sion?
There is room to doubt whether he would quite maintain as much as
this himself. He has gone over the old ground, and reproduced the
old arguments; but these arguments already lay before Hilgenfeld
and Volkmar in their elaborate researches, and simply as a matter
of scale the chapter in 'Supernatural Religion' can hardly profess
to compete with these.

Supposing, for the moment, that the author has proved the points
that he sets himself to prove, to what will this amount? He will
have shown (a) that the patristic statement that Marcion mutilated
St. Luke is not to be accepted at once without further question;
(b) that we cannot depend with perfect accuracy upon the details
of his Gospel, as reconstructed from the statements of Tertullian
and Epiphanius; (c) that it is difficult to explain the whole of
Marcion's alleged omissions, on purely, dogmatic grounds--assuming
the consistency of his method.

With the exception of the first, I do not think these points are
proved to any important extent; but, even if they were, it would
still, I believe, be possible to show that Marcion's Gospel was
based upon our third Synoptic by arguments which hardly cross or
touch them at all.

But, before we proceed further, it is well that we should have
some idea as to the contents of the Marcionitic Gospel. And here
we are brought into collision with the second of the propositions
just enunciated. Are we able to reconstruct that Gospel from the
materials available to us with any tolerable or sufficient
approach to accuracy? I believe no one who has gone into the
question carefully would deny that we can. Here it is necessary to
define and guard our statements, so that they may cover exactly as
much ground as they ought and no more.

Our author quotes largely, especially from Volkmar, to show that
the evidence of Tertullian and Epiphanius is not to be relied
upon. When we refer to the chapter in which Volkmar deals with
this subject [Endnote 209:1]--a chapter which is an admirable
specimen of the closeness and thoroughness of German research--we
do indeed find some such expressions, but to quote them alone
would give an entirely erroneous impression of the conclusion to
which the writer comes. He does not say that the statements of
Tertullian and Epiphanius are untrustworthy, simply and
absolutely, but only that they need to be applied with caution
_on certain points_. Such a point is especially the silence
of these writers as