On the Gospel Used By Justin

Here is something you need to know. Boismard has argued exhaustively (and exhaustingly for the reader) that the Pepys ms. derives not from the Diatessaron but from the Gospel book quoted by Justin, composed not later than 140, the Memoirs of the Apostles. Boismard calls this book a harmonisation, but I prefer to see it as a long Gospel not dependent on the ancestors of our canoical four. Boismard shows that it couldn’t have depended on the four in the form we have them. He gives this book used by Justin the siglum P, after its main surviving witness, the Pepys ms. He argues that all mediaeval European witnesses to the Diatessaron have been influenced by this same book known to Justin, or from a book in Syriac and Latin derived from it, so that none is pure Diatessaron. In fact, the best witness to the Latin Diatessaron, the Luik ms., has been more strongly coloured by P than most other witnesses. Others have shown in numerous studies that Efrem had two different long Gospels, and the evidence is compelling. He says one of the books used by Efrem is this P and the other the Diatessaron. He shows that the Arabic translation of the Diatessaron has been strongly coloured by P. He argues that the Diatessaron was a re-edition of P. with some changes. I think he thinks of P as having been composed in Greek, but in my opinion all his evidence fits a theory of an original in Western Aramaic or Hebrew, with a Greek translation. He thinks the form used by Justin might have been altered. I think so too. I conclude that this P might simply be the Gospel of the Hebrews, but revised, possibly tendentiously.

I forgot to mention that many scholars have noticed that the Greek fragment of the Diatessaron is not pure Diatessaron. Boismard gives evidence for the inclusion of slabs of P in this text. P and the Diatessaron must have both been well known and used together. See what I said about Efrem, quoting Boismard quoting numerous scholars. I conclude that the two were treated as two different editions of the Gospel of the Hebrews. This would partly explain why Epiphanius confuses the Diatessaron with the Gospel of the Hebrews, though it must be borne in mind that Epiphanius could manage to get confused without any encouragement from facts.