Marcion's Legacy
Recently, I've been very interested in Marcion. He was a second century Christian who produced the first Christian Bible. His canon consisted of the Evangelion and the Apostolikon. The Evangelion is a shorter version of the gospel of Luke, and the Apostolikon consists of shorter versions of 10 letters of Paul (no pastoral epistles). We don't have full manuscripts of those texts, but several early Christians cited them. Using those citations, scholars have produced several reconstructions of the texts.
Many scholars believe that Marcion redacted the gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul. After looking into the arguments, I'm convinced of the opposite position. I think that Marcion used the texts that he had available and that later authors expanded those texts. In particular, I think that the author of Luke-Acts created the gospel of Luke by expanding the Evangelion. I think that the order of the synoptic gospels is Mark, Evangelion, Matthew, Luke. There are some scholars who hold the same or a similar position, including Matthias Klinghardt, Markus Vinzent, Mark Bilby, Jason BeDuhn, David Litwa, and more.
Is anyone interested in discussing/debating this topic? I prefer to focus on the Evangelion rather than the Apostolikon, because we have way more attestation to the text.
