On Marcion's Text of the Gospel

These are some notes on the current line of reading. Comments would be appreciated, not on the linguistic questions, but on the historical considerations.

It seems to be established that the Western Text of the Gospels is heavily influenced by a text like the Diatessaron in its separate readings and like the Diatessaron in being a harmony of some kind. This text was certainly in a Semitic language. We have the Western text in both Greek and Latin. Here we have difficulties. First, it is now established beyond doubt that the Latin was translated from a Semitic language, not from Greek. Aside from this, by what mechanism could the text of all four separated Gospels have been affected so pervasively by the Diatessaron? How were the readings entered so systematically into four separate Gospels? It seems to me that it would be easier to suppose that the four in their Old Latin form were excerpted from a long text while being accommodated to the Greek four separated Gospels. I know there so many are difficulties with this proposal that it can’t be right as it stands; but the facts remain. I will have to work on it.

It is established that Marcion’s text of the Gospel and Epistles resembled the Western Text. The only conclusion from this, taken with what was said above, is that Marcion’s Gospel text resembled the Diatessaron. I conclude that Tatian published Marcion’s Gospel text, presumably with modifications. Here I come back to what I said a few weeks ago, that Tatian didn’t have the influence to impose universal acceptance of his product for all Aramaic-speakers; or to stop the spread of the Separated Gospels in the Aramaic-speaking world (including Persia) for a couple of centuries. That leaves Marcion’s text.

I said it is established that the Western Text is permeated by the influence of a text in a Semitic language. Everyone assumes it must have been Syriac, but this is only because of the assumption of derivation from the Diatessaron. If the derivation was directly from Marcion’s text, which as is well known is the impression given by the overwhelming number of distributions of readings, then the dialect would have been a form of Western Aramaic. I have had another look at the instances of double translation in the Latin caused by reading a single Syriac word in two senses, or by reading the spelling of a word wrongly once and correctly once, and have verified that all these instances will still work for Western Aramaic and its alphabet. Here we have another part of the answer to the success of the Diatessaron. It was in Syriac, the new international literary dialect of Aramaic, a standardised Eastern dialect taken from a dialect with its home in what is now northern Iraq. Slight editorial changes or additions, or perhaps even extensive additions, would not have mattered much to a reader completely at home in the dialect of the new edition. I think if the reader in Iraq had so to speak been reading his book in Friesian and suddenly had it in front of him in English he would have leapt upon it.

The one part of the Aramaic-speaking world that didn’t accept the Diatessaron overwhelmingly was Palestine; yet the Syropalestinian text closely resembles the Diatessaron and Marcion. The conclusion seems to me to be that the dialect of the Diatessaron was not regarded with favour in Palestine, and Marcion’s text was read, without worrying about its history.

The Diatessaron and the Old Latin were promulgated (I use this word advisedly) only a few years apart, perhaps even simultaneously. The implications of this need further consideration.