of texts (either in literary fiction or in actual practice of groups) are due to their common roots within the Greek and Roman ways of living and studying as philosophers. The supposition that Christian groups adopted or inherited Jewish Diaspora customs of reading and studying Torah does not moreover explain the later prominence of the Gospels in Christian liturgies. Even if the Gospels should have been written in the late first century, there was just no Christian liturgy in which they played an essential role. Sympotic meetings of Christians provided a framework for discussions of all kinds of texts and topics. They do not require Gospel texts like the later Liturgies of the Word. It is still not evident for Origen that Gospel readings were indispensable.
Justin’s group does not perform Liturgies of the Word in their third and fourth century shape and function. Therefore, it is not more than a tentative suggestion that these later Liturgies of the Word took their shape independent of Justin but because of the same reasons. Ephrem the Syrian still wrote tractates against Macion (and others). Opposition against Marcion thus united churches which diverged in other questions. Justin’s choice of texts reveals the same motivation as later designs of liturgies without being their precursor. In later epochs, an obligatory Liturgy of the Word came to stage the sanctity of the canonical Gospels as well as their superiority over other texts. Readings of Old Testament texts supported the same case. The performance of Liturgies of the Word and its ritualized emphasis on the Gospels thus emerged in order to shape and express Christian identity and orthodoxy as Anti-Marcionite.
Apart from these only tentative suggestions, the origins of the Gospels must be reconstructed based on historical and textual data. Gospel texts emerge in the middle of the second century as reading material of a group of intellectuals/philosophers (Justin). A century later, their reading is attested in the first traces of a Liturgy of the Word preceding the celebration of the Eucharist. The history of Christian liturgies does not require a date of origins for the Gospels before Justin. Even that time—as well as several decades after Justin’s death—Christianity did not practice any type of liturgy that required Gospel readings.
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