Diatessaron

One Card-Sized Fragment

Tatian came from the East, called himself an Assyrian, went to Rome, became a pupil of Justin Martyr, and after Justin's death broke with the church over an austere teaching that rejected wine, meat and marriage. Somewhere around AD 170 he produced a single continuous gospel narrative out of the four. The name means "through four". Eusebius, writing a century and a half later, could only report it at arm's length: Tatian "formed a certain combination and collection of the Gospels, I know not how, to which he gave the title Diatessaron, and which is still in the hands of some."

Nothing of it survives complete in any language. The only piece of it in Greek that anyone has ever found is a single parchment leaf about ten centimetres across, dug out of the embankment of the city wall at Dura-Europos on 5 March 1933 by the Yale and French Academy expedition, and datable simply because Dura fell in 256 or 257 and nothing was put into that embankment afterwards. Yale holds it in the Beinecke Library as P.CtYBR inv. DPg 24, and has digitised it in full; it is also known as Dura Parchment 24 and, in the register of New Testament manuscripts, as uncial 0212. The verso is blank.

Everything else is at one or more removes. There is Ephrem the Syrian's commentary on it, surviving in Armenian and — since the Chester Beatty Library acquired the manuscript in 1957 — in Syriac, published by L. Leloir in 1963 with forty-one more leaves surfacing in 1984 and 1986; between the Dublin leaves and one folio in Barcelona, about eighty per cent of that codex survives. There is an Arabic version, translated in the eleventh century from a Syriac copy made in the ninth. There is a Latin harmony, Codex Fuldensis, written for Victor of Capua in the 540s and now at Fulda. There are medieval Dutch, Persian and Old High German harmonies. As P. M. Head puts it of the Arabic, we are "at least one translation (maybe two) away from the original Diatessaron, and several copyings."

Why a Bible Reader Should Care

The first reason is what its existence shows about the Gospels. By about AD 170 Tatian had four, and it was these four, and he treated them as the material to be harmonised rather than as four options among many. Victor of Capua, who read the whole Latin harmony closely enough to insert reference numbers throughout it, could be confident that scarcely a word in it does not come from one of the four. That is a strong piece of evidence and it deserves to be stated carefully rather than pushed: it shows the four were the authoritative gospel material in Tatian's world, which is not the same claim as a closed canon, and specialists differ on how much further it reaches. The standard recent volume on the subject, edited by M. R. Crawford and N. J. Zola, is described by its publisher as addressing a work that has been claimed both as a vindication of the fourfold gospel's early canonical status and as an argument for the canon's continuing fluidity — which is a fair summary of how widely the same evidence gets used. There are two real qualifications. Tatian appears to have had some access to material outside the four, though it is a small proportion of the whole. And Victor was reading a sixth-century Latin harmony whose text had been conformed to the Vulgate — the very witness the next section shows to be the only surviving Western one, and a compromised one. His observation is worth having; it is not a direct sight of what Tatian wrote.

The second reason is what happened to it. It was not merely edged out; it was collected up and replaced, and the bishop who did it wrote down why. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, about 453, reported that Tatian "composed the Gospel which is called Diatessaron, cutting out the genealogies and such other passages as show the Lord to have been born of the seed of David after the flesh." Ordinary congregations, he says, used it innocently: it "was in use not only among persons belonging to his sect, but also among those who follow the apostolic doctrine, as they did not perceive the mischief of the composition, but used the book in all simplicity on account of its brevity." Then the sentence that is quoted in every account of the Diatessaron: "And I myself found more than two hundred such copies held in respect in the churches in our parts. All these I collected and put away, and I replaced them by the Gospels of the Four Evangelists."

It is worth being exact about that, because it is often told as a story about tidiness and it is not. Theodoret's stated objection is doctrinal: he thought the harmony obscured the Lord's descent from David in the flesh, which is a claim the New Testament makes in its own words. And it is a story about the four winning, in a place where they had not been the working text for generations. What survives of Tatian's own tendencies in the text is thinner than the lurid version suggests. The genealogies really are absent from Ephrem and from the Arabic, and Theodoret says so too — though some witnesses carry them and D. Plooij argued they were there originally. Head's own conclusion after examining the christology is measured: in producing the harmony "Tatian pursued a relatively conservative procedure: including practically everything from each Gospel," and apart from the genealogies "there is little other evidence of a rejection of the humanity of Jesus."

The Method for Recovering It Is Collapsing

For most of the twentieth century, scholars reconstructed Tatian's text by triangulating the surviving translations and quotations. W. L. Petersen built the standard apparatus for it and wrote the field's standard book. The governing rule was that a reading counts as Tatian's when both an Eastern and a Western witness carry it and no other source explains it. That method is now in serious trouble, and the trouble came from inside.

U. B. Schmid, building on B. Fischer and J. Rathofer, showed that the supposedly ancient Latin readings in the medieval Western harmonies were circulating in ordinary medieval commentary — in the Glossa Ordinaria and in marginal and interlinear glosses — and traced twenty-four Latin witnesses back, one by one, to Codex Fuldensis. His verdict is blunt: "in all likelihood only one Western witness had an independent voice, and that is Codex Fuldensis itself. Forget about the rest, if you want to reconstruct Tatian's Diatessaron." D. C. Parker drew the consequence: "At a sweep, therefore, the entire Western tradition is reduced to a single witness [= Codex Fuldensis]. This is a matter to which scholars will need to turn their attention rather urgently." N. J. Zola's summary is that "the entire Western Diatessaronic tradition is collapsing back into a single witness: Codex Fuldensis."

Even the Dura fragment is contested. D. C. Parker, D. G. K. Taylor and M. Goodacre re-edited it in 1999 and concluded it is not Tatian's at all: "We confess to having felt some surprise when five out of the eight items on which a conclusion could be reached proved to be non-Tatianic. The bulk of evidence is strongly against the fragment's being a part of Tatian's Diatessaron." J. Joosten answered them in 2003 and defended the identification. I. N. Mills argued the case against more strongly still in the standard 2019 collection; this article has not opened his chapter and reports it from the volume's own contents. M. Monier and J. E. Taylor, who come down in favour of the identification, nevertheless put the underlying difficulty in one sentence: "reconstructing the Diatessaron on the basis of later versions has proven problematic, so there is no agreed-upon text with which the fragment can be compared". Their own suggestion is that the leaf "contains significant errors of reading, and thus it may be a writing exercise" — an early form of Tatian's text, but not an expert copy of it. Even the original language is unresolved: T. Zahn, D. Plooij and Petersen argued for Syriac, H. Vogels, H. von Soden and Schmid for Greek, and Zola describes the field as "split down the middle" with a resolution unlikely without new evidence.

This article has not opened Petersen's 1994 volume, and it will not put words in his mouth: he was acutely aware of how poor the available editions were, and the one hedge of his that can be quoted with a page number is his description of the "insurmountable obstacles" presented by the "poor editions and translations" of the Arabic. It is also worth knowing the field has not stopped. Zola argues that Fuldensis may yet yield genuine Tatianic readings; J. W. Barker's 2021 study sorts the witnesses by narrative sequence rather than wording and argues the Eastern witnesses preserve Tatian's order while the Western descend from a fourth-century revision. The reason to tell a reader all this is not to be gloomy about scholarship. It is that a method which worked for eighty years turned out to be resting on medieval glosses, and the people who found that out were the specialists themselves, in print, correcting their own field.

Scripture references

• John 1:1-3 — Where the Diatessaron begins, in both Ephrem's commentary and the Arabic version
• Romans 1:3 — Born of the offspring of David according to the flesh — precisely Theodoret's stated objection
• Matthew 1:1 — One of the two genealogies absent from the Diatessaron's main witnesses
• Luke 3:23 — The other genealogy, and the reason a bishop went looking for two hundred copies

Sources

• Holding institutionYale University Library: P.CtYBR inv. DPg 24, Yale Papyrus Collection — Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University · The holding library's own record, confirmed through its IIIF manifest and its LUX data record after the catalogue page proved to reject automated requests. It gives the abstract "Tatian, Diatessaron", the container P.CtYBR inv. DPg 24, the language as Greek, the note that the verso is blank, and full digitisation with public access. Note the shelfmark. Yale's own container is P.CtYBR inv. DPg 24; the leaf is cited in the scholarly literature as Dura Parchment 24 and, in the New Testament register, as uncial 0212. Several other numbers circulate for it and this article does not attempt to adjudicate between them, giving the holding library's own designation firstSupports: The one surviving Greek witness, its shelfmark and its facsimile
• Holding institutionChester Beatty Library: Syc 709, Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron — Chester Beatty Library, Dublin · The holding library's own viewer and catalogue record: 75 folios, Syriac, about AD 500 with the first ten folios eighth or ninth century, acquired 1957 and bound in 1960. Its description supplies the chapter coverage, the companion manuscript Syc 709.1 acquired in 1984 and 1986, the single folio in Barcelona, and the calculation that about eighty per cent of the original codex survivesSupports: The Syriac commentary, its extent and its acquisition history
• ScholarshipN. J. Zola, Tatian's Diatessaron in Latin: A New Edition and Translation of Codex Fuldensis — Nicholas J. Zola · Baylor University doctoral dissertation, open access, 196 pages, downloaded and read. Zola is co-editor of the standard 2019 volume on the Diatessaron, so this is the state of the question in a specialist's own words. Source of the collapse of the Western tradition, of the Schmid and Parker quotations as he prints them, of the account of the original-language dispute as "split down the middle", of Victor of Capua's own words about Tatian, and of the one Petersen hedge quoted here with its page referenceSupports: The whole of the third section, and the Latin and Arabic transmission
• ScholarshipP. M. Head, "Tatian's Christology and its Influence on the Composition of the Diatessaron" — Peter M. Head · Tyndale Bulletin 43.1 (1992), 121-137, DOI 10.53751/001c.30478, open access. Source of Tatian's biography with its primary references, of the observation that the removes between us and the original are at least one translation and several copyings, of the evidence about the genealogies including D. Plooij's dissent, and of Head's own conclusion that Tatian's procedure was relatively conservativeSupports: Tatian himself, and what can and cannot be shown about his handling of the text
• ScholarshipM. Monier and J. E. Taylor, "Tatian's Diatessaron: The Arabic Version, the Dura Europos Fragment, and the Women Witnesses" — Mina Monier and Joan E. Taylor · Journal of Theological Studies 72.1 (2021), 192-230, DOI 10.1093/jts/flab039. The abstract is open and was fetched and read; the full article is behind a paywall and this article has not read it. Both sentences quoted here are from that abstract. Note carefully where they stand: they argue the Arabic version aligns closely with the Dura parchment and support identifying it as an early form of Tatian's work, so they belong on the affirmative side of that dispute even though they think the leaf is an imperfect copy · paywalledSupports: That there is no agreed text against which the Dura fragment can be tested
• Primary textThe Diatessaron of Tatian, translated by H. W. Hogg (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. IX) — Translated by Hope W. Hogg · The Arabic Diatessaron in English, public domain and hosted at Wikisource in fifty-five sections. Consulted directly for the opening at John 1:1 and for the reading of the Baptist's food, where Hogg's own footnote is a useful warning: the vegetarian "milk and honey" reading so often attributed to Tatian is not in the surviving Arabic text but is reconstructed from other witnesses. Bear in mind throughout that this is a translation of a translationSupports: The opening of the harmony, and a caution about reconstructed readings
• Primary textTheodoret of Cyrrhus on the Diatessaron, in S. Hemphill, The Diatessaron of Tatian (1888) — Theodoret of Cyrrhus, translated by Samuel Hemphill · Public domain at the Internet Archive; the full text was downloaded and the passage read in place. Theodoret's report is Haereticarum fabularum compendium 1.20, written about 453. Every sentence of his quoted here — the excision of the genealogies, the innocent use by orthodox congregations, and the two hundred copies — is from this translationSupports: Why the Diatessaron was withdrawn, in the words of the bishop who withdrew it
• Primary textEusebius, Church History 4.29 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series II, vol. I) — Eusebius of Caesarea, translated by A. C. McGiffert · Public domain at Wikisource, read in place. Section 6 is the earliest surviving notice of the work by name, and the phrase "I know not how" is quoted here because it shows how remote a well-read bishop already was from the work in the early fourth century — he knows copies are "still in the hands of some" and cannot say how it was put together. That is not the same as proving he never saw one, and the article does not say it isSupports: The earliest external notice, and how remote it already was
• Primary textD. C. Parker, D. G. K. Taylor and M. Goodacre, "The Dura-Europos Gospel Harmony", as quoted at Early Christian Writings — D. C. Parker, David G. K. Taylor and Mark Goodacre · Their re-edition is in D. G. K. Taylor, ed., Studies in the Early Text of the Gospels and Acts (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999), 192-228. This article has not opened that volume; the page linked reproduces their conclusions with page references, and it is where the sentences quoted here were read and checked, at their page 225. Flagged plainly because it is a quotation of living scholars taken from a reproduction rather than from the bookSupports: The 1999 argument that the Dura leaf is not Diatessaronic
• ScholarshipM. R. Crawford and N. J. Zola, eds., The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Nature and Text of the Diatessaron; and J. W. Barker, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Composition, Redaction, Recension, and Reception — Matthew R. Crawford and Nicholas J. Zola; James W. Barker · Crawford and Zola, The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries 3 (London: T&T Clark, 2019), is the standard recent collection and carries I. N. Mills’s chapter against the Diatessaronic character of the Dura leaf and U. B. Schmid’s on Codex Fuldensis; the publisher’s description of that volume is the source of the sentence in section two about how widely the same evidence gets used. Barker, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2021), sorts the witnesses by narrative sequence rather than wording and argues the Eastern witnesses preserve Tatian’s order while the Western descend from a fourth-century recension. Neither has been opened here and both are reported at second handSupports: The current state of the field named in the third section
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Diatessaron

Further reading

• Yale University Library: P.CtYBR inv. DPg 24 (Dura Parchment)
• Chester Beatty Library: Syc 709, Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron
• N. J. Zola, Tatian's Diatessaron in Latin (open access)
• The Diatessaron of Tatian, translated by H. W. Hogg (public domain, Wikisource)