Did the Sixteenth-Century Translators and Editors of Justin Notice the Forgery?
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. Taken in sequence — Estienne, Maumont (twice), Périon, Gelenius, Lang, Sylburg — they show the forgery being detected not once and late, but repeatedly and early, and by the translators before the bibliographers.
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 forgery named 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
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).
The collation changed his rendering at the contested word. 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. 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, and 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 own slightly loosened citation of Périon’s note.
Périon thus doubted the ascription twice over: explicitly, in this margin, and implicitly, in his cautious rendering of the disputed word at Q. 107 as resonat, "resounds," which commits him to no instrument. He was not a silent transmitter but a reader who marked the forgery where he met it.
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 such apparatus. 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. (His rendering of the crux, the openly instrumental pulsatur, is a lexical choice, not a verdict on authorship.)
Lang (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): the forgery 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. Working from the Greek rather than from a translation, he could add anachronisms invisible to the Latin readers: 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; Q. 107 remained on the page, and Sylburg’s own reading of the disputed word — he glosses it pulsatum, "struck," in his note, understanding it in the instrumental sense — was made in full knowledge that the author was not Justin. His judgement on the word owes nothing to the authority of the name.
Sylburg also gathered up his predecessors. He built his edition on Lang’s Latin, "the most recent and most accurate" of the three versions; 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 Lang’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. The two editors of the Greek who framed the corpus — Estienne at the beginning, and Gelenius’s press in the middle — left no verdict on the attribution: Estienne transmitted the whole under one name, and Gelenius died before any apparatus could be written. But every translator who read the text closely enough to render it caught the forgery, and caught it early. Maumont stated it in his 1554 observations and refined his rendering in 1559; Périon marked it in his 1554 margin at the decisive Origen passage; Lang stated it twice in 1565, from the catalogues and from the same anachronism; and Sylburg classified it among the spuria in 1593. The bibliographer Sixtus of Siena, usually credited with the discovery in 1566, was in fact preceded by at least three men and twelve years.
The detection was, moreover, remarkably consistent in its instrument: the citation of Origen, whom Justin could not have read. Maumont reached it through Suidas and Theodoret’s imperial chronology; Périon condensed it into four marginal words; Lang expanded it into a dated argument about Alexander Severus and the Antonines. Three readers, working in two languages and three cities, converged on the same passage and drew the same conclusion. The men who put pseudo-Justin into print were not deceived by him. They knew the name on the title-page was not the author’s, said so in the places their readers would look, and published the text anyway — for its matter, not its signature.