There is nothing in Justin (as in Luke xxiv, but cp.  Acts i. 3) to show that the Ascension did not take place on the same day as the Resurrection.

I have taken especial pains in the above summary to bring out the points in which Justin way seem to differ from or add to the canonical narratives.  But, without stopping at present to consider the bearing of these upon Justin’s relation to the Gospels, I will at once proceed to make some general remarks which the summary seems to suggest.

(1) If such is the outline of Justin’s Gospel, it appears to be really a question of comparatively small importance whether or not he made use of our present Gospels in their present form.  If he did not use these Gospels he used other documents which contained substantially the same matter.  The question of the reality of miracles clearly is not affected.  Justin’s documents, whatever they were, not only contained repeated notices of the miracles in general, the healing of the lame and the paralytic, of the maimed and the dumb, and the raising of the dead—­not only did they include several discourses, such as the reply to the messengers of John and the saying to the Centurion whose servant was healed, which have direct reference to miracles, but they also give marked prominence to the chief and cardinal miracles of the Gospel history, the Incarnation and the Resurrection.  It is antecedently quite possible that the narrative of these events may have been derived from a document other than our Gospels; but, if so, that is only proof of the existence of further and independent evidence to the truth of the history.  This document, supposing it to exist, is a surprising instance of the homogeneity of the evangelical tradition; it differs from the three Synoptic Gospels, nay, we may say even from the four Gospels, less than they differ from each other.

(2) But we may go further than this.  If Justin really used a separate substantive document now lost, that document, to judge from its contents, must have represented a secondary, or rather a tertiary, stage of the evangelical literature; it must have implied the previous existence of our present Gospels.  I do not now allude to the presence in it of added traits, such as the cave of the Nativity and the fire on Jordan, which are of the nature of those mythical details that we find more fully developed in the Apocryphal Gospels.  I do not so much refer to these—­though, for instance, in the case of the fire on Jordan it is highly probable that Justin’s statement is a translation into literal fact of the canonical (and Justinian) saying, ’He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire’—­but, on general grounds, the relation which this supposed document bears to the extant Gospels shows that it must have been in point of time posterior to them.

The earlier stages of evangelical composition present a nucleus, with a more or less defined circumference, of unity, and outside of this a margin of variety.  There was a certain body of narrative, which, in whatever form it was handed down—­whether as oral or written—­at a very early date obtained a sort of general recognition, and seems to have been as a matter of course incorporated in the evangelical works as they appeared.