The Pulpit Commentary — John — Volume 1 — Section 21

to the Old Latin trnnslatfon, in one of its best manuscripts of Matt. iii. 15 (a, Codex Vercellen~is), hlls n pRs~Rge Rlmost identical. Nor does this stand alone; for Codex D of Luke iii. 22 gil'cs 1-yi'.i '"1/"pa11 .,...,,1v.,.,,1ro. II'• for 111 ll'ol ,~3&,,.11ll'a, together with a b c, tJ, l. Moreover, they l\re quoted by Lactanlius, Hilary, and even Augusti~e'. "Whether or not Justin originated the error, we cannot tell; but it is sayina too much to make it 11 _reason for holding that ho had not seen the Gospels of Matthew, John, or Luke. Twice J ust.m refers to the 'Acts of Pontius Pilate.' He quotes two sayinas not found in the synoptists. These are intercslini;:, and may be paralleled by a fe~ <'tbers, some of which are manifestly apocryphRl. 'l'he refcrencea to the • Acta Pontii Pilati' are supposed, with reason, to have arisen from the assumption that public <locurnents must have contained such records, whether he bad ever seen them or not. Now, if these explanations are insuflkient, and granting the possibility of his use of some other narrative, it becomes very difficult to sny what this can have been. The most probable is the' Gospel according to the Hebrews,' which, nevertheles~, is known to have omitted certain most important passages, wit.h which it is certain that Justin wns familiar. The 'Gospel of James' states the narrative of the Magi differently in o. manner far less in harmony with the synoptic narrative. ' The best way to come to something like a determination of the mean in a of J ustin's deviations from the evangelic narratives is to observe the degree of accuracy with which be quotes from the Pcntateuch and the Old Testament generally. The following table has been made out by Dr. Sanday:- Exact. SllgbUy variant. Marked divergence. Pentateuoh 18 ... 19 11 Psalms 16 (nine whole psolms) 2 s Isaiah 25 (eh. lli., llii.) 12 16 Other great prophet& 3 4 11 Minor prophet&, etc. 2 7 13 64 44 54 In the Gospels Justin has made ten ex.act quotations, twenty-five variant, and thirty-two divergent. The quotations from the Old Testament, reduced to the same standard of comparison, would give ten exact, seven variant, nine divergent. This shows a higher range of variation in the Gospels, and reveals the fact that he was not so familiar with the latter as with the former, that he took more liberty with his text, and that he scarcely regarded them in the same category as the older and venerable Scripture. It is also not impossible that he made use, along with them, of some other documents, which by the time of Irenams were no longer extant. The positive evidence that he did quote from :Matthew's Gospel is very strong in cases where he introduce9 not merely the words of Jesus, but the comment of the evangelist, as in Matt. xvii. 11-13.. Justin quoted, moreover, the ipsissima verba of Luke, where these differ from Matthew and Mark. It ha.s been argued by the author of 'Supernatural Religion ' that similar deviations from the Fynoptic text are found in the Clementine Homilies and in Justin, suggesting that the origin of the double quotation is some other authority rather than that of the caoonical Gospels ; but the peculiarity to be noted is this-that eeveral of these quota- tions are given in two forms by the Clementines and Justin, and they "alternately adhere to the canonical text when they differ from each other." One curious fact is that many of the texts of Justin correspond with what are proved to be corrupted Western texts, such as we find afterwards embodied in Codex Beza, and the Old Latin Version. No critic of any school would base his text on these authorities, but it is certain that they represent a much older text than the age of the codices them.selves, and that they point back to a period of corruption of text in the midst of which Justin lived and laboured.. That simple fact suggests a much more remote period when such paraphrastic modifications were made. Dr. Sanday inclince to the idea that, if Justin used any other authority than our Gospels, he made usu of a, /t04"1TWTl,y that was then existing. Let it be also noted that Justin makes sundry quotations from the LXX.; in doing wr:> he occasionally deviated from it, and, moreover, in the deviation followed the leading of the Gospels. Thus Zech. ix. 9 is twice cited inaccurately. Sometimes he blended  THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. ,JOHN. ltXV