On the Claim that the Diatessaron Went Back to an Original Hebrew Gospel Which Was 'By John'

It is becoming very strange indeed to see how close Polycarp is getting to Valentinism. This goes against everything that Irenaeus claimed about his teacher. Nevertheless it should hardly be surprising given the fact that sitting across from Irenaeus at the Imperial court was Florinus who was a Valentinian and undoubtedly claimed that he learned his teachings from the man Irenaeus identifies as 'Polycarp' or 'the elder.' For the moment let me merely emphasize that the discovery of Irenaeus' 'correction' of Polycarp’s Diatesseron-like gospel in his Letter to the Philippians quite literally transforms our understanding of the origins of Christianity.

All at once we see the quaternion as necessarily representing an artificial construct on the part of Irenaeus. As I have said earlier, this “fourfold tradition” necessarily did not come from Polycarp. Indeed it is important to note that Irenaeus never once cites his master as a witness to its pre-existence. Instead he essentially uses arguments from what we might call “Christian natural science” – i.e. that it is only fitting to have four gospels because the universe itself and its Creator reflect this very number.

If we didn’t know better, it sounds like Irenaeus’ numerological argument to support his quaternion developed out of the imagination of the heresies. As it is we are left to combat the lingering prejudices in the minds of scholars that the use of “many gospels” was normative in ancient Christianity while the use of “one gospel” was somehow “strange” and “idiosyncratic.”

Of course I am in the minority when I suggest that the “ur-Gospel” behind our Catholic tradition must necessarily have been a Diatesseron-like Gospel of John. I am not even arguing for the fact that this “one gospel” is the earliest gospel (I think the Marcionite text and the Justin-Tatian Diatesseron were all still earlier). Nevertheless it is important to finally recognize that even our Catholic tradition was rooted in a “super text.”

At best we can say that Irenaeus must have claimed that Polycarp’s “ur-Gospel of John” was above all else an anti-Marcionite revisionist text. But all of this will have to wait.

I think it is entirely possible to demonstrate that the Borgian and Vatican MSS are connected to Polycarp’s “ur-Gospel of John” rather than Tatian’s earlier text. Most scholars acknowledge that what has been passed down to us is not from Tatian. Nevertheless they struggle to explain from whence this “gospel harmony” arose. At last now we have the likely answer – the surviving text is most likely is a descendant of Polycarp’s original John gospel.

The truth is that I have always been struck by the manner in which the name “John” still appears in the opening lines of our Diatesseron manuscripts. We read in the opening lines of both the surviving Borgian and Vatican manuscript the words:

The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus the Son of the living God John In the beginning was the Word etc.

I wasn’t the only one puzzled by the name “John” appearing “smack dab” in the middle of the opening sentence seemingly unconnected to the words around it.

This single word “John” in the Arabic text of the Diatesseron makes no sense at all. It baffled both of the translators into English, Hamlyn Hill and Hope W. Hogg. The first editor of the Arabic text, Ciasca, passes over it in silence. Yet, given the fact that all of the material now survives in Arabic and undoubtedly comes from Syriac, I thought to myself "why not get a Semitic language expert involved to dissect the many layers to the material and figure out 'what's what'?"

According to my good friend Professor Ruairidh Boid of Monash University, it is a general rule that the presence of an impossibly awkward word or phrase in a text that has been translated twice can often be explained by the translator at the second stage having misunderstood what was before him, and having done his best to render faithfully what was actually there, leaving it to others with more information to solve the difficulty.

In this case the first translation was from Hebrew (or Aramaic) to Greek, and the second translation was from Greek to Syriac, followed by an Arabic translation of the Syriac. We can imagine the same passages in both Hebrew and Greek as reading:

In Hebrew ראשית בשרת ישו המשיח: ליוחנן: בראשית היה הדבר וגו'
Reshit Bassoret Yeshu ha-Mashiach. Le-Yochanan. Bereshit haya ha-Davar (etc.).
In Greek ARCHE TOU EUAGGEIIOU IESOU TOU CHRISTOU: IOANNOU: En arche en ho logos ktl

The Hebrew Le-Yochanon (ליוחנן) would be rendered by the genitive case with no preposition in Greek, as IOANNOU. It is highly likely that the name (in the genitive case) was abbreviated, as is normally done in mss, and the translator saw simply IOANN or IOAN 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 KATA IOANNEN (with the accusative case) meaning “according to John”, with its implicit assumption of the existence of four Gospels. He would not have been thinking in terms of a single Gospel. He would thus not have expected IOANNOU meaning “by John” with the intended meaning that this was the only 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 “super-Gospel”. (Note that the term “super-Gospel” does not mean a combined Gospel, but rather an original long Gospel not yet divided between four or even more shorter Gospels).

In favour of this explanation, the faithful reproduction of what was no longer intelligible is the preservation of the acrostic on the name MRQH in the scribal prefatory note. The Syriac translator would not have understood that this was an Aramaic equivalent of the name Marcus, because in Syriac the name would be spelt with Alef, not He. He still reproduced the acrostic, without trying to alter it to make sense of it. This scribal note seems, then, to go back either to the Greek translator, or to the original Hebrew (or Aramaic). It would not be expected that the Greek translator would have invented an Aramaic acrostic.

Also, the Aramaic in this form and with this spelling fits only two forms of Aramaic, the Samaritan dialect and the Jewish Palestinian dialect before 150 A.D. Actually, it would be somewhat anomalous in the Jewish Palestinian dialect, which usually, though admittedly not always, keeps the original Latin or Greek case ending. A Samaritan Aramaic origin is therefore much more likely. Regardless of which explanation is right, the fact remains that the spelling of the Aramaic name Marqe as required by the acrostic, with He instead of Alef, would have been unknown to the Syriac translator and irrelevant to the Greek translator. Both translators have faithfully reproduced this ancient scribal scholion. The assumption of the faithful reproduction of the name John by the Syriac translator is consistent with this faithfulness.