These readings represent in the main a text which was undoubtedly current and widely diffused in the second century.  ’Though no surviving manuscript of the Old Latin version dates before the fourth century and most of them belong to a still later age, yet the general correspondence of their text with that of the first Latin Fathers is a sufficient voucher for its high antiquity.  The connexion subsisting between this Latin, version, the Curetonian Syriac and Codex Bezae, proves that the text of these documents is considerably older than the vellum on which they are written.’  Such is Dr. Scrivener’s verdict upon the class of authorities with which Justin shows the strongest affinity, and he goes on to add; ’Now it may be said without extravagance that no set of Scriptural records affords a text less probable in itself, less sustained by any rational principles of external evidence, than that of Cod.  D, of the Latin codices, and (so far as it accords with them) of Cureton’s Syriac.  Interpolations as insipid in themselves as unsupported by other evidence abound in them all....  It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected originated within a hundred years after it was composed’ [Endnote 135:1].  This is a point on which text critics of all schools are substantially agreed.  However much they may differ in other respects, no one of them has ever thought of taking the text of the Old Syriac and Old Latin translations as the basis of an edition.  There can be no question that this text belongs to an advanced, though early, stage of corruption.

At the same stage of corruption, then, Justin’s quotations from the Gospels are found, and this very fact is a proof of the antiquity of originals so corrupted.  The coincidences are too many and too great all to be the result of accident or to be accounted for by the parallel influence of the lost Gospels.  The presence, for instance, of the reading [Greek:  o haetoimasen ho pataer] for [Greek:  to haetoimasmenon] in Irenaeus and Tertullian (who has both ‘quem praeparavit deus’ and ‘praeparatum’) is a proof that it was found in the canonical text at a date little later than Justin’s.  And facts such as this, taken together with the arguments which make it little less than certain that Justin had either mediately or immediately access to our Gospels, render it highly probable that he had a form of the canonical text before him.

And yet large as is the approximation to Justin’s text that may be made without stirring beyond the bounds of attested readings within the Canon, I still retain the opinion previously expressed that he did also make use of some extra-canonical book or books, though what the precise document was the data are far too insufficient to enable us to determine.  So far as the history of our present Gospels is concerned, I have only to insist upon the alternative that Justin either used those Gospels themselves or else a later work, of the nature of a harmony based upon them [Endnote 136:1].  The theory (if it is really held) that he was ignorant of our Gospels in any shape, seems to me, in view of the facts, wholly untenable.