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Either Justin has used a lost Gospel or Gospels, besides those that are still extant, or else he has used a recension of these Gospels with some slight changes of language and with some apocryphal additions. We have seen that he has two short sayings and several minute details that are not found in our present Gospels.
These Sun myths, ever recurring throughout the ages, with a different name for their Hero in each new recension, cannot pass unrecognised by the student, though they may naturally and rightly be ignored by the devotee; and when they are used as a weapon to mutilate or destroy the majestic figure of the Christ, they must be met, not by denying the facts, but by understanding the deeper meaning of the stories, the spiritual truths that the legends expressed under a veil.
It was further asserted that he finally obtained permission to publish his edition on condition that he inserted within brackets the celebrated text 1 John v. 7, which was wanting in the manuscript. Whether this was true or not, it is certain that what the learned cardinal gave to the world was more an edition, a critical recension of the text, than a faithful transcript of the Vatican Codex.
The Old Testament Company, on the contrary, had ready to hand a textus receptus which really deserved the title, and on which, in their preface, they write as follows: "The received, or, as it is commonly called, the Massoretic text of the Old Testament Scriptures has come down to us in manuscripts which are of no very great antiquity, and which all belong to the same family or recension.
But on a careful examination this hypothesis is seen to raise more difficulties than it solves. What was there in the position of Peisistratos, or of Athens itself in the sixth century B. C., so authoritative as to compel all Greeks to recognize the recension then and there made of their revered poet?
There are Hindu authorities who would carry it back to the fifth century B.C., the time which is assigned for the first recension of the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is a very small part. But the highest authorities find conclusive proof that it originated about the second or third century of our era, and was then inserted as a part of an episode in the narrative of the great epic.
These correspond fairly well with the Pali text but represent another recension and a somewhat different arrangement. We have therefore here fragments of a Sanskrit version which must have been imported to Central Asia from northern India and covers, so far as the fragments permit us to judge, the same ground as the Vinaya and Suttas of the Pali Canon.
All these works lay great stress on the doctrine of śûnyatâ, and the non-existence of the world of experience. The longest recension is said to contain a polemic against the Hinayana.
There are many recensions, or editions, in the various libraries of Europe and also in the East, and no two of them are identical in the text. Lepsius translated from the Turin papyrus; Budge bases his translations on what is called the Theban recension. But in all the text is exceedingly corrupt, and translation is often no more than a guess.
The point of special interest that comes out in all this investigation of the details of differences in quotations, is, that the edition, or recension, of the Old Version, used by British writers, was unlike any now known. It was, so far as we can ascertain, peculiar to themselves.
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