Over the past few years, scholarship has taken a new interest in the
study of Marcion and particularly in his Gospel. Most recently several
attempts have been made at reconstructing this Gospel, and its role in
the Synoptic question is being discussed. One of the most detailed and
crucial information that we possess derives from Tertullian’s preface to
Marcion’s Gospel and his Antitheses with which Marcion
himself introduced and defended his Gospel against earlier misuses. The
present monograph first looks at Tertullian’s ways of prefacing his
works to then move to his preface of his antimarcionite writings,
especially Adversus Marcionem, to then give the text, translation
and a close reading and interpretation of his introduction to the Antitheses
and Marcion’s Gospel in the extended preface to book IV of Adversus
Marcionem. As a result, the reader will get a better understanding
of both Tertullian’s literary response to Marcion and Marcion’s Antitheses
and his Gospel, but also gain glimpses of what despite all the rhetoric
historically might have provoked Tertullian’s response, namely more
intellectual proximity between the two interlocutors than the battle on
the surface would intimate.