One further illustration, and we have done. We find the following in Hom. iii. 55: "And to those who
think that God tempts, as the Scriptures say, he said: 'The evil one is the tempter,' who also tempted himself. "l This short saying is not found in our Gospels. It probably occurred in the Gospel of the Homilies in connection with the temptation of Jesus. It is not improbable that the writer of the Epistle of James, who shows acquaintance with a Gospel different from ours,(2) also knew this saying.(3) We are here again directed to the Ebionite Gospel. Certainly the quotation is derived from a source different from our Gospels.(4)
These illustrations of the evangelical quotations in the Clementine Homilies give but an imperfect impression of the character of the extremely numerous passages which occur in the work. We have selected for our examination the quotations which have been specially cited by critics as closest to parallels in our Gospels, and have thus submitted the question to the test which is most favourable to the claims of our Synoptics. Space forbids our adequately showing the much wider divergence which exists in the great majority of cases between them and the quotations in the Homilies. To sum up the case: Out of more than a hundred of these quotations only four brief and fragmentary phrases really agree with parallels in our Synoptics, and these, we have shown, are either not used in the same context as in our Gospels or are of a nature far from special to them. Of the rest, all without exception systematically vary more or less from our Gospels, and many in their variations agree with similar quotations in other writers,
or on repeated quotation always present the same peculiarities, whilst others, professed to be direct quotations of sayings of Jesus, have no parallels in our Gospels at all. Upon the hypothesis that the author made use of our Gospels, such systematic divergence would be perfectly unintelligible and astounding. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the agreement of a few passages with parallels in our Gospels cannot prove anything. The only extraordinary circumstance is that, even using a totally different source, there should not have been a greater agreement with our Synoptics. But for the universal inaccuracy of the human mind, every important historical saying, having obviously only one distinct original form, would in all truthful histories have been reported in that one unvarying form. The nature of the quotations in the Clementine Homilies leads to the inevitable conclusion that their author derived them from a Gospel different from ours; at least, since the source of these quotations is never named throughout the work, and there is not the faintest direct indication of our Gospels, the Clementine Homilies cannot be considered witnesses of any value as to the origin and authenticity of the canonical Gospels. That this can be said of a work written a century and a half after the establishment of Christianity, and abounding with quotations of the discourses of Jesus, is in itself singularly suggestive.