jakejonesiv

Hi Julian,

This is a perplexing question, and I don't know the answer.

That would be strange, a harmony of the gospels before any of the gospels were known. The earliest mention of the four gospels by name is Ireanaus about 180 CE. His reasoning for their authenticity is ludicrous.

I wonder if Justin was participating in the process of gospel creation? In several cases he seems to be basing his gospel directly upon the Septuagint without any intermediary gospel. He never names a gospel, it is all undifferentiated "Memiors" and some of his memoirs cannot be derived from the canonical gospels or a harmony of them. He doesn't know the gospels, but he knows the Acts of Pontius Pilate?(FA35) WTF?

Whatever the answer turns out to be, we can say that the gospels were still in a fluid state in the middle of the second century.

Neil Godfrey, An alternative trajectory for Mark, Matthew and Luke? ,has produced an interesting chart correlating the Memoirs to various canonical and non-canonical sources. Here.

See:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...4&postcount=19

Jake Jones

Julian

True. However, seeing how Tatian cranked out the Diatessaron he must have had something to work with. If Tatian had material for a harmony surely Justin would have had some knowledge of some sort of writing. What is your stance on Tatian and the Diatessaron?
Agreed.

Julian

Ben C Smith

Justin Martyr makes clear in Apology 1.66.3 that the texts he is calling memoirs are (usually?) called gospels (plural). This is the only plural, I think, of that word in Justin, but this passage rules out Justin knowing only a harmony or single proto-gospel. He knows more than one.

In Dialogue 106.3 he writes of the memoirs specifically of Peter... and then proceeds to give a gospel detail (Boanerges) found amongst all extant gospels only in Mark 3.17. (But could this detail have been found also in the lost opening portion of the gospel of Peter? We may never know.)

In Apology 1.33.4-5 he writes that the power of God overshadowed Mary, a pretty distinctive phrase paralleled in Luke 1.35. And there are other instances in which the parallels for the so-called memoirs seem to come from Matthew, Luke, or John.

In Dialogue 103.8 he writes that the memoirs were composed (A) by apostles of Jesus and (B) by their followers. This is sometimes taken to mean Matthew and John (the apostles) with Mark and Luke (followers of Peter and Paul), but Streeter suggested that, since in Dialogue 106.3 the gospel of Mark is attributed directly to Peter (without Mark as intermediary), perhaps the two apostles are Matthew and Peter, the two followers Luke and the elder John, not the apostle. On the other hand, perhaps the phrase apostles and their followers is not to be pressed for its plurals, and merely means that each of the memoirs that Justin regards as authoritative comes from the apostolic or immediately subapostolic era.

In Dialogue 100.1 he writes: In the gospel it is written..., then he proceeds to give a version of Matthew 11.27 = Luke 10.22.

At any rate, it looks to me like we are dealing with (A) a set of texts (that is, more than one) that (B) were said to be written by apostles and by their associates, (C) one of which contains a detail known only from our canonical Mark and (D) several of which contain other details known only from Matthew, Luke, or John.

These allusions or quotations are rarely if ever exact. It is possible that Justin was referring to other gospels that are now lost to us, but is that the most parsimonious solution? What would rule out quoting from memory? Verbatim quotations, while found in some ancient writers like Eusebius, are by and large a modern standard.

I do not have a firm position either way at this time, but I do like parsimony.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

It is beyond doubt, in my judgment, that Justin had something in writing; he tells us that he does when he writes of the memoirs. What he had in writing is my big question.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

Just to digress on this subject:

In general ancient writers had to quote a lot from memory, because of the problems they had with looking up material in rolls, with none of the modern helps for the reader such as page numbers, or even word divisions, no chapter divisions, no indexes.

A text such as Pliny the Elder's Natural History -- a candidate for indexing if ever there was one -- has a book of summaries prefixed to it. But it is quite unclear whether each sentence in it had some numeric attached to it, or whether any such were found against the text, allowing cross-referencing. In a paper given at a modern colloquium on book organisation 10 years ago, one speaker commented bitterly that the editors of the critical texts of Pliny were 'fort discret' on whether any medieval manuscript had copied any such information in the margins.

Habitual verbatim quotation of large extracts seems to be an innovation by Eusebius of Caesarea, as far as I know (anyone know different?), and is probably responsible for the modern practice, in that his Church History was such a success in the medieval world, that everyone became accustomed to a writer doing this.

You could, of course, get a slave to look the exact words up. There is some evidence that Eusebius did this, namely that his quotations do not always match his statement (from memory) as to what they contain. Likewise there is evidence of quotation from memory, when in the same work the same passage from the same writer is quoted twice, once in an abbreviated form from memory, and once in full. It's like watching the birth of the idea of proper citation, emerging from the habit of references from memory.

One final point on this. I have read somewhere (which, alas, I did not note down and so have lost forever) that it was necessary to misquote deliberately, when quoting a writer -- give it a witty twist or adapt it to your context -- to show that you were a proper writer and were quoting from memory, rather than just the owner of an educated slave. I'm not sure how we know this, but it isn't improbable. The point is to be careful how we apply modern expectations to a culture which had no printed books. If we do this, we will always trip up.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

That is not a digression at all. In fact, I thought I had made this point on one of the posts on this thread, but I just checked and could not find it; it must have been in my PM to Julian. I agree with you completely here. I sometimes find looking up vaguely remembered references troublesome in my own Bible with its versification, chapter divisions, section headings, and a decent index in the back.

Very good to know. I earlier used Eusebius as an example of an author with a penchant for word for word quotations and threw in later ecclesiastical writers too for good measure, but if it appeared in any way that I was pegging him as the originator of the practice that was purely coincidental. I just assumed (for no very good reason) that he got it from some subclassical author or authors.

That would be interesting to follow up on. I have a quote from Josephus on rewriting historical sources for a new history, but that seems only tangentially related.

Ben.

Roger Pearse

The whole question of chapter divisions, titles, etc in ancient literature seems to be very under-studied, and the critical editions do not help, in that they usually presume such things to be medieval and don't even report them when present in the manuscripts.

Complicating the subject further is the summaries (praefationes, prologi, whatever) of books which appear at the start of each book of a multi-volume work; or collected together at the start of the whole work; or indeed circulating separately, perhaps as a bookseller's tool (thus we have the prologi for the lost history of Pompeius Trogus, of which we have only the epitome of Justin; the summaries of Livy, including for the lost books). Are these authorial? Sometimes they are. Eusebius sometimes composed his own, it seems to be thought. But what is missing is any survey of the whole subject, to which we can all refer. I really don't think scholars know.

I'm interested in the subject, as perhaps you can see. Chapter titles and divisions seem to have come in during the 5th-6th centuries AD (thus we have a Ms. of Augustine's De Civitate Dei from the 5th century, probably executed at his own scriptorium, which has none, while a set exists in most later mss, probably composed by Eugippius. On the other hand Greek histories, as Richard Carrier reminded me once, have the summaries at the front from the time of Dio Cassius on, which might suggest an innovation in this area. But on the other hand the presence of author-composed summaries are definitely mentioned by Cyril of Alexandria in the Commentary on John as if they were a new thing, so perhaps the 5th century is to be looked for on the Greek side also. Data... there just is not enough.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

mens_sana

In addition to quoting from memory, there are also instances "remembering" the "sayings of the Lord," that is, the quoting of oral sources prior to their literary "freezing."