he angel
to Mary, not to Joseph, 'Behold thou shalt conceive of the Holy
Ghost and bear a Son and He shall be called the Son of the
Highest, and thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His
people from their sins.' Again the Protevangelium has the phrase
'Thou shalt conceive of His Word,' which, though not directly
quoted, appears to receive countenance from Justin. The author
adds that 'Justin's divergences from the Protevangelium prevent
our supposing that in its present form it could have been the
actual source of his quotations,' though he thinks that he had
before him a still earlier work to which both the Protevangelium
and the third Gospel were indebted. So far as the Protevangelium
is concerned this may very probably have been the case; but what
reason there is for assuming that the same document was also
anterior to the third Gospel I am not aware. On the contrary, this
very passage seems to suggest an opposite conclusion. The
quotation in Justin and the address in the Protevangelium both
present a combination of narratives that are kept separate in the
first and third Gospels. But this very fact supplies a strong
presumption that the version of those Gospels is the earliest. It
is unlikely that the first Evangelist, if he had found his text
already existing as part of the speech of the angel to Mary, would
have transferred it to an address to Joseph; and it is little less
unlikely that the third Evangelist, finding the fuller version of
Justin and the Protevangelium, should have omitted from it one of
its most important features. If a further link is necessary to
connect Justin with the Protevangelium, that link comes into the
chain after our Gospels and not before. Dr. Hilgenfeld has also
noticed the phrase [Greek: charan de labousa Mariam] as common to
Justin and the Protevangelium [Endnote 130:1]. This, too, may
belong to the older original of the latter work. The other verbal
coincidences with the Gospel according to the Hebrews in the
account of the Baptism, and with that of Thomas in the 'ploughs
and yokes,' have been already mentioned, and are, I believe, along
with those just discussed, all that can be directly referred to an
apocryphal source.

Besides these there are some coincidences in form between quotations
as they appear in Justin and in other writers, such as especially the
Clementine Homilies. These are thought to point to the existence of a
common Gospel (now lost) from which they