Boid on the Word 'John' Appearing at the Beginning of the Diatessaron

When explaining the presence of the word “John” at the start of the Diatessaron, a few words need to be added for clarity. Where you say “the editor” it would be better to say “Tatian or the editor of the predecessor to Tatian’s edition, known as the Diatessaron”. When you say “translating”, it would be clearer if you said “translation from Greek into Syriac (reaching us in an Arabic daughter-translation from the Syriac).”. It might be a good idea to set out the Greek forms more systematically in a footnote, or in the body of the text, like this.

““The Hebrew ליוחנן would be rendered by the genitive case with no preposition in Greek, as ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ. It is highly likely that the name (in the genitive case) was abbreviated, as is normally done in mss., and the translator saw simply ΙΩΑΝΝ or ΙΩΑΝ with no indication of the case that was intended. In this case a translation without a preposition would be inevitable. What would have confused or misled the translator even more was that he would have been familiar with the phrase ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ (with the accusative case) meaning “according to John”, with its implicit assumption of the existence of four Gospels. He would not have expected ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ meaning “by John” meaning that this was the single Gospel and this single Gospel was composed by someone with the name or title of John, or by anonymous editors claiming the authority of John for this edited text of the original single long Gospel, the “super-Gospel”. (Note that the term “super-Gospel” as used in this monograph does not mean a combined Gospel, but rather an original long Gospel not yet divided between four or even more shorter Gospels).”

Your comparison with people not recognising Clark Kent as Superman because of the glasses is very good. But Clark Kent does take his glasses off sometimes. He is still not seen as Superman because he combs his hair a different way. The comparison you make is unfortunately very appropriate. KEEP THIS ANALOGY.