mixed No) and put together a Gospel and called it (the) Diatessaron, that is ‘‘ of the Mixed” (da -Méhalléte); and concerning the divinity of . Christ he did not write. And on this (Gospel)
* Op. cit. p. 29.
+ For a full discussion of his commentary on the NT as con- tained in the Cambridge MS, Add. 1978, and of the passages bearing on“Ephraem’s commentary and the Diatessaron, see R. Harris, Fragments of the Commentary of Ephraem Syrus upon the Diatessaron, London, . 1895, p. 10f. Attention was first called to the importance of Isho'dad’s work in this connexion by the American scholars, Dr. Hall and Professor Gottheil, Journal of Biblical Literature, vols. xi. and xii.
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DIATESSARON
DIATESSARON
Mar Ephraem commented.’ Hjelt (op. cit. p. 30 f.) argues with some force that the position of Tatian immediately after the four Evangelists, and the manner in which he is mentioned, seem to show that Isho‘dad regarded his testimony as of equal value with that of the Evangelists; and this im- pression is confirmed by an examination of those passages in his commentary in which the Diates- saron is definitely cited, viz. Mt 12> 34 1 211, Ac 1, It is noteworthy that Ishodad avoids the error into which so many of his successors have fallen, and draws a clear distinction between the Diatessaron of Tatian and that of Ammonius. Thus, in discussing the words ‘as it is written in the prophet Isaiah’ (Mk 1%), he says,* ‘others (say): in the book of the Diatessaron which was composed in Alexandria, he (Mark) says ‘‘in the prophets” instead of ‘‘ as it is written in Isaiah.”’
The Jacobite bishop Moses bar-Kepha (d. A.D. 903), who was almost a contemporary of Ishodad, also wrote a commentary on the NT in which there are clear traces of acquaintance with Eph- raem’s commentary, and apparently with an even earlier work (Harris, pp. 10, 18, 24, 85). He further makes direct mention of the Diatessaron in two passages in which he is discussing the canons of Eusebius. The whole passage runs as follows: ‘Which shows who collected the four books of the Evangelists and set them in order in one book. And some people, indeed, say that Eusebius of Ceesarea, when he saw that Julianus (ste! for Ammonius) of Alexandria made the Gospel of the Diatessaron, 7.e. ‘‘by means of Four,” and changed the sequence of things [Hjelt : of the verses] in the Gospels, and that Tatian also the Greek, the heretic leader, made a Gospel which is called Tasaron (sic !), and he too changed the eee of things; he, Eusebius, took care and collected the four books of the four Evangelists and set them in order and placed them in one book, and preserved the body of their compositions [Hjelt : the integrity of the text of the narratives of the Evangelists] as it was without taking any- thing from them or adding anything to them, and made certain Canons on account of their harmony one with another.’| Here we see that Bar-Kepha distinguishes the two Diatessarons, though appa- rently he only knew Tatian’s work through the medium of Ephraem’s commentary. The absence of any direct quotations from the Diatessaron as well as the epithets which he applies to Tatian may be due, as Hjelt suggests, to strong anti- Nestorian feeling.
The two lexicographers Isho' bar- Ali (d. 873) and Bar-Bahlul (who flourished about the middle of the 10th cent.) both refer to the Diatessaron. The former defines the word ‘ Diatessaron’ (for which he gives a variant Diagutrun) as ‘the Gospel of the Diatessaron, which Tatian made, the Mixed,’ and adds that the author omitted both the human and the Divine genealogies of our Lord, and is on this account accursed, namely, Tatian: the latter statement is, however, not found in all MSS, and may be regarded as a later gloss. In Bar-Bahlul’s lexicon the Diatessaron is defined (Hjelt, p. 48) as ‘the collective Gospel which (was composed) from the four Evangelists’: to this is added, ‘This was composed in Alexandria, which the bishop Tatianus has written.’ The latter sentence is, however, wanting in other MSS, and by its very form betrays its eet character. It is interesting to find that Bar-Bahlul quotes the Diatessaron by its Syriac name EHvangelion da-Méhalléte, while he
* We have here followed the text of the Berlin MS as given by Hijelt o. 35 note). For the text of the Cambridge MS, which
seems less original, see Harris (p. 15); the latter refers the Suet ‘(as) ib is written in Isaiah’ to Tatian’s reading at
+ Harris, op. cit. p. 21.
cites the reading ‘ Jesus Barabbas’ (Mt 27”), which is found in the Sinaitic palimpsest, as occurring in the Evangelion da-Mépharréshé.
The evidence of our next witness, Jacob bar- Salibi, the Jacobite bishop of Amida (d. 1171 A.D.) 1s largely based upon that of his predecessors. Thus in his NT Commentary he reproduces with but slight variations the statement of Ishodad in con- nexion with the opening verses of St. Mark. He omits, however, the sentence ‘and concerning the divinity of Christ he has not written,’ but adds the remark ‘now the commencement of the same was : In the beginning was the Word.’ In like manner he follows Bar-Kepha in his statement concerning Eusebius and his canons (see above), though in another passage in his prologue to the Gospels (Harris, p. 28) he makes the extraordinary state- ment that Tatian and Ammonius were unable to bring the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection into harmony, and therefore desisted from the attempt. * Probably Zahn is right in supposing that Bar- Salibi has here confused Ammonius with Eusebius, and has assigned to the latter the réle of Elias of Salamia (of whom he speaks elsewhere): for the fact that the canons of Eusebius stopped at Mk 168 was apparently treated by him as excluding the narrative of the Resurrection, while he ascribes the correction of this supposed error to Eusebius instead of to Elias. In any case it seems tolerably certain that Bar-Salibi can hardly be treated as an independent witness to the existence of the Diates- saron, even though we reject the statement with regard to the Diatessaron which occurs in his com- mentary at Mk 12.