Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [23]
According to some early Christians, the gospel of Matthew is the earliest, which is why it appears first in the canon. However, as noted, the gospels have been arranged in virtually every order, and scholars of the past few centuries have considered Mark to be the earliest, used by the writers/compilers of Matthew and Luke. Going against this trend, Waite evinced that Luke was first, followed by Mark, John and Matthew. In fact, these gospels were written not from each other but from common source material, including the narrative, or Diegesis, as it is in the original Greek. The first gospel of the "narrative" type, in actuality, appears to have been the proto-Lukan text, the "Gospel of the Lord," published in Rome by the Gnostic-Christian Marcion, as part of his "New Testament." As Waite relates:
The first New Testament that ever appeared, was compiled and published by Marcion. It was in the Greek language. It consisted of "The Gospel," and "The Apostolicon." No acts-no Revelation, and but one gospel. The Apostolicon comprised ten of Paul's Epistles, as follows: Galatians, 1 sl and 211u1 Corinthians, Romans, except the 151h and 161h chapters, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon and Philippians; arranged in the order as here named. This canon of the New Testament was prepared and published shortly after his arrival in Rome; probably about 145 A.D. Baring-Gould thinks he brought the gospel from Sinope.... IMarcion's) gospel resembles the Gospel of Luke, but is much shorter.12
It is interesting to note that the two missing chapters of Romans are historicizing, whereas the rest of the epistle is not. Furthermore, the gospel referred to by Paul in this epistle and others has been termed the "Gospel of Paul," presumed lost but in reality claimed by Marcion to be a book he found at Antioch, along with 10 "Pauline" epistles, and then edited, bringing it around 139-142 to Rome, where he translated it into both Greek and Latin.
The Gospel of the Lord
Originally in the Syro-Chaldee or Samaritan language, Marcion's Gospel of the Lord, which predated the canonical gospels by decades, represents the basic gospel narrative, minus key elements that demonstrate the conspiracy. Although much the same as the later Gospel of Luke, Marcion's gospel was Gnostic, non-historical, and did not make Jesus a Jewish man, i.e., he was not born in Bethlehem and was not from Nazareth, which did not even exist at the time. In Marcion's gospel there is no childhood history, as Marcion's Jesus was not born but "came down at Capernaum," i.e., appeared, in "the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar," the very sentence used in Luke to "prove" Jesus's historicity. Marcion's original, non-historicizing and non-Judaizing New Testament was a thorn in the side of the carnalizing conspirators, who were compelled to put a spin on the facts by claiming that the "heretic" had expurgated the gospel of Luke, removing the genealogies and other "historical" and "biographical" details, for example. Thus, Marcion was accused of "purging the letters of Paul and Luke of `Jewish traits,"' an allegation that served as a subterfuge to hide the fact that Marcion's Jesus was indeed not a Jewish man who had incarnated a century before. However, as demonstrated by Waite and others, Marcion's gospel was first, and Luke was created from it. Thus, it was not Marcion who had mutilated the texts but the historicizers who followed and added to his.
The Gospel of Luke (170 CE)
The Gospel of Luke is acknowledged by early church fathers to be of a late date. As Waite states:
. . . Jerome admits that not only the Gospel of Basilides, composed about A.D. 125, and other gospels, admitted to have been first published in the second century, were written before that of Luke, but even the Gospel of Apelles also, which was written not earlier than A.D. 160.13
Like the rest of the gospels Luke fits