The exactness is especially remarkable in the plain historical narratives of the Pentateuch and the Psalms, though it is also evident that Justin had the MS. before him, and referred to it frequently throughout the quotations from the latter part of Isaiah.  Through following the arrangement of Credner we have failed to notice the cases of combination; these however are collected by Dr. Westcott (On the Canon, p. 156).  The most remarkable instance is in Apol. i. 52, where six different passages from three separate writers are interwoven together and assigned bodily to Zechariah.  There are several more examples of mistaken ascription.

* * * * *

The great advantage of collecting the quotations from the Old Testament is that we are enabled to do so in regard to the very same writers among whom our enquiry is to lie.  We can thus form a general idea of their idiosyncracies, and we know what to expect when we come to examine a different class of quotations.  There is, however, the element of uncertainty of which I have spoken above.  We cannot be quite clear what text the writer had before him.  This difficulty also exists, though to a less degree, when we come to consider quotations from the New Testament in writers of an early date whom we know to have used our present Gospels as canonical.  The text of these Gospels is so comparatively fixed, and we have such abundant materials for its reconstruction, that we can generally say at once whether the writer is quoting from it freely or not.  We have thus a certain gain, though at the cost of the drawback that we can no longer draw an inference as to the practice of individuals, but merely attain to a general conclusion as to the habits of mind current in the age.  This too will be subject to a deduction for the individual bent and peculiarities of the writer.  We must therefore, on the whole, attach less importance to the examples under this section than under that preceding.

I chose two writers to be the subject of this examination almost, I may say, at random, and chiefly because I had more convenient access to their works at the time.  The first of these is Irenaeus, that is to say the portions still extant in the Greek of his Treatise against Heresies, [Endnote 49:1] and the second Epiphanius.

Irenaeus is described by Dr. Tregelles ’as a close and careful quoter in general from the New Testament’ [Endnote 49:2].  He may therefore be taken to represent a comparatively high standard of accuracy.  In the following table the quotations which are merely allusive are included in brackets:—­