These results, however, did not satisfy Volkmar,(5) who entered afresh upon a searching examination of the whole subject, and concluded that whilst, on the one hand, the
Gospel of Marcion was not a mere falsified and mutilated form of the Canonical Gospel, neither was it, on the other, an earlier work, and still less the original Gospel of Luke, but merely a Gnostic compilation from what, so far as we are concerned, may be called the oldest codex of Luke's Gospel, which itself is nothing more than a similar Pauline edition of the original Gospel. Volkmar's analysis, together with the arguments of Hilgenfeld, succeeded in convincing Ritschl,{ 1} who withdrew from his previous opinions, and, with those critics, merely maintained some of Marcion's readings to be more original than those of Luke,{ 2} and generally defended Marcion from the aspersions of the Fathers, on the ground that his procedure with regard to Luke's Gospel was precisely that of the Canonical Evangelists to each other;{ 3} Luke himself being clearly dependent both on Mark and Matthew.{ 4} Baur was likewise induced by Volkmar's and Hilgenfeld's arguments to modify his views;{ 5} but although for the first time he admitted that Marcion had altered the original of his Gospel frequently for dogmatic reasons, he still maintained that there was an older form of the Gospel without the earlier chapters, from which both Marcion and Luke directly constructed their Gospels;--both of them stood in the same line in regard to the original; both altered it; the one abbreviated, the other extended it.{ 6} Encouraged by this success, but not yet satisfied, Volkmar immediately undertook a further and more exhaustive examination of the text of Marcion, in the hope of finally settling the
discussion, and he again, but with greater emphasis, confirmed his previous results.(1) In the meantime Hilgenfeld(2) had seriously attacked the problem, and, like Hahn and Volkmar, had sought to reconstruct the text of Marcion, and, whilst admitting many more original and genuine readings in the text of Marcion, he had also decided that his Gospel was dependent on Luke, although he further concluded that the text of Luke had subsequently gone through another, though slight, manipulation before it assumed its present form. These conclusions he again fully confirmed after a renewed investigation of the subject.(3)