thumb|[[Claire Clivaz has argued that Papyrus 69 is "a witness to a Marcionite edition of Luke's Gospel".]]
The Gospel of Marcion, called by its adherents the Gospel of the Lord, or more commonly the Gospel (Evangelion), was a text used by the mid-2nd-century Christian teacher Marcion of Sinope to the exclusion of the other gospels. The majority of scholars agree that this gospel was a later revised version of the Gospel of Luke, though several involved arguments for Marcion priority have been put forward in recent years. Even if the Gospel is a later redaction, it is unclear whether Marcion produced it himself or simply discovered an earlier redaction developed by someone else.
There are debates as to whether several verses of Marcion's gospel are attested firsthand in a manuscript in Papyrus 69, a hypothesis proposed by Claire Clivaz and put into practice by Jason BeDuhn. Theodor Zahn (1892), Adolf von Harnack (1921), Kenji Tsutsui (1992), Jason BeDuhn (2013), Matthias Klinghardt (2015/2020, 2021),
Like the Gospel of Mark, Marcion's gospel lacked any nativity story. Luke's account of the baptism of Jesus was also absent. The gospel began, roughly, as follows:
Other Lukan passages that did not appear in Marcion's gospel include the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
While Marcion preached that the God who had sent Jesus Christ was an entirely new, alien god, distinct from the God who had created the world, this view was not explicitly taught in Marcion's gospel.
Patristic hypothesis
The proto-orthodox and orthodox Church Fathers maintained that Marcion edited Luke to fit his own theology, Marcionism, and modern scholars such as Bruce M. Metzger, Bart D. Ehrman, and Roth have maintained this as well. The late 2nd-century writer Tertullian stated that Marcion, "expunged [from the Gospel of Luke] all the things that oppose his view... but retained those things that accord with his opinion".
According to this view, Marcion eliminated the first two chapters of Luke concerning the nativity, and began his gospel at Capernaum making modifications to the remainder suitable to Marcionism. The differences in the texts below are interpreted by advocates of this hypothesis as evidence of Marcion editing Luke to omit the Hebrew Prophets and to better support a dualistic view of the earth as evil.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Comparable passages in Luke and Marcion
!scope="col"|Luke
!scope="col"|Marcion's Gospel
|-----
| O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken (24:25)
| O foolish and hard of heart to believe in all that I have told you (24:25)
|-----
| They began to accuse him, saying, 'We found this man perverting our nation' (23:2)
| They began to accuse him, saying, 'We found this man perverting our nation [...] and destroying the law and the prophets.' (23:2)
|-----
| I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth (10:21)
| I thank you, heavenly Father... (10:21)
|}
Late 19th- and early 20th-century theologian Adolf von Harnack, in agreement with the traditional account of Marcion as revisionist, theorized that Marcion believed there could be only one true gospel, all others being fabrications by pro-Jewish elements, determined to sustain worship of Yahweh; and that the true gospel was given directly to Paul the Apostle by Christ himself, but was later corrupted by those same elements who also corrupted the Pauline epistles. In this understanding, Marcion saw the attribution of this gospel to Luke the Evangelist as a fabrication, so he began what he saw as a restoration of the original gospel as given to Paul. Harnack wrote that: