Most people can’t even imagine where someone like Mohammed would have gotten the idea that Jesus was really the herald for someone else. That’s because they haven’t considered the possibility that our four existing canonical texts represent a selective ‘dicing and slicing’ of a lost master gospel material in order to make its volatile original logically incomprehensible. But that’s exactly what I and a number of ancient testimonies are suggesting. So let’s start at the beginning.
It cannot be doubted that a ‘gospel in four parts’ was the beating heart of the Greek-speaking churches which dominated religious life in the Roman Empire. To argue against this would be foolishness because it is plainly evident that this was the reality at the dawn of the third century. However before that period and outside of these Greek speaking churches of Europe and Asia Minor an entirely different picture emerges.
Throughout the Middle East – and especially in Syria and Palestine, the very territory first visited by Jesus and his disciples – this ‘fourfold innovation’ never took hold until the fifth century. Even then it was only forced into Syriac churches by a sustained Imperial effort to burn all copies of the form of the gospel these people had always known and loved – a single, long text with all the stories ‘under one roof’ so to speak.
In order to determine which textual form came first we have to look at a number of factors – i.e. what do the surviving reports of the earliest Church writers tell us? What do we discover from the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament? When we do a systematic study of all the available evidence we find that:
(i) the earliest Christian witnesses inevitably speak of ‘the gospel’ used by the true Church rather than ‘the gospels.’
(ii) an examination of the citation of gospel material among these earliest witnesses shows they drew from a single, long gospel (viz. Marcion, Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Valentinus, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian etc.). Our four canonical gospel were unknown to them or at least unused by them.
(iii) Bart Ehrman in his survey of all surviving gospel manuscripts (The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research p. 77) acknowledges that "[i]n raw chronological terms, the Diatessaron antedates all MSS of the NT, save that tiny fragment of the Gospel of John known as P52." I have just finished an article which points out that Ehrman and others are actually wrong about P52. It could well be a fragment from the Diatessaron. This means that we can effectively restate Ehrman’s observation to say that ALL earliest manuscripts can be viewed as being of the single, long gospel variety, though in the case of P52 this is not conclusive.
(iv) Irenaeus is the first person to say that there should be four gospels rather than one and did so only at the end of the second century. He does so without citing a pre-existent tradition in the Church to hold this belief. He seems to invent it out of thin air. This suspicion is reinforced by an inherent contradiction in Irenaeus’ testimony. For while Irenaeus swears up and down that he is only preserving the teachings and traditions of Polycarp of Smyra (a famous teacher from Asia Minor) a detailed examination of Polycarp’s writings demonstrates that this Church Father only drew gospel citations from the Diatessaron. The inference again would be that Irenaeus had something to do with the development of the four canonical gospels – a suggestion confirmed by one of our main experts Dr David Trobisch of the Society of Biblical Literature.
The point is that the surviving Arabic Diatessaron is all the physical evidence we will ever need. Diatessaron fragments have been discovered in all parts of the Empire and beyond. Our earliest surviving complete manuscript of a ‘Diatessaron’ or single, long gospel comes from a much later period. It is a text associated with the Nestorian monk Abu'l-Faraj `Abd-Allāh al-Iraqi or Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. 1043 CE). The surviving manuscript was translated from Syriac into Arabic by him. Yet this language difficulty present problems for New Testament scholars. It is difficult to have one tradition in Arabic and others in Greek and Syriac. It makes comparing the texts something like deciding between apples and oranges.
For a useful, up to date discussion of the authorship of the Arabic diatessaron see Joosse 1997 VI pp. 38-44. Manuscripts or fragments of the Diatessaron of Tatian and closely related texts existed in a variety of languages, including Syriac, Greek, Arabic, Parthian, Persian, Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Latin and Old High German, etc (for some details see Petersen, 1994: Appendix 1). The Arabic and Persian renderings are among the more ancient and important. Modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament include occasional variant readings indicated in the Arabic diatessaron (=T A ). The Diatessaron represents a pre-canonical forms of the New Testament Gospels (Petersen, 1994:1).
Major mss. include:
Rome Vatican Arab 14 XII/XIII.
Rome Vatican Arab Borg. arab. 250 XIV
Cairo Coptic Patriarchate Ms. 67.
Oxford Bodleian Arab e 163 1806
Aleppo Paul Sbath No. 1020 1791
Beirut Jesuit Library No. 429 1332
The Persian Harmony or translation of the Diatessaron (13th century CE?).
Mss. = Florence Bib Laurent Cod Ms. Or. XVII (81) 1547
Refer: Bibliothecae Mediceae Lavrentianae et Palatinae Codicvm mms. Orientalivm Catalogus, ed. S.E. Assemani (Florentiae 1742), 59-61.
Apparently translated by a Jacobite layman of Tabriz named Īwānnis `Īzz al-Dīn ("John, the Glory of the Religion") (see Metzger, Early Versions, 1977: 17-19).
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dating back to conversations with his grandfather, Gaston Frank. "He said we represent one of the last descendants of the Frankist Jewish faith in the world," he muses. "I grew up thinking that our family was something like the Last of the Mohicans."