All Ancient Witnesses to the Diatessaron [Part Four]

F) THEODORE BAR KONI, LIBER SCHOLIORUM

The Liber scholiorum, written in 791, is the first original Syriac document (as opposed to translations, such as that of Eusebius' he) to mention Tatian and the Diatessaron. Theodore, a Nestorian writes thus:

And finally came the Greek Tatian, and he saw that in the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe ("The Gospel of the Separated") the episodes were described two and three times, and he undertook to write them down, each time once, and collected [or: compiled] from all four one book, and called it Diatessaron. And when he reached the pericope of the resurrection, he saw that the testimonies of all four differed, because each one described that He was risen from the dead at the time that our Lord appeared to him. And so as not to have to choose one testimony and omit three, he spoke thus in order to take account of the testimony of all four: "In the night when the first day of the week dawned our Lord rose from the dead."

Tatian is the compiler of the Diatessaron; Theodore is the first to call Tatian "the Greek," a sobriquet perhaps inspired by knowledge of Tatian's Oratio. For the first time we find a motive stipulated for the creation of the Diatessaron: Tatian undertook his harmonization when he encountered the gospels' parallel accounts. Whether the text from which from which Tatian worked — Theodore calls it the "Evangelion da-Mepharreshe" - was in Greek or in Syriac is unclear. In this passage, Theodore provides us with the first quotation attributed by name to the Diatessaron." The emphasis Theodore places on the difficulties Tatian faced with the resurrection accounts is a theme which surfaces in some later testimonia (see infra, items N and P).[Petersen, Diatessaron p. 52 - 53]