Midrash: A Late Christmas Present with Dr Robert M Price

I would push the needle toward the idea that Paul’s letters were first, then Q, then Mark, then Luke, and finally Matthew. – The synoptics no earlier than Plutarch’s Parallel lives at the turn of the century, and so I disagree with dating Mark between 66-74 with the war since this too early.