Prefaces often remain unread. In our modern academic culture, they are littlemore than a place for name-dropping, reminiscing and thanking everyone from the author's parents to the provider of funding for the work in question – thoughts that may well be important to the author, but rarely necessary for the reader. With this premise in mind, Markus Vinzent wants to draw our attention to Tertullian's preface to Marcion's gospel, which must, according to Vinzent, not remain unread if one is to understand the theological agenda behind the Carthaginian's writings.

Given the title of the book, the reader may well be surprised to find that only about one third of it actually deals with said preface, whereas the other two-thirds are devoted to prefaces that Tertullian prefixed to several other works of his, such as his De praescriptione haereticorum, a part of the book which alone covers almost two hundred pages. Regarding the terminology, one may also be surprised as to what Vinzent defines as a ‘preface’. A preface is traditionally considered to be a short personal account including an acknowledgement of specific people and institutions for their help. The texts which Vinzent labels as ‘prefaces’ in Tertullian's works, however, have none of that. They are far longer, their content and style are more akin to those of the chapters that follow and they are essential to the development of the book's argument. Would such sections not more fittingly be called ‘introductions’?

Having passed such minor inconsistencies, the book offers an extensive and insightful commentary on the prefaces/introductions to Tertullian's works which deal, explicitly or implicitly, with his nemesis Marcion – Adversus Marcionem IV–V, De praescriptione haereticorum, De carne Christi, De resurrection carnis. Vinzent offers the complete text of the introductions to these works in the Latin original, an English and a German translation, each time juxtaposed in three columns. His choice of translations, however, is not always comprehensible, particularly concerning the German translations. Vinzent consistently chooses translations from the nineteenth-century series Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, which is not known for being particularly reliable. While with several works by Tertullian there is no other German translation at hand, it is hard to understand why he did not prefer Dietrich Schleyer's translation of De praescriptione haereticorum from the Fontes Christiani series, which is far more recent and more accurate. He states that he refrained from offering his own translation ‘which then could serve my interpretative purposes’ (p.3). However, as everyone familiar with Vinzent's works will know, he does in no way refrain from offering his own, some might say unique, interpretation of Tertullian's text.

Vinzent is correct in asserting that Tertullian's introductions to his texts are the ‘glasses Tertullian puts on the noses of his readers’, at which we should not stop (p.352). Indeed, these texts often tell us more about the intellectual biography and theological agenda of the author than the actual body of the volume. Of course, when reading this commentary, the readers have to aware that they are looking through the glasses that Vinzent puts on their noses – at which they should not stop. For instance: ‘Because of Marcion's key role in the making of Scripture, the main topic of On the prescription of heretics is Scripture itself, not only the right or wrong use or interpretation of it’ (p.34). Whenever Vinzent speaks of ‘Marcion's key role in the making of Scripture’, he is referring to his hypothesis that Marcion produced the first Gospel ever written and that all four of our canonical Gospels used Marcion's Gospel as a source. Accordingly, he can conclude that ‘Whenever we read Tertullian we should check whether the opposite of what he is trying to convey could be closer to reality. For our context, for example, his statement that his own Gospel-text is the one, true and traditional Gospel of the Apostles which was cut up and down by Marcion, while the historical truth might have been the contrary’ (p.352). As one can easily imagine, this particular view on the development of the Early Church largely shapes Vinzent's present commentary. For those readers who cannot follow Vinzent regarding said hypothesis it may not always be easy to follow his comments on Tertullian's work, either. Still, Vinzent's book is a powerful reminder that the introduction is more often than not a crucial part of an author's work and should not be neglected – a lesson that this reviewer desperately keeps trying to teach his students.