(4) It is noticed in 'Supernatural Religion' [Endnote 65:1] that the particular phrase [Greek: chraesteusthe] has at least a partial parallel in Justin [Greek: ginesthe chraestoi kai oiktirmones], though it has none in the Canonical Gospels.

This may seem to point to a documentary source no longer extant.
Doubtless light would be thrown upon the question if we only knew what was the common original of the two Synoptic texts.

How do they come to be so like and yet so different as they are?
How do they come to be so strangely broken up?
The triple synopsis, which has to do more with narrative, presents less difficulty, but the problem raised by these fragmentary parallelisms in discourse is dark and complex in the extreme; yet if it were only solved it would in all probability give us the key to a wide class of phenomena.

The differences in these extra-canonical quotations do not exceed the differences between the Synoptic Gospels themselves; yet by far the larger proportion of critics regard the resemblances in the Synoptics as due to a common written source used either by all three or by two of them.

The critics have not however, I believe, given any satisfactory explanation of the state of dispersion in which the fragments of this latter class are found.