y 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to add something new and as yet unpublished to the common stock.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