Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (90 page)

First, however, it is important to note that Justin Martyr, some fifty years before Serapion, also gives evidence of knowing the Gospel of Peter, in a much-controverted passage in his Dialogue with Trypho. On fifteen occasions throughout
his writings, Justin refers to the Gospels by calling them the
the “Memoirs.” In most instances he explains that these are specifically the “memoirs of the apostles,” and in one case he makes it quite clear that he is referring to literary productions, Gospels, produced by apostles:
(I
Apol
. 66.3). On the one occasion we are most interested in, however, he refers one set of Memoirs to a specific apostle:

And when it says that he changed the name of one of the apostles to Peter, and when also this is written in his Memoirs, that he changed the name of … the sons of Zebedee to Boanerges, which is “sons of thunder.…”

Scholars such as Hilgenfeld and Harnack maintained that the reference should be read in the most straightforward sense, so that the possessive pronoun “his” refers to its nearest antecedent, “Peter,” making this the earliest reference to the existence of the Gospel of Peter.
³
Naysayers have taken a variety of positions, some arguing that “his” refers to Jesus, so that the
is some kind of objective genitive, or that it refers specifically to the Gospel thought by Papias to be Peter’s version of the Gospel, that is, the Gospel of Mark—thus, most emphatically, Claus-Jürgen Thornton, in an article that is more learned than compelling.
⁴

Against the passage referring to the Gospel of (= about) Jesus is, to begin with, a simple question of grammar, overlooked by such advocates of the view as Paul Foster, in his recent full-length commentary.
⁵
Objective genitives occur with nouns of action (love, hate, vision, and so on). A “memoir” (like a “book”) does not seem to qualify; Foster, at least, provides nothing analogous. But what is more, how can a personal pronoun in the genitive be an objective genitive? “His book” or “his writing” or “his anything” surely indicates possession (the one who owns it) or derivation (the one who created it). Yet more significant, we have the other uses throughout Justin’s writings, where “Memoirs of the Apostles,” clearly refers to the books that the apostles wrote, as explicated in the reference cited above of 1
Apol
. 66.3. That is to say, the genitive following
is consistently a genitive of source or origin. Is there any compelling reason, apart
from a general unwillingness to see this as a reference to the Gospel of Peter, not to take it this way here?
⁶

On the contrary, a compelling case for reading it this way has been made by P. Pilhofer. In particular Pilhofer is opposed to the idea that Peter’s “Memoirs” could be a reference to the Gospel of Mark. Taking it this way presupposes knowledge of Papias, whom Justin never mentions, even though he may be front-and-center in the minds of modern scholars thinking about the Gospel of Mark in relation to Peter. But there are positive reasons for thinking that Justin has the Gospel of Peter in mind, that Justin has, in fact, been influenced elsewhere by the accounts distinctive to it. As Pilhofer points out, where Justin’s comments on the life of Jesus overlap with the surviving narrative in the Akhmim fragment of the Gospel of Peter, he appears to rely on it in substance. For example, the guilt of the Jews in the death of Jesus–they are the ones who actually kill him—is the same in both (e.g.,
Dial
. 85.2 “who suffered and was crucified by your people under Pontius Pilate”; cf.
GPet
. 5–10); and in both accounts the disciples are said to have fled after Jesus’ crucifixion (
Dial
. 53.5; cf.
GPet
. 26, 59), unlike in the New Testament Gospels.

Two specific passages especially merit attention. According to 1 Apol. 35.6, it is the Jews, not the Roman soldiers, who mock Jesus (thus also
GPet
. 5–10, but not the Gospels of the New Testament);
⁷
and in
Dial
. 97.3, when Jesus’ clothes are divided, the phrase used is
a phrase that never occurs in Greek literature before Justin, with one exception:
Gospel of Peter
12,
Confronted with these similarities, Foster asks which direction the dependence was more likely to go, from the Gospel of Peter to Justin or the other way around. He opts for the latter option, but how can that be the better alternative? Which would be more likely, that a Gospel writer would comb through the lengthy, discursive writings of an apologist in order to ferret out isolated and scattered dominical traditions to include in his Gospel account, or that an apologist would rely on a Gospel text for his occasional references to the life of Jesus? Surely it is the latter. And we need constantly to recall that after referring to Peter in
Dial
. 106.3, Justin does refer to “his Memoirs.”
⁸
This point has been recently
reemphasized by Katharina Greschat, an advocate for Pilhofer’s view, who provides additional supporting evidence.
⁹

The reason Justin’s witness matters is, in part, that it provides a
terminus ante quem
for the Gospel of Peter as the first half of the second century, when it was already in circulation and known in Rome, and in fact accepted by a prominent proto-orthodox teacher there as a scriptural authority. This conclusion also shows, as a sidelight, that whether or not Justin used a Gospel harmony, as Bell-inzoni and others have argued, he also used separate Gospels.
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