If, then, Justin made use either of a single document or set of documents distinct from those which have become canonical, we conclude that it or they belonged to a later and more advanced stage of formation.  But it should be remembered that the case is a hypothetical one.  The author of ‘Supernatural Religion’ seems inclined to maintain that Justin did use such a document or documents, and not our Gospels.  If he did, then the consequence above stated seems to follow.  But I do not at all care to press this inference; it is no more secure than the premiss upon which it is founded.  Only it seems to me that the choice lies between two alternatives and no more; either Justin used our Gospels, or else he used a document later than our Gospels and presupposing them.  The reader may take which side of the alternative he pleases.

The question is, which hypothesis best covers and explains the facts.  It is not impossible that Justin may have had a special Gospel such as has just been described.  There is a tendency among those critics who assign Justin’s quotations to an uncanonical source to find that source in the so-called Gospel according to the Hebrews or some of its allied forms.  But a large majority of critics regard the Gospel according to the Hebrews as holding precisely this secondary relation to the canonical Matthew.  Justin’s document can hardly have been the Gospel according to the Hebrews, at least alone, as that Gospel omitted the section Matt. i. 18-ii. 23 [Endnote 103:1], which Justin certainly retained.  But it is within the bounds of possibility—­it would be hazardous to say more—­that he may have had another Gospel so modified and compiled as to meet all the conditions of the case.  For my own part, I think it decidedly the more probable hypothesis that he used our present Gospels with some peculiar document, such as this Gospel according to the Hebrews, or perhaps, as Dr. Hilgenfeld thinks, the ground document of the Gospel according to Peter (a work of which we know next to nothing except that it favoured Docetism and was not very unlike the Canonical Gospels) and the Protevangelium of James (or some older document on which that work was founded) in addition.

It will be well to try to establish this position a little more in detail; and therefore I will proceed to collect first, the evidence for the use, either mediate or direct, of the Synoptic Gospels, and secondly, that for the use of one or more Apocryphal Gospels.  We still keep to the substance of Justin’s Gospel, and reserve the question of its form.

Of those portions of the first Synoptic which appear to be derived from a peculiar source, and for the presence of which we have no evidence in any other Gospel of the same degree of originality, Justin has the following:  Joseph’s suspicions of his wife, the special statement of the significance of the name Jesus (’for He shall save His people from their sins,’ Matt. i. 21, verbally identical),