3. The Diatessaron Originally Greek

an opinion founded upon ignorance of historical facts. Tatian, " born in the

Originally land of the Assyrians," had the Syriac Greek. as his mother tongue. After long years of travel in the West he returned to the East and settled down and gave his countrymen the Gospel, not in the form of four books, but, as he himself called his volume, in the form " The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God through four." That the Greek apologete Tatian gave the Diatea saron in Syriac is an improbable supposition, and against it is the discrimination he makes between Matt. x. 10 and Luke ix. 3 on the one hand and Mark vi. 8 on the other, "a rod and not a staff." But the Diatessaron became a household book in the Syrian Church. Whether it was the ,oldest Gospel, which was later displaced by a translation of the four Gospels, is a question for further exam ination.

A reconstruction of the Diatessaron from the translations in other languages can not be dispensed with, for no sure traces exist of the Greek. From a sermon wrongly attributed to Gregory of Nyssa and to Severus, but really by a certain Hesychius, probably the presbyter of Jerusalem (c. 438), a man interested in the matter of harmony of the Gospels,

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it appears that he knew nothing of a Greek harmony.

In the sixteenth century O. Nachtigall found some

Greek fragments which he thought belonged to the harmony of Ammonius (Evangelicae historice

ex 1111 Evangelistis continuata narratio, ex Am

monii Alexandrini fragmentis, Basel, 1550); but these may have depended upon the Syriac and may have been by a Greek writer, just as the

Instituta regularia of Junilius in Constantinople depended upon the lec;,ures of the Syrian

Paul of Nisibis. The Arabic Diatessaron is not a simple translation from the Syr

4. Reconstruction of the Diatessaron through the Versions

iac, but depends in part upon the Gospel text of the Peshito. The translator, or perhaps better the editor,

Diatessaron has permitted himself to make impor

Through thetant alterations; and in view of the

Versions. fact that it was often difficult to find in the original the passages from which the elements of the Diatessaron were taken, the consequence is that, instead of the artistic Diates saron, there is a rough Arabic work. Little use could be made of the Arabic translation were there not a Latin translation also, which latter is as closely related to the Syriac as is the Arabic, and which exists in the Codex Fuldensis, made under the direction of Victor of Capua, c. 546 A.D. About the lineage of this "One Gospel from Four" nothing was known by Victor; it fell into his hands by chance. But Victor clearly did not think that it originated in the Latin Church; he knew only that

Eusebius had mentioned two works of the kind in the Greek, and he thought he had a translation of one or the other of these. That it was not an exact and independent translation of a work in a foreign tongue was evident from its agreement with the text of the Vulgate. If it was based on a foreign harmony, it had been worked over to accord with the text of Jerome. As a result, this corresponded exactly with the work done in the Arabic translation of the Syriac, and the individual features of the

Diatessaron were lost. It has been shown that while, as a whole, the Latin depends upon Tatian's

Diatessaron, the original form of the Latin has not come down unchanged. It can not have depended upon a Greek harmony, since in the Greek Church up to the time of Victor neither Tatian's nor any other harmony was known. The presence of the original of the Latin translation is accounted for by the many Syrian Christians in the West in the fifth century. Victor's manuscript came to Fulda, probably into the hands of Boniface, and became the exemplar of all codices which contain this text.

From it was made the, German Tatian belonging to

820-830 A.D., now found in Codex 56 of St. Gall.

In the Middle Ages the Latin Tatian was much used, and there are extant commentaries on it by Zacha rias of Chrysopolis and Peter Cantor. Other har monies were circulated in the latter half of the

Middle Ages, the relation of which to the Victor manuscript needs investigation. One in particular

(Codex Monac. Lat. 10,025, of the thirteenth cen tury) has interesting relationship both to the Syriac and the Arabic, and it also seems to be independent of the text of Victor. The original of the Victor text has not been found; but that it had considerable circulation is proved by the existence of texts independent of the Victor type in Dutch. It is from manuscripts of this type that the text published by O. Nachtigall (ut. sup.) was derived.

The Monotessaron of John Gerson (Opera, iv. 83-202, Antwerp, 1706) must be discriminated from this type as altogether modern. Since Augustine's unfinished De consensu evangeliorum this was the first attempt of the kind. The text is divided into 150 (151) rubrics, and in that in which the Sermon on the Mount fell the author engages in a critical discussion, and remarks on the concordantia dissonantia of the Gospels, considering them aids to faith. From harmonizing in the strictest sense Gerson is free. A work of independence, pains, and learning, and having important results upon further efforts, was that of Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, Harmonise evangelicce libri quattuor,