Joseph B. Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts: A Defining
Struggle.
University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price.
One of the most important, pivotal, and
impossible-to-find works elucidating canon history is the 1942 study
Marcion and the New Testament by John Knox. Joseph Tyson is a
successor his professor could be proud of, and in the present volume,
Tyson re-presents Knox’s compelling case, especially for the benefit of
the majority who will never have read it. And Tyson proceeds to update
the thesis with reference to subsequent scholarship on Luke-Acts, much
of which is quite relevant to Knox’s thesis without having it in view.
In sort, Marcion and Luke-Acts bears pretty much the same
relation to Knox’s Marcion and the New Testament as Heikki
Räisänen’s The Messianic Secret in Mark’s Gospel bears to Wrede’s
masterpiece The Messianic Secret. In both cases, the original
theory only comes out stronger than before. But what was Knox’s thesis?
Knox had an epiphany that F.C. Baur was only partly right about the New
Testament books being divisible into those embodying Petrine/Jamesian
Torah-Christianity on the one hand, Pauline Torah-free Christianity on
the other, and mediating nascent Catholicism. Baur saw the first camp as
akin to the Ebionites and Nazarenes discussed by Justin and Jerome. The
second group were the colleagues and converts of Paul, who found faith
in Christ and baptism in his name to be sufficient. The third
represented a compromise between these two. What occurred to Knox was
that Baur needn’t have cast about for hypothetical first-second-century
entities to have waged this theological war. It would make as much or
more sense if the Christians promoting freedom from the Old Testament
Law were simply the
Marcionite
Church,
with the Christians retaining the Torah simply being Catholics who
opposed Marcionism. The “Catholicizing” documents were still exactly
that, representing, not an ecumenical compromise and merger proposal,
but rather a co-opting of Marcionite heroes and writings as a scheme for
absorbing Marcionites into the emerging Catholic Church. The Book of
Acts would be the Ministry of Truth version of early Christian history
as it should have been. Paul and Peter are paralleled in such a
fashion that no Marcionite could reasonably vilify Peter since he seemed
cut from Pauline cloth. No Catholic could any longer damn Paul as a
heretic since he was just so Petrine. Just as Genesis portrays Edomite-Israelite
relations by telling stories of Esau and Jacob, so does Acts try to
neutralize Marcionism by retelling happy stories of Peter and Paul.
Entailed in Knox’s theory was the Tübingen view (one of them) that
Marcion’s gospel was not, as the church fathers claimed, a tendentious
abridgment of Luke, but was rather a lightly edited version of an
earlier version of Luke than we have in the canon. Knox believed that
the emerging Catholics reacted to the Marcionite canon of the “the
Gospel and the Apostle” (the one gospel plus ten Pauline letters in
shorter versions) by retaining the categories but stuffing more books
into them in order to dilute the straight Paulinism of the originals.
Marcion’s gospel was padded out as the sanitized Luke and supplemented
by Matthew, Mark, and John (no doubt after a similar bowdlerizing at the
hands of Bultmann’s Ecclesiastical Redactor). The Pauline Epistles were
also padded (Winsome Munro would eventually show exactly how and where),
and the Pastorals were added as a paradigm for reading Paul in a
Catholic way. Acts supplemented the gospels so as to widen the circle of
true apostles beyond Paul, and for the same reason a rag-tag collection
of letters ostensibly of other apostles (or at least by people with
similar names!) was added on. The theory is compelling and, I think,
definitive. David Trobisch and Stephan Hermann Huller have carried the
theory further, identifying the Ecclesiastical Redactor, the author of
Acts and of the Pastorals as Polycarp of Smyrna.
If
one may fantasize, it would have been great if Tyson’s valuable book
could have accompanied a long-overdue reprint of Knox’s.
A
pair of dissenting notes are in order, if only to help refine an
excellent theory further. First, Tyson had for a while seriously weighed
the possibility of eliminating the Marcionite middle man, even as the
early Ritschl had, seeing the Marcionite gospel itself as the draft
subsequently enlarged by the Redactor (i.e., Polycarp). But by the time
he got to writing this book, Tyson was convinced otherwise. One of the
reasons was this: “Although the simpler version of the earl Ritschl may
seem more attractive, it would require us to believe something that is
highly improbable, namely that a proto-orthodox author would base his
work on a writing that he regarded as heretical” (pp. 84-85). Not at
all! Keep in mind the Sitz-im-Leben as Tyson himself brilliantly
draws it: the Catholic faction is coveting the Marcionite sheep and
cannot hope to acquire them without welcoming their heretical scriptures
in the bargain. In order to do this, they must, quite simply, bowdlerize
them, both the Marcionite gospel and epistles.
Second, Tyson several times “conclude[s] that the Acts of the Apostles
was probably written about 120-125 C.E., just when Marcion was beginning
to attract adherents” (p. 78). But that can’t be right. Surely it is
more natural to suggest that it was only once Marcionite Christianity
was well established as a rival and a threat that Catholicism decided it
must try to take the wind out of the Marcionite sails. This makes Acts
and the redaction of Luke some twenty-five years later. That still gives
Polycarp time to have done the job.