ABSTRACT
The uniformity of the titles of the four later canonical Gospels speaks to either a deliberate editorial decision or a common template on which the four Gospels relied and which they imitated to some degree, partly in parallel, partly diverging from one another. The Gospel headings were thus not used without editorial reflection. Reading Irenaeus’s polemical attack, one first recognizes that he was aware of Marcion’s criticism of the pseudonymous products, whose editors he accuses of a lack of transparency and seriousness, as well as a lack of prudence, but above all that Marcion saw them as clinging to Judaism. Strikingly, both the fourth-century Syriac Ephrem and the fifth-century Armenian Eznik of Kolb report that Marcion used the Jewish Scriptures according to the Hebrew version. Irenaeus is obviously still aware of this context of controversy when he takes up the name “Gospel” and relates it to the literary composition of Mark.
