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A General Introduction to the Study of the Diatessaron of Tatian*

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A General Introduction to the Study of the Diatessaron of Tatian* CHAPTER SEVEN A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE DIATESSARON OF TATIAN* After the Bible The Gospel harmony called Diatessaron or Diapente, which the Christian apologist Tatian wrote about 170 C.E. in Syriac somewhere in the Near East, welding together the four now canonical gospels with a Judaic Christian Gospel tradition, was the most widely read book after the Bible during the early Christian period and the Middle Ages. It was translated into Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Latin (the Codex Fuldensis, the Gospel of Bonifatius), English, Old Saxon, Flemish, German, Icelandic. It was the only version of the Gospel acknowledged by the Manichaeans, who formed a Gnostic Christian Church which spread until China and persisted for more than a thousand years. It is amazing that all these versions have preserved traces of a deviat- ing text, written about 170 C.E. somewhere in the region of Aramaic Christianity. And yet this cannot be doubted anymore. Whereas Mark (10:21) says that Jesus loved the rich young man, the Liège Diatessaron (the 12th-century Life of Jesus in the dialect of Limburg), says that Jesus looked upon him lovingly. That is exactly what Tatian wrote: “Jesus looked upon him lovingly and said”. This was probably a stylistic emendation due to the pen of Tatian himself. But all versions of the Diatessaron have preserved variants of the Gospel text not found in modern editions of the New Testament in Greek, which was mostly based on the so- called Egyptian text, which was constituted in Alexandria in the third century and afterwards. It is possible that Tatian, who lived in Rome for some time as a pupil of the Catholic apologist Justin Martyr, has taken the rather deviant text in Rome with him, when he left the city and returned to the East. * First publication. 94 chapter seven Judaic Christian Influence But this is not the only reason why these versions are so deviant. Ever since the rise of critical Bible scholarship it has been supposed that the Diatessaron transmitted extra-canonical tradition. Already in the seventeenth century, the diplomat and scholar Hugo Grotius, a friend of Queen Christina of Sweden, supposed that the Diatessaron pre- served traces of the lost Gospel tradition of the Judaic Christians, the descendants of the primitive congregation of Jerusalem. He supposed this because the Diatessaron transmitted, like a preserved fragment of a Judaic Christian Gospel, that a light shone on the water, when Jesus was baptised in the river Jordan (meaning that Jesus at that moment was anointed by the Holy Ghost as Messiah). More such traces of a lost tradition were discovered later. Owing to the decline of cricital scholarship and the rise of dogmatic theology (Karl Barth) Diatessaronic studies came to a stop for a while. Today they fl ourish thanks to the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas. This contained in part a Gospel tradition, which can be paralleled by the fragments of the Jewish Christian Gospels, the Pseudo-Clementine writings and the Diatessaron of Tatian. This tradition, it turned out, originated in the primitive congregation of Jerusalem and must be older (about 50 C.E.) than the Gospels of Mark (ca. 60), Matthew and Luke (ca. 70) and John (ca. 90). Moreover, it does not show the fi ngerprints of Pauline theology, which pervades the Canonical New Testament (with the exception of the Apocalypse of John and the Epistle of James). New Sources Again and again new sources are being discovered. A small parch- ment codex was found in the former Great Seminary at Haaren in the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands: it contained a Dutch Gospel harmony which at fi rst seemed almost completely adapted to the text of the Vulgate and therefore identical with another Dutch Gospel harmony which was contained in a manuscript at Stuttgart. Close scrutiny, however, revealed that it showed deviant variants to be found in other Diatessarons. An as yet unpublished and never studied Latin and Dutch Diates- saron in the Utrecht University Library (Ms 1009) was loaned during .
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