The short answer: Yes, of course. When you translate a text, you have to read it. When the text is completely ‘new’, you have to really read it. So you notice… anachronisms. Theological discussions that postdate Justinus philosophus (aka Justin Martyr, first halve second century), references to books written by later authors, like Origenes (third century). And, they generally signal this, suggesting minimal later interpolations, maximal another author. Interested? Continue reading.
The Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos and its readers, 1551–1593
When the Byzantine manuscript Parisinus graecus 450 reached the royal library and Robert Estienne set its contents in the grecs du roi, a large body of writing entered print for the first time under the name of Justin Martyr. Most of it was not his. Surrounding the three genuine works — the two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho — stood a series of later compositions, among them the Quaestiones et responsiones ad orthodoxos (QRO), a question-and-answer collection now dated to the fifth or sixth century. The whole corpus went out under a single second-century name.
The question pursued here is narrow and answerable from the books themselves: as the QRO passed from Greek editio princeps through French and Latin translation to critical edition, did the men who handled it notice that its author could not be Justin? The answer is not uniform. Some printed it in silence; others caught the anachronism at once and said so, in prefaces, in margins, and in their apparatus. In sequence — Estienne, Maumont (twice), Périon, Gelenius, Lang, Sylburg — what (and how) they signalled it.
Estienne (1551): the text without a verdict
The editio princeps is silent on the question. Robert Estienne printed Justin’s works from the single Paris manuscript, announcing the undertaking in his preface to the Biblia Regia, and the 1551 volume presents the QRO as part of the Justinian corpus without any note distinguishing it from the genuine works. Estienne was an editor of the Greek, not a critic of the attribution; the corpus came to him whole, under one name, and he transmitted it whole, under one name. No authenticity remark survives from his hand on this text. That silence is itself worth recording: the man who made the QRO available to the century did not flag it, and everyone who did flag it worked from his page.
Maumont (1554): the anachronism, signalled in the vernacular
The first reader to state the problem in print was not a Latinist or a bibliographer but the French translator Jean de Maumont, in the annotations & observations appended to his 1554 Œuvres de S. Justin. He raises the matter directly, and at length, building a chronological argument out of Suidas, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Eusebius:
Sois aussi adverty, que ce que je mets es annotations & observations mises sur la fin touchant Origene, est pris de Suidas. Et que je trouve par Theodorit Evesque de Cyre en Syrie, qui fut homme tres-sçavant & fervent propugnateur de nostre foy, que Origene peult avoir esté du temps de l’Empereur Commodus, ou bien tost après … Et quant à Commodus, il est certain qu’il fut filz de Marc Aurelie Antonin le philosophe … D’avantage je voy que le mesme Eusebe recite … qu’au temps de la persecution, que l’empereur Severus … feit contre l’eglise de Dieu, Origene estoit encore bien jeune … & narre outreplus que Origene fut appellé par Mammee mere de l’empereur Alexandre …
He then draws the conclusion the chronology forces, and applies it by name to the QRO:
Je t’amene (lecteur) toutes ces choses, à fin de conferer les temps, & cognoistre par le regne des Empereurs, si Justin peult avoir faict mention d’Origene, & juger conséquemment par là, si le dernier traicté, auquel sont contenus les questions Chrestiennes & explications d’icelles, est veritablement dudict Justin: car en icelluy, Origene est allégué …
The argument is complete and correct: Origen belongs to the age of Commodus and Severus, was still young under Severus, and was summoned by Mammaea, mother of Alexander — all long after Justin; the treatise that cites him “est veritablement dudict Justin” only if one ignores the dates, which Maumont refuses to do. This is the anachronism argument in full, in French, in 1554 — a dozen years before the bibliographer Sixtus of Siena, to whom it is often first credited.
One distinction should be kept when citing him. Maumont uses Theodoret as a chronological authority and raises the authenticity question; he does not, in this passage, propose Theodoret as the QRO’s author — the further step Sixtus would take. What Maumont states is the doubt and its ground, not a replacement name.
Maumont again (1559): the reviser who collated his own text with the Latin translations
Maumont is also the one translator who returned to his work, and the revision shows a mind still working on the text. The title-page of the revised edition advertises exactly what he had done in the interval: the text was now collated against the Greek exemplar and against the Latin translations made since, “in France and in Germany” — that is, against Périon and against Gelenius — with the difficult passages explained “according to the three translations” in a separate treatise at the back. He was candid about the limits of his material, blaming partly his own ignorance but adding that the Greek exemplar, “corrupt in many places,” had played its part; at Q. 107 his own margin flags the text as defective (lieu imparfaict).
Aside: Q107 (about Music). The collation made him change his rendering of the contested word ἀνακρουόμενον. Where his 1554 text had read chantée en chant ou en preface, the 1559 text reads chantée en chant ou en resonance spirituelle — the “prelude” given up for “spiritual resounding,” moving toward Périon’s acoustic reading and away from anything instrumental (although Gelenius had translated ‘pulsatur’). The revision registers a translator who had set the Greek beside both Latin versions, weighed their solutions, and moved on second thought. His critical engagement with the text — already explicit on the question of authorship in 1554 — extends in 1559 to a documented re-weighing of the crux itself.
Périon (1554): the anachronism in the margin
In the same year (as Maumont), apparently independently, the Benedictine Joachim Périon caught the same thing at the same place. His Latin Opera (Paris: Dupuys, 1554) carries, in the left margin beside the Answer to Question 82 — exactly where the text cites Origen’s Interpretation of the Hebrew Names — a four-word note:
Cùm Origenem nominet, ab alio Iustino scripta haec videntur.
Since he names Origen, these writings seem to be by a different Justin. The reasoning is the anachronism argument reduced to its core: the text names Origen, who is later than Justin, so the work belongs to someone else — specifically, in Périon’s formulation, to “a different Justin” (alio Iustino), a later namesake, rather than to the martyr. It is a stated verdict, in print, at the precise locus, and it survived to be quoted at the very end of the century: when Sylburg came to compile his Annotationes posteriores he reported finding, “in the margin … since Origen is named here, these pieces seem written by a different Justin” (ab alio Iustino haec scripta videri) — his slightly loosened citation of Périon’s note.
Gelenius (1555): silence, and a death
The second Latin version is silent on authenticity — and the silence is, in this case, well documented, because the volume explains why its translator left no annotations: Sigismund Gelenius died with the work half finished. His printer Nicolaus Episcopius set out the circumstances in the preface Candido lectori:
… Sigismundi Gelenij, hunc autorem in Latinam linguam convertere aggressi mors importuna … qui dum in suo instituto occupatus esset, plusque iam dimidia parte absolvisset, lethali est correptus morbo … Hinc factum est, ut alii cuidam docto viro, nobis amico, Latinaeque ac Graecae linguae perpulchre gnaro, reliquum eius autoris traducendi provincia fuerit tradita …
Death “seized him with a fatal illness” when he had “completed more than half,” and the remainder passed “to another learned man, a friend of ours, thoroughly skilled in Latin and Greek.” A translation broken off at its author’s death and finished by a second hand for the press was not the occasion for a critical dossier on the corpus, and none was supplied. Gelenius belongs with Estienne on the “no” side of the ledger — not because he judged the text genuine, but because the edition records no judgment at all.
Lange (1565): doubt stated twice
With Johann Lang the doubt becomes fully articulate and is stated in two distinct forms. In the preface to the two books of Responsiones ad orthodoxos (Tomus III, p. 54), Lang grounds the doubt in the ancient book-lists:
Non inveniuntur autem duo haec Iustini volumina, in librorum eius nomenclatura, quae apud Ecclesiasticos historicos & Hieronymum reperitur. Et quamvis eo nomine, & aliis quoque de causis addubitari possit, an illa Iustini philosophi & martyris nostri genuina sint scripta, nec ne: non illibenter tamen ea viri studiosi & pii, neque sine fructu multo legent.
The two volumes “are not found in the catalogue of his books as it appears in the ecclesiastical historians and in Jerome”; and so “one may doubt … whether those are genuine writings of our Justin the philosopher and martyr, or not” — yet the pious reader will read them “not unwillingly, and with much profit.” Lang adds the mechanism by which a spurious text could look genuine: later annotations, he says, were absorbed into the running text “through the carelessness of copyists” (non satis considerati scribae … per imperitiam inseruerunt).
That is the catalogue argument. Lang also gives the anachronism argument, and — significantly — at the same Origen passage Périon had marked. His annotation to Question 82 spells out the imperial chronology the French translators had invoked:
Haec verba, nisi adiecticia sunt, in dubium vocare possunt, an hic à beato Iustino compositus sit liber. Aliquanto namque post Iustinum, in Ecclesia Christi apud Alexandriam floruit Origenes: sub Alexandro Severo videlicet, cuius cum matre Mammaea fuisse Origenes dicitur. Iustinus autem sub Antoninis vixit, & sub Commodo martyrio defunctus est.
Origen “flourished some while after Justin … under Alexander Severus, with whose mother Mammaea he is said to have associated,” while “Justin lived under the Antonines and died a martyr under Commodus”; so the words that cite him “can call into question whether this book was composed by the blessed Justin” — “unless they are an interpolation” (nisi adiecticia sunt), the loophole his preface had already prepared. Lang, then, holds both grounds at once: the work is unlisted by Jerome, and it cites an author who postdates its supposed one. He translated and published it in full regardless, with a patristic catena of his own — the act of a philologically conscious editor, not a naïve transmitter.
Sylburg (1593): spuriousness classified
By the time Friedrich Sylburg re-edited the Greek for the Commelinus press, doubt had hardened into classification. Sylburg divided the whole Justinian corpus into three classes — genuine, doubtful, and spurious — and placed the QRO in the third. He signalled this in his preface only by deferral, promising to give his verdict “on certain things that seem to have crept into the catalogues of Justin’s works by spurious substitution”:
de quibusdam quæ adulterina suppositione in Iustinianorum cataloga irrepsisse videntur … sententiam exponemus.
The arguments themselves he reserved for the Annotationes, where he judged the book’s genuineness valde dubium — “very doubtful” — and found not a few of its questions longe inferiores, far beneath Justin’s own age: institutions and controversies belonging to a later church. Yet, like every editor before him, he printed the QRO complete (pp. 306–381). The spurious classification governed the apparatus, not the contents. Sylburg also gathered up his predecessors. He built his edition on Lang’s Latin, “the most recent and most accurate” of the three versions in his opinion; he drew on Périon’s annotations, quoting the very marginal note at Q. 82; and in retelling the sequence of translations he preserved the account that had come down from Lange’s own preface. The critical tradition on the QRO’s authorship, begun in a French margin and a French appendix in 1554, closes in 1593 with the text formally consigned to the spuria — and still, characteristically, printed in full.
Conclusion
Across the six sixteenth-century encounters with the text, the pattern is clear. Two of the six left no verdict on the attribution, each for his own reason: Estienne transmitted the whole corpus under a single name in his 1551 princeps, without comment; Gelenius died with his own translation still unfinished, leaving nothing behind for anyone to judge. Every translator who read the text closely enough to render it in full, by contrast, caught the spuriousness — and caught it early. Maumont stated it in his observations of 1554; Périon marked it in his margin that same year, at the decisive Origen passage; Lang stated it twice in 1565, once from the ancient catalogues and once from the same anachronism; and Sylburg classified it among the spuria in 1593. The bibliographer Sixtus of Siena, usually credited with discovering the spuriousness in 1566, was in fact preceded by at least three men, and by as much as twelve years. These readers knew the name on the title page was not the author’s, said so exactly where their readers might start to wonder the same thing — at the Origen passage — and published their translation of the text regardless — the relevance of the text lay in its matter, not its signature.
2026 Dick Wursten