Reddit mentions of Justin Martyr and His Worlds

Hurtado starts that 1 Sept 2017 blog post with

>"At a conference earlier this week in Málaga, one of the main sessions was on Justin Martyr, and the lecturer was asked about Justin’s knowledge and use of NT writings.  The lecturer responded by rather firmly urging that there is scant evidence that Justin knew the NT Gospels, emphasizing that Justin’s numerous references to the “memoirs [ἀπομνημονεύματα] of the apostles” might very well have designated other kinds of texts instead."

As for -

>Oskar Skarsaune, “Justin and His Bible,” in Justin Martyr and His Worlds,, ed. Sara Parvis and Paul Foster (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 53-76; and arguing for Justin’s use of G.John in particular, C. E. Hill’s essay in the same volume, “Was John’s Gospel Among Justin’s Apostolic Memoirs?” (88-94);

In the introduction to Justin Martyr and His Worlds, the editors Sara Parvis and Paul Foster write -

>"Oscar Skarsaune tantalizingly introduces the possibility that Justin may have been acquainted with the collection later labeled as the New Testament. He states that 'as far as the New Testament is concerned, he did not know the specific collection of books that later got that name'."

and

>''Charles Hill states that the 'only quote, or near quote, of the Fourth Gospel of Jesus' saying from John 3:5,7 about being reborn and seeing the kingdom of heaven (of God, in John) (1 Apol. 61.4)'. ''
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>https://www.amazon.co.uk/Justin-Martyr-Worlds-Sara-Parvis/dp/0800662121

Apparently Hill thinks that the citation of Dialogue 105.1 appears to link Johannine Logos Christology with the apostolic memoirs.

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As for Hill CE, (2010) Who Chose the Gospels?: Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy, OUP Oxford, -

>".. the truth is that scholars who have studied the question of Justin’s use of Gospels are today quite ‘diverse’ in their conclusions on the matter. It is true that some influential scholars, in keeping with the idea that a four-Gospel collection was the brainchild of Irenaeus, think that Justin either did not know or did not appreciate the Gospel of John, or that instead of the individual Gospels he knew only a three-Gospel Harmony, or that he held Gospels other than the four in equal or greater esteem ...
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>"[many ask] ‘If Justin had the canonical Gospels (or any of the New Testament books for that matter) why didn’t he simply tell us?’ (the only New Testament author he mentions by name is the author of the book of Revelation, John, ‘one of the apostles of Christ’, Dial. 81.4) .."
>
>Hill CE, (2010) Who Chose the Gospels?: Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy (p. 125-6). OUP Oxford. Kindle edn.

eta: The rest of Hill's commentary about Justin Martyr over two chapter is, in my opinion, spurious, with rather a lot of appeal to Celsus.

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Earlier this year Hurtado and Brent Nongbri made a series blog-posts in answer to each other and the issue of Justin Martyr came up. In one post Nongbri wrote -

>"Over the years, different studies have sought to demonstrate that Justin definitely knew all four canonical gospels (e.g. Stanton), while others have emphasized instead the handful of examples in which Justin’s quotations don’t match up well with any of the canonical gospels (e.g. Koester)."

and in another

>"When Justin refers to texts very similar to what we would call the Gospel According to Matthew and the Gospel According to Mark, he consistently uses the plural (both  apomnemoneumata and euangelia) and does not distinguish individual authorship (it’s nearly always 'of/by the apostles' .. 'and their followers').
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>"All of this tends, in my view, to confirm Matthew Larsen’s argument [in 'Accidental Publication, Unfinished Texts and the Traditional Goals of New Testament Textual Criticism', 2017, Journal for the Study of the New Testament], about how Justin and earlier Christian authors characterize the gospel(s), which in turn supports his larger conclusions: '…early readers and users of gospel texts regarded the gospel not as a book, but as a fluid constellation of texts. … Ancient writing practices and textual fluidity present us with exciting challenges and interesting possibilities to rethink how texts became books, how writers became authors, and how we might describe how texts change'.”

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