Boid on the Diatessaron

I though you might like to know I’ve just acquired two important books. The first is Das Diatessaron Tatians: seine Überlieferung und sein Nachwirken in Morgen- und Abendland sowie der heutige Stand seiner Erforschung, by Curt Peters (Rome 1939; reprinted 1962). The second is Vetus Evangeliun Syrorum et exinde excerptum Diatessaron Tatiani [Biblia Polyglotta Matritensia VI], Madrid, 1967. This second book is surprising. It is a reconstruction of the Diatessaron in Syriac. The editors don’t take their work further by using the Arabic or any other evidence past the translations into Arabic and Latin. They even avoid using the fragment of the Greek, wrongly in my view. Their argument is that the Greek is translated from Syriac. You know I think there were two originals, one in Greek and one in Syriac, though I admit that Tatian might have got someone else to edit the Greek. Their reason for not using the Arabic is that they say it would have been altered slightly by the translator, because they have seen that the Diatessaron quotations in Syriac works are often slightly mangled in the Armenian and Georgian translations. This seems to me to be a very unsound argument. A translation of the whole Diatessaron would have been done more carefully than a translation of a quotation. All the same, what they have done is impressive. They have assembled every quotation from the Diatessaron in Syriac, including Syriac works only extent in translation, and then sifted these quotations to recover the most likely text of each verse. They summarise their reconstruction in the introduction in a list using the names of the four canonical books and their modern chapter and verse nos. Their method of working leads them to start with “In the beginning was the Word etc.”, whereas I think the words “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus the anointed” must have come before this as a heading.

An observation by Knox. The ancient headings still used centuries later “kata Matthaian”, “kata Markon”, “kata Loukan”, “kata Iôannên” imply the concept of a SINGLE Gospel. The heading is not “The Gospel according to Mark” and so on, but only “according to Mark. The heading “the Gospel” is therefore implicitly reserved for the book of which these are the four parts. He points out that this is the kind of wording used by all early authors. I would add that this is still reflected in the order of service, in which “the Gospel” is the name of a book containing all four. Knox adds that this manner of reference means that the abstraction “the Gospel” comes according to Mark and so on, but he adds as well that the abstraction is visible in a book, or what would be a book if you could fit all four into one ms., and that this book would not be four Gospels, but one Gospel with four faces, referring to the old symbolism of the lion, bull, eagle, and man. I would add that this symbol comes from Ezekiel ch. I and ch. X, and that in Ezekiel’s vision the four faces belong to ONE angelic being. What all this means is that ancient scribal practice and ancient liturgical terminology and ancient theological terminology reflect an original situation of one Gospel, and that these usages are inexplicable otherwise.

This is also the assumption in the Koran.