drawn as to their written source."(1) Critics have maintained very different and conflicting views regarding that source. Apologists, of course, assert that the quotations in the Homilies are taken from our Gospels only.(2) Others ascribe them to our Gospels, with a supplementary apocryphal work: the Gospel according to the Hebrews, or the Gospel according to Peter.(3) Some, whilst admitting a subsidiary use of some of our Gospels, assert that the author of the Homilies employs, in preference, the Gospel according to Peter;(4) whilst others, recognizing also the similarity of the phenomena presented by these quotations with those of Justin's, conclude that the author does not quote our Gospels at all, but makes use of the Gospel according to Peter, or the Gospel according to the Hebrews.(5) Evidence permitting of such divergent conclusions manifestly cannot be of a decided character. We may affirm, however, that few of those who are
willing to admit the use of our Synoptics by the author of the Homilies along with other sources, make that concession on the strength of the absolute isolated evidence of the Homilies themselves, but they are generally moved by antecedent views on the point. In an inquiry like that which we have undertaken, however, such easy and indifferent judgment would obviously be out of place, and the point we have to determine is not whether an author may have been acquainted with our Gospels, but whether he furnishes testimony that he actually was in possession of our present Gospels and regarded them as authoritative.
We have already mentioned that the author of the Clementine Homilies never names the source from which his quotations are derived. Of these very numerous quotations we must again distinctly state that only two or three, of a very brief and fragmentary character, literally agree with our Synoptics, whilst all the rest differ more or less widely from the parallel passages in those Gospels. Some of these quotations are repeated more than once with the same persistent and characteristic variations, and in several cases, as we have already seen, they agree more or less closely with quotations of Justin from the Memoirs of the Apostles. Others, again, have no parallels at all in our Gospels, and even Apologists are consequently compelled to admit the collateral use of an apocryphal Gospel. As in the case of Justin, therefore, the singular phenomenon is presented of a vast number of quotations of which only one or two brief phrases, too fragmentary to avail as evidence, perfectly agree with our Gospels; whilst of the rest, which all vary more or less, some merely resemble combined passages of two Gospels, others merely contain the sense, some
