T.J. Lang: Did Tertullian Read Marcion in Latin?: Grammatical Evidence from the Argument Regarding the Greek of Ephesians 3:9 in the Latin of Against Marcion 5.18.1

In his landmark work on Maricon, Adolf von Harnack was the first modern scholar to propose that Tertullian only knew Marcion's Gospel and Apostolikon in Latin translation. This proposition obtained early support but has been questioned in more recent years, the common conjecture now being that Tertullian himself translated Marcion's Greek into Latin as needed. In deciding this matter scholars have conventionally compared the citations of Marcion reproduced in Tertullian's Against Marcion with corresponding Gospel and Pauline citations elsewhere in Tertullian's corpus and then other extant Latin traditions. This nexus of data is then evaluated in terms of vocabulary and stylistic variation. The results of such a method are, however, largely a matter of how one is predisposed to read the evidence. In this paper I propose that a way forward in this debate is to attend more closely to potential argumentative implications of a Latin versus Greek Vorlage and, specifically, to instances where arguments presented in Tertullian's Latin might unravel if retrojected into Marcion's Greek. I contend that we find a potential "smoking gun" in Against Marcion 5.18.1, where Tertullian's evaluation of Marcion's alleged emendation of Ephesians 3:9 makes sense on Latin terms but mostly disintegrates when considered in Greek. This suggests that either (1) Tertullian is indeed interacting within Marcion in Latin translation (as Harnack originally proposed), and so is developing his arguments accordingly, or (2) he is exploiting the surface of his own Latin translation to persuade his Latin readers, even if by rather disingenuous means.