The bottom line is take a word out of context your interpretation will suffer - viz. discover the context, discover the meaning.
We have been discussing the use of the word diatessaron in association with the earliest gospels while at the same time going section by section through Bill Petersen's collection of the various references to the term in his Tatian's Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, And History In Scholarship. Petersen's book is quite amazing but at the same time it suffers in my opinion from one serious flaw and it is a result of the traditional way academics frame problems.
Because of his decision to emphasize what the mostly uninformed ancient Church Fathers say about the text they call 'the Diatessaron' we end up still reinforcing inherited notions about the text. Of course, it is obvious why Petersen decided to pursue this course of action. As the title suggests, the book is as much a discussion of the development of Diatessaronic studies as it is the text itself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as Petersen informs us about many important discoveries would otherwise be unknown to us.
Yet for those of us who aren't 'professional academics,' for those of us not involved in the business of scholarship, might have been better served with another book which focused exclusively on what we know about the likely structure of the original work. Nowhere is this more evident in the manner in which Petersen deals with the Manichaean use and development of the Diatessaron.
Because Petersen has structured the book in such a way that all the Patristic references are grouped together, the Manichaean witness is left out. This even though it is universally acknowledged that they used a text which developed from a very early witness to the original text associated with Tatian or which perhaps one which went back to an even earlier date. So it is that if you want to hear about the Manichaean witness to the Diatessaron, you won't find it in the collection of testimonies from the Church Fathers. You will only see it referenced in the section dealing with modern scholarship and the theories of individual academics which had a role in shaping Diatessaronic studies.
The section which deals most extensively with the Manichaean use of the Diatessaron - an association which is now almost universally acknowledged in scholarship - is that which deals with the Dutch scholar Gilles Quispel (whose most famous student perhaps is Elaine Pagels). As Petersen notes, according to Quispel's analysis:
the Diatessaron was used by both the "catholic" Christians (eg, Ephrem, Aphrahat) and Manichaeans in the East. There, however, because the Diatessaron was also the "standard" gospel text of the Syrian church, the "catholic" line of transmission had the greatest influence on the Diatessaron's text; Manichaean influence was comparatively small. And the "catholic" Christians, being part of the "Great Church," were under constant pressure to bring the Diatessaron's text into line with the normative Greek gospels. This pressure was already felt before Ephrem's time. Therefore, in the East the Diatessaron was subject to extensive Vulgatization at a very early date precisely because of its (quasi-) official status. The story in the West was quite different. While both Manichaeans and "catholics" used the Diatessaron in the East, only Manichaeans used it in the West: prior to Victor of Capua in 546, it appears to have been unknown to "orthodox" authors in the West. Prior to the time of Victor (or whoever it was who Vulgatized the codex which came into his hand, if it was not Victor himself) the Manichaeans had been the guardians of the Diatessaron in the West — and they, of course, were under no pressure to Vulgatize it. On the contrary: they would have wanted to keep the Diatessaron as distinctive as possible, for Vulgatization would have been a sign of assimilation to the "Great Church." Therefore, concluded Quispel, the Diatessaron used by the Manichaeans in the West was the most ancient recoverable version of the Diatessaron, for it had escaped
Vulgatization longer than any other branch of the Diatessaronic tradition. Quispel used this explanation to account for two distinctive features of some Western Diatessaronic witnesses: variant readings not found in Eastern witnesses, and the unique sequence of harmonization. Both were inherited from the Manichaean Diatessaron, whose Vulgatization began only in the sixth century. Because of its unrivaled antiquity, said Quispel, the Manichaean Diatessaron was far "wilder" than the Diatessaron known to Ephrem: Baarda's discovery of the "flying Jesus" may be an example of a "wild" but ancient reading from the Manichaean Diatessaron. If Quispel's thesis is correct — something which awaits demonstration — then two conclusions follow. First, at many points, the Western Diatessaronic tradition would be more ancient and reliable than the Eastern Diatessaron. Second, the Western harmonized tradition would not rest upon a "domesticated" and "sanitized" "catholic" Diatessaron like Ephrem's, but upon a "wild" and unvulgatized Manichaean Diatessaron.
Regardless of whether Quispel's theoretical reconstruction of the genesis of the Western Diatessaronic tradition is correct or not, several important points emerge. Manichaean use of a Diatessaron continues to be confirmed by new readings, while critics have yet to explain the agreements. Quispel's stress on the significance of who (the "catholic" or Manichaean Christians) was preserving and transmitting the tradition is valuable. It places a premium on the recovery of readings from Manichaean sources, be they Eastern or Western. [Petersen, Diatessaron p. 337 - 338]
The point here is that Quispel has clearly touched on something which cannot be refuted. The original long text first identified as 'the Diatessaron' by Eusebius was not originally developed as a mere harmonization of the four canonical gospels. This new text, first witnessed by Ephrem, necessarily emerges out of the Catholic Church's historical response to the original text circulating in various forms among the 'heresies.'
The Manichaean witness is very, very important as it makes clear that those who used the text did not think the narrative was a 'harmony of four' other text. Mani referred to his text as 'the Gospel of the Living,' 'the Great Gospel' or 'the Living Gospel.' Al-Biruni (Persia 973 - 1048), who still had access to the full text, commented that it was a "gospel of a special kind", unlike any of the gospels of the Christians, and that the Manichaeans insisted that theirs was the only true gospel, and that the various gospels of the Christians misrepresented the truth about the Messiah. It is known that the gospel had 22 parts, each labelled by a different letter of the Aramaic alphabet. The combination of two Turfan fragments only allows the reconstruction of the text of the first part (alaph).
Again it has to be emphasized that the Manichaean text is not likely to be the original source of the 'Diatessaronic' text type. Mani clearly borrowed from some earlier source which has to be considered to be Marcionite. The Acts of Archelaus make this absolutely explicit. Yet here again we see another short-coming in the manner in which Petersen arranged his book. For he does not so much as mention R Casey's study of the Marcionite Diatessaron known to Armenian witnesses (and republished in full with footnotes at this blog here), nor does he reference the strange fact that Ephrem, even while developing one of his frequent attacks against the Marcionites in his Commentary on the Concordant Gospel (= 'the Diatessaron') omits the standard Catholic argument that Marcion shortened shortened the gospel of Luke. Ephrem indeed, makes the case that the heretics related to Marcion - and even Marcion himself - 'cut' the Gospel of Concord.
This point appears time and again in Ephrem's Dominus directed against Marcion, Bardesanes and Mani. One such example manifests itself in the course of his discussion of the resurrection narrative where we read:
For our Lord has fixed the traditions of His truth like the bodily organs, [which] He has fixed in one another, that when contention and Error (i.e. the hereesies) wish to cut off an organ the Body all of it wails and the organs [from all] sides are crying out about that one which is cut off. The Truth (i.e. the gospel) is living and life-giving to all, lo, the tastes of it bear witness to it. For lo, by a myriad trials the affair of our Lord is learnt, that in the Body He died and was raised, and His Birth and His Death have become a test for the very Body which He put on, that not in appearance and fraud did He put it on. [Prose Refutations, trans. Mitchel p. 143]
The point is that scholars are so locked into the Irenaean paradigm that "Marcion 'cut' things out of Luke" that we have failed to grasp that Ephrem implicitly contradicts this notion. Ephrem, who certainly had access to the Marcionite gospel (the same cannot be said about Irenaeus or Tertullian), makes the case that the gospels of both his tradition and that of the Marcionites resembled one another - the only difference was that Marcion 'cut things out' of the 'Gospel of Concord.'
I won't hold my breath of course with regards to other scholars seeing this 'other paradigm' at work in the history of the early Church. They will inevitably shout 'Ephrem is much later than Irenaeus.' I would respond - "what do we really know about the development of Christianity in 'Jesus's part of the world' at the time Irenaeus was writing?" Yes Irenaeus provides us with a witness - but to simply assume that the Christians from Syria and the Middle East were originally in lock step with an idea Irenaeus basically confesses came out of his own imagination - viz. the fourfold gospel - before Irenaeus invented it, is absolutely reckless.
Ephrem's paradigm of contrasting the Marcionite ommissions from the 'Gospel of Concord' (= 'the Diatessaron') has to be the original 'anti-Marcionite argument' which Irenaeus necessarily developed with his invention of not only the fourfold gospel but 'Luke' (which also has no witnesses before Irenaeus). We will demonstrate this more clearly with the example of Tertullian's Syrian source for Books Four and Five of his Latin 'Against Marcion' series, but for the moment let's see how Ephrem typically develops his argument for Marcion 'cuts' to his 'Gospel of Concord.'
We read in Ephrem's Commentary on the Concordant Gospel that Marcion cut something important out of his text. The only problem for standard bearers for the inherited Catholic tradition who pretend to be scholars, is that what Ephrem thinks he cut out of 'the gospel of Concord' not Luke:
After these things, he came to his town and was teaching them on the Sabbath in their synagogues. Was there not another people, or another land apart from that of the Jews? But in order that Marcion's lie be refuted, it said after this, He entered the synagogue as was his custom, on the Sabbath day. What was the custom of him who had come just now? He had come to Galilee, and had begun to teach, not outside of the synagogue, but within it, he [came] to talk to them about their God. Otherwise it would have been in order for him to proclaim to them outside of their synagogue. He therefore entered Bethsaida among the Jews. It does not indicate that they said anything to him other than, Physician, heal yourself. They seized him and brought him to the side of the mountain. It is not likely that the word [he] had spoken to them was leading them to anger. For, if he had been speaking to them concerning the Creator, and [if] this was why they had given the response, They seized him that they might cast him down, why then did it not record in other places that it was like this too? That the people of the town hated him, there is this testimony: A prophet is not accepted in his home town. [Ephrem Commentary 23]
It is utterly impossible to read this section of text in any other way than the Catholics and Marcionites in fourth century Osrhoene shared a long gospel which in places strongly resembled one another against the canonical readings. Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot so blinded by dogmatic thinking that they don't even deserve the time of day.
The fact that the earlier Patristic witnesses don't directly mention any of what is being cited here only speaks to the unreliability of the testimonies that have come down to us from western sources (however I will surprise people with my demonstration shortly that Tertullian's source agreed again with Ephrem in every way). For the moment we need only emphasize that in both Ephrem's 'Gospel of Concord' and Marcion's gospel basically the same narrative was manifest and most notably that the city was identified as 'Bethsaida' rather than 'Nazareth.' Clearly 'Nazareth' is a Catholic invention developed to further emphasize the addition found already in Ephrem's 'correction' of the shared gospel that (a) Jesus had a 'home town' (Matt 13.54) and (b) that it was because Jesus was known to these people at Bethsaida (Luke 4.23 - 24) that he had this hostile reception.
It should be obvious that not only was 'Nazareth' unknown to shared gospel tradition of both the Catholics and the Marcionites in fourth century Osrhoene but moreover that (a) and (b) - additions present in Ephrem's 'Gospel of Concord' - were not present in the Marcionite original Gospel. Indeed it is utterly amazing to see how many things Ephrem seems to allude to being different in the Marcionite narrative:
- Ephrem infers that Marcion cut the words 'he came to his town' (cf. Matt 13.54)
- He may infer that the Marcionites did not think the synagogue was Jewish (Samaritans?)
- Ephrem makes explicit that the Marcionites cut 'he entered the synagogue as was his custom, on the Sabbath day' (Luke 4.16)
- Ephrem also implies that the Marcionite text had Jesus giving his speech in front of the synaogogue rather than within it.
- Ephrem makes direct reference to the fact the crowd declares to Jesus 'Physician heal thy self,' Luke now has Jesus intimate that the crowd was thinking these words.
- Ephrem implies that the Marcionite interpreted the passage as if it was Jesus's claims about the Creator that enraged the parishoners and leading to their attempt to push him off of a precipice which apparently was just outside the synagogue.
With all of these differences it should be readily apparent that while the two narratives were similar, the context of the Marcionite pericope was radically different. There simply aren't a lot of synagogues in Israel located near cliffs whose height is sufficient that a man would be killed if he went over it.
Without getting too distracted by this speculation, it is enough to emphasize that the Marcionite gospel was similar but markedly different than the 'Gospel of Concord' in the hands of Ephrem but also similar to the copies of the same text in the hands of other early communities. In our earlier citation of the summary of Quispel's idea in Petersen reference was made to the 'flying Jesus' narrative which appears in the Manichaean gospel as well as Diatessaronic 'harmonies' in the West. Here is Petersen's summary of Baarda's discovery gleaned at the time of his doctoral thesis of the use of the Gospel of John in Aphrahat. Baarda:
noticed that Aphrahat (Dem. II.17; Aphrahat died about 350), when discussing the confrontation at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30), states that "He showed the power of his majesty when He was cast down from the height into the depth and was not hurt" (p. 59, italics mine). According to the canonical account, however, despite the fact that the crowd has taken him to a precipice, intending to "cast him down," Jesus is not thrown from the hill, but mysteriously escapes by "passing through the midst" of the crowd (Luke 4:29-30).While this discovery is quite exciting in its own right, it has apparently again escaped the notice of scholars that the same reading was already being noted as being present in the Marcionite Diatessaron in Tertullian's source for Book Four of Against Marcion.
The causal reader is inclined to dismiss Aphrahat's account as his own overly dramatic invention. But Baarda knows both the ancient and modern sources too well to fall into this trap. In 1881 Theodor Zahn had already noted the reading, when he set about reconstructing the text of the Diatessaron. Basing himself on the Armenian version of Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron, Zahn determined that a similar reading probably stood in Tatian's second century harmony. Baarda then turns to Ephrem's Commentary and presents evidence from both the Armenian version and the Syriac text (discovered only in 1957 and published in 1963). In no fewer than nine instances in the Commentary Ephrem either directly states or obliges one to infer that Jesus was, indeed, cast from the precipice by the mob and "flew," unhurt, down to Capernaum. Turning then to Ephrem's Syriac hymns and metrical sermons, Baarda unearths another seven instances of the same. One theme in much of Baarda's work is his preference for reconstructing each family of the Diatessaron (Eastern and Western) separately. He does so here, offering a reconstruction of the Syriac Diatessaron's text as:
they stood up and they led Him out [from] the town and brought Him by the side of the hill, [on which their town was built,] in order to cast Him down. [When?] they cast Him down from the height into the depth [and?] He did not fall and was not hurt/harmed.... through their midst He passed [and?] He flew [in the air?] and He descended [from above] to Kapharnaum [pp. 79-80, italics omitted].
Suddenly, the odd and abrupt kathlqen of Luke 4:31 takes on a whole new meaning.
But this is not all, for there is also a Western Diatessaronic tradition. Here Baarda continues to unearth new evidence for the reading: among other sources, it occurs in the "Rijmbijbel" of Jakob van Maerlant (in Middle Dutch, composed in 1271), which is dependent upon Peter Comestor's "Historia Scholastica," which also has the reading and is a Diatesaronic witness. Most remarkably, Augustine preserves part of the tradition in his Contra Faustum 26.2: He quotes the Manichaean Faustus in order to refute him and in so doing reproduces the "throwing" of Jesus from the hill. Augustine does not comment on the varia lectio. Baarda notes,
The agreement between Faustus and the Syriac texts suggests that the Manichaean was acquainted with the Diatessaron or at least with traditions that took their origin in this harmony. Remarkably enough, Augustin [sic] in his refutation does not mention the fact that Faustus used an argument for which [there] was no support in the canonical gospels. We cannot, therefore, exclude the possibility that Augustin knew this very tradition from his Manichaean past [p. 78]
It is noteworthy that Tertullian knows full well that the Marcionites used their version of this passage to confirm their belief that Jesus was a wholly divine being come down from heaven. After emphasizing once again that the Marcionite gospel denied Jesus had a 'hometown' and moreover that the correct reading was 'Nazareth' Tertullian remarks:
My reason for not leaving this out (i.e. the mention of Nazareth) is that Marcion's Christ ought by rights to have forsworn all association even with the places frequented by the Creator's Christ, since he had all those towns of Judaea, which were not in the same way conveyed over to the Creator's Christ by the prophets. But Christ has to be the Christ of the prophets, wherever it is that he is found to accord with the prophets. Even at Nazareth there is no indication that his preaching was of anything new (i.e. not hostile to the Creator), though for all that, by reason of one single proverb (i.e. Luke 4:16), we are told that he was cast out. Here, as I for the first time observe that hands were laid upon him, I am called upon to say something definite about his corporal substance; that he who admitted of contact, contact even full of violence, in being seized and captured and dragged even to the brow of the hill, cannot be thought of as a phantasm. It is true (as the Marcionites claim) that he slipped away through the midst of them, but this was when he had experienced their violence, and had afterwards been let go: for, as often happens, the crowd gave way, or was even broken up: there is no question of its (i,e. the crowd) being deceived by (Jesus') invisibility, for this, if it had been such, would never have submitted to contact at all. [Against Marcion 4.8]In no uncertain terms can we acknowledge that the 'wild' reading which finds its way into many so-called 'Diatessaron' texts actually derives its origin from the Marcionite text.
Of course there is inevitably to be a response that Tertullian is using a gospel of Luke and comparing and contrasting his gospel with the Marcionite original and thus neither text in question is actually Diatessaronic. As such, it would be argued, the Marcionite text might be the a 'source' for the Diatessaron but that it itself was not 'Diatessaronic.' The error of this traditional way of viewing things is that it discounts:
- the irrefutable evidence uncovered by Casey that the Armenian Marcionites used a Diatessaron
- the repeated observation of von Harnack from his familiarity with all the Patristic evidence related to the Marcionites that even the Marcionite gospel known to western Church Fathers had pericopes that only appear in our canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark and John.
- that the Philosophumena identifies the gospel of Marcion as the Gospel of Mark.
The most obvious evidence in favor of this identification of the Marcionite gospel as the source of all subsequent Diatessaronic witnesses is the fact again that not only Ephraim but Tertullian's original source makes reference to Marcion taking things out of his gospel which don't appear in Luke but only in the other canonical gospels and especially Matthew. What we have suggested elsewhere is that Tertullian has only superficially modified an original comparison of the false 'Marcionite' gospel to the true 'Gospel of Concord' developed by a Syrian predecessor of Ephrem to reflect the new orthodoxy in the west of a fourfold gospel and where Marcion is thought to have only altered the 'third' gospel Luke.
The fact that the occassional comment that Marcion removed things that appear alongside what we would call 'Lukan material' in the Diatesaron but are now exclusively found in Matthew is a sign that we have tapped the earliest strata of the material untouched by Tertullian's ammendments. That the author shared a Syrian canon similar to Ephrem is actually found in the fact that the order of the Apostolikon in Book Five is identical with the order that original order of the Old Syrian canon used by Ephrem. (Clabeaux, Lost Edition, 2) In other words, Tertullian has just copied out a the original order of the anti-Marcionite polemic of a Syrian whose idea of orthodoxy was rooted in a 'Gospel of Concordance' followed by an Apostolikon starting with Galatians. The Galatian first feature is not that of the canon of Marcion but of his opponent who text is Tertullian's exclusive window to the beliefs and practices of the so-called 'Marcionites.'
This theory is ultimately strengthened once more by Petersen's discussion of another great scholar in the field of Diatessaronic research, Daniel Plooij and his work on the Liege Gospel Harmony:
Plooij concluded with a chapter titled "Marcionite Readings," in which he subscribed to the thesis that Tatian was allied with Marcion's party in Rome, and that he knew and used Marcion's gospel text when composing the Diatessaron. At a theoretical level, the fact that both Marcion and Tatian were present in the mid- second century obviously raised the possibility of dependence. Plooij, however, based his conclusion on textual evidence in the form of readings common to Tatian and Marcion. Two of the most convincing are the following:
(1) The Liege Harmony harmonized Luke 12.3 with Matt 10.27 in the following example "dat ic u segge in demsternessen dat predect in der clerheit ende dat ic u rune in uwe ore, dat predekt oppenbare" ("What I say to you in darkness preach ye that in clearness and what I whisper to you in your ears preach ye that openly"). "Rund' ("whisper") was found in Luke in Syr" p and the Arabic Harmony. Plooij noted that one might be inclined (a la Julicher ?) to put the variant down to "Tatian's picturesque style," save for the fact that the same variant occurred in one of Tertullian's quotations from Marcion: "Cum subjiciat etiam quae inter se mussitarent" [v 1 tractarent] in apertum processura." (Adv. Marc. IV.28) Here again we find "whisper. Even more striking was Liege's variant "oppenbare" (openly) which finds its only parallel here in Marcion: "in apertum"! Apropos of this last variant, Plooij remarked:
We can hardly imagine that a textual form of which there is no trace found but in Marcion's Gospel and in Tatian's Diatessaron, ever belonged to any general tradition; not even to the Old- Roman Greek Text of the Gospel about 150 AD. So it suggests a very close relation between the Tatianic and Marcionite texts of the Gospel.
(2) At Luke 11.28, the Liege Harmony reads "en oc syn salech die horen dat Gods wart en dat behouden en dar na werken" ("And also are blessed those that hear God's word and keep it and do according to it"). The same interpolation is found in a single Greek manuscript, 2145 (Plooij calls it a "Tatianizing minuscule"), in Vetus Latina MS q, and in Marcion: "Immo beati qui sermonem dei audiunt et faciunt." (Tert Adv. Marc. IV.28) Interestingly enough, the Commentary of Zacharias Chrysopolitanus offers evidence that he knew the same variant.
Through some channel or another, said Plooij, Marcionite readings were incorporated into the Diatessaron. For the reason given above, he rejected the idea that both were dependent upon a common Roman Old-Greek text. One possible solution was mutual dependence upon the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Although the means by which the readings came about remains obscure, the examples noted by Plooij are incontrovertible evidence of a textual connexion between the text of Marcion (as given by Tertullian) and the Diatessaron. [Petersen, Diatessaron p. 192 - 193]
The point through all of this is the fact that the Marcionite gospel's underlying parallels with the 'Gospel of Concord' necessarily must change our inherited understanding that the Marcionites simply 'cut' the Gospel of Luke to make their own text. The evidence from all of our principal witnesses for the Marcionite gospel show it was related to the text called 'Gospel of Concord.' Only a slavish devotion to an obvious partisan and polemicist like Irenaeus can avoid seeing things clear here.
To this end I inevitably go back to my original point - how can we simply ignore the idea that Irenaeus report that the Marcionites 'openly cut' some kind of second gospel for public use be at the heart of the idea of a 'gospel concordance' or indeed that the relationship between the 'short' and 'longer' narratives resembled a 'diatessaron' (i.e. because of their ending on a fourth - viz. the discovery of the empty tomb 'after three days' - and an octave - an eighth day witness of Jesus to all of his disciples). I will demonstrate all of this in my subsequent posts in this series from the related Manichaean gospel.
Yet I should like to close this post with another reference from Ephrem which might allude to the Marcionites possessing a 'short' and 'long' gospel as described in to Theodore:
(the Marcionites have a saying to the effect that) "in His law (Torah) our Lord was a stranger, but in His action one of the household," this is (a description of) the foolish Marcion, who is partly inside and partly outside. And they ought therefore, if they are lovers of true things, to remain in doubt; for if they called Him a stranger on account of the new sayings which He uttered, then because He did not create a strange creation (i.e. the gospel) the bold preaching ought to have been buried in silence (lit. confined within silence).[Ephrem Against Marcion Book 3]
Clearly the 'law' that is kept secret implies some hidden component to the teachings of Jesus which is usually glossed over in studies of Marcion which are too reliant again on the information that comes from uninformed Church Fathers in the West.
As von Harnack already notes the Fihrist not only attributes the authorship of the Marcionite gospel to Marcion (something intimated also in western Fathers) but again emphasizes the 'secret teachings' of Jesus in their tradition:
The Marcionites had a book to which they attached special significance and in which they wrote about their doctrines. There was a book of Marcion's which he called 'the Gospel' (another MS 'the Unraveling') ... [it] is not to be found, unless God knows where [it is], for [it] is concealed among the Christians [al-Nadim Fihrist 9.1]
My guess of course is that the two gospels of the Marcionite tradition (cf. 1 Cor 2.1 - 9) were understood to harmonize as a 'diatessaron' and the name eventually stuck with the 'concordant gospel' type generally. But this will have to be demonstrated later, in a subsequent post ...
