Justin’s
Canon of Scripture
As Justin himself makes plain, his
Christian sources would quote as Scripture passages that Justin could not find
in the biblical books to which he had access. Justin concludes that Jewish
scribes must have cut these passages out when they copied the relevant biblical
books. The most instructive passages concerning this are found in Dialogue 71-73
and 120.5. Here Justin accuses the Jewish scribes of having deleted one passage
from the book of Ezra, two from Jeremiah, one from David (i.e., the Psalms),
and one from Isaiah. He quotes or paraphrases the allegedly deleted passages,
which have in common that they appear as prophecies of Christ’s passion, one of
which comes from a well-known apocryphon, the Martyrdom of Isaiah. This
makes it likely also that the other quoted passages come from scriptural pseudepigrapha,
now lost. In other words, Justin’s Christian sources could sometimes quote and
use scriptural material that was not directly quoted from Scripture, but rather
came from midrashic embellishments of the scriptural stories, as exemplified by
some of the pseudepigraphic works of the centuries around the beginning of our
era. In the Testimonia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a reference to the Songs
of Joshua is treated as Scripture on a par with a quote from canonical
Joshua, and the same could well be the case in Justin’s sources. But Justin’s
own concept of canon and Scripture is much stricter. He therefore cannot imagine
anything else that these passages must have been part of the authentic text of
the biblical books of Ezra, Jeremiah, David (the Psalms), and Isaiah. It is
these books and none other that he has searched for these passages and not
found them. He is completely unaware of the possibility that these passages
could derive from other books than those represented in the scrolls of
canonical Ezra, Jeremiah, Psalms, and Isaiah. Again we observe a characteristic
difference between Justin and his Christian predecessors whose work is visible
in his sources. In his debates with Jews, he was leaning more than he liked on
the Jewish texts and much more than he knew of the Jewish canon. Since he would
only base his argument on texts and complete books recognized as canonical and
authentic by the Jews, he really had no choice.
This fact concerning Justin’s text
and canon of Scripture is an early instance of a phenomenon to be observed all
through the patristic period: when it comes to questions of text and canon, the
ongoing dialogue with Judaism was perhaps the one most important factor in
making the church not finally abandon the Jewish canon and text of the Bible. (Oskar
Skarsaune, “Justin and His Bible,” in Justin Martyr and His Worlds, ed.
Sara Parvis and Paul Foster [Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2007], 63-64)
