gmx wrote:Ulan wrote:We can exclude this hypothesis of "our gospels" only, as we have seen from the only time that Justin actually quoted something from a gospel that he himself identified as "written", which was from the "Gospel" of Marcion
Simply untrue, Ulan. Justin says...
I was answering to this your statement:
gmx wrote:BTW my use of foursome did not mean to imply all four Gospels. It was more meant "our Gospels", not some other hypothetical Gospels that hypothetically have been lost.
Justin quoting from Marcion's gospel and the Gospel of James means that it's not "our" gospels
only but some other sources he's using. Whether that includes texts that resemble "our" gospels is unclear, but your example definitely looks like something from "Mark"'s text. He's is definitely
also using other "gospels" that are not ours.
Justin only uses the statement "in
the Gospel it is written" once. And this one time, he quotes from Marcion's Gospel. What you refer to is indirect, as in all other cases her refers to "memoirs". Or in other words: nobody knows what kind of text(s) Justin used. From single sentences, it's hard to reconstruct whole texts.
It is at least perplexing that the only time he actually refers to something written in "the Gospel", it is Marcion's gospel. The best explanation is that he had Marcion's NT, which consisted of "The Gospel", "The Apostle" and the Antitheses (maybe), which means that during his time, there may have been only one text that actually bore the "official" title "The Gospel". There may have been other texts which he refers to as "memoirs", and maybe calling those "gospels" was a newfangled thing during Justin's time, mimicking Marcion's example.
While Marcion being the first to collect something like an NT is pretty much standard scholarship nowadays, there are obviously other possibilities, like the idea of a single "diatessaronic" (in a sloppy sense) text, plus some other sources.
Summary: We can safely conclude that the assumption that Justin was using "our" gospels and
not any other lost gospels is false. You can propose he used both, although such a proposal cannot be proven. It is however sure that he used non-canonical texts.