Besides this there was also other matter which, without such general recognition, had yet a considerable circulation, and, though not found in all, was embodied in more than one of the current compilations.  But, as we should naturally expect, these two classes did not exhaust the whole of the evangelical matter.  Each successive historian found himself able by special researches to add something new and as yet unpublished to the common stock.  Thus, the first of our present Evangelists has thirty-five sections or incidents besides the whole of the first two chapters peculiar to himself.  The third Evangelist has also two long chapters of preliminary history, and as many as fifty-six sections or incidents which have no parallel in the other Gospels.  Much of this peculiar matter in each case bears an individual and characteristic stamp.  The opening chapters of the first and third Synoptics evidently contain two distinct and independent traditions.  So independent indeed are they, that the negative school of critics maintain them to be irreconcilable, and the attempts to harmonise them have certainly not been completely successful [Endnote 101:1].  These differences, however, show what rich quarries of tradition were open to the enquirer in the first age of Christianity, and how readily he might add to the stores already accumulated by his predecessors.  But this state of things did not last long.  As in most cases of the kind, the productive period soon ceased, and the later writers had a choice of two things, either to harmonise the conflicting records of previous historians, or to develope their details in the manner that we find in the Apocryphal Gospels.

But if Justin used a single and separate document or any set of documents independent of the canonical, then we may say with confidence that that document or set of documents belonged entirely to this secondary stage.  It possesses both the marks of secondary formation.  Such details as are added to the previous evangelical tradition are just of that character which we find in the Apocryphal Gospels.  But these details are comparatively slight and insignificant; the main tendency of Justin’s Gospel (supposing it to be a separate composition) was harmonistic.  The writer can hardly have been ignorant of our Canonical Gospels; he certainly had access, if not to them, yet to the sources, both general and special, from which they are taken.  He not only drew from the main body of the evangelical tradition, but also from those particular and individual strains which appear in the first and third Synoptics.  He has done this in the spirit of a true desultor, passing backwards and forwards first to one and then to the other, inventing no middle links, but merely piecing together the two accounts as best he could.  Indeed the preliminary portions of Justin’s Gospel read very much like the sort of rough prima facie harmony which, without any more profound study, most people make for themselves.  But the harmonising process necessarily implies matter to harmonise, and that matter must have had the closest possible resemblance to the contents of our Gospels.