RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Harmony of the Gospels
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 histories ex HII Evangelistis continuata narratio, ex Ammonii 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 lectures of the Syrian Paul of Nisibis. The Arabic Diatessaron is not a simple translation from the Syr- 4. Recon- iac, but depends in part upon the
struction Gospel text of the Peshito. The
of the translator, or perhaps better the editor,
Diatessaron has permitted himself to make impor-
Through the tant 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 Diatessaron, 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 Zacharias of Chrysopolis and Peter Cantor. Other harmonies 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 century) 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, Harmonics evangelicce libri quattuor, Basel, 1537. In the dedication Osiander named as his three predecessors Euse- 5. Modern bius, Augustine, and Gerson, and, be- Works of sides these, two Evangelia dia tessaron the Kind, in manuscript in the monastery at Heilbronn, and the work of Zacharias of Chrysopolis, which last is a commentary on the Latin Tatian. While in this place Osiander appears to have passed by Ammonius, he mentions him in the preface alongside the others. What he regretted in all these works was a lack of reverence for the text of the Gospels in that this was changed in order and in letter, even arbitrarily. It was his desire to express in his work the full purport of the original text and to have shine through it all the original inspiration. If Christ himself (Matt. v. 18) had said that not one jot of the law of Moses was to fall, much more was every word and letter of the Gospels to be taken into account. From no consequence of this principle did Osiander shrink. He regarded as accounts of different events the cleansing of the Temple as given in the Synoptics and in John, and even distinguished between two events as narrated in Matt. xxi. 12; Luke xix. 45; and Mark xi. 15. And so throughout, slight differences in statement seemed to justify him in regarding the narratives as dealing with different events. Similarly his rule that each of the Gospel texts must stand in its own order involved him in difficulties solved in the same manner. And in this way he thought he had accomplished new results in a real Harmonia evangelica. This name was kept by those who, with as great regard for Scripture, were not carried to an excess of unnaturalness. This was the case with Calvin, in whose commentary on the separate Gospels and in his Commentarii in harmoniam ex Matthaeo, Marco et Luca (1555) the material is divided into 222 sections. In this the genealogies of Matthew and Luke are referred to Joseph, the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew and Luke are worked together, and a similar plan rules throughout. In the work an unfavorable opinion is pronounced upon the work of Osiander. With a milder expression of opinion of Osiander's work was the Harmonia quatuor evangelistarum, by M. Chemnitz, published after his death by P. Leyser and continued by J. Gerhard (Frankfort, 1593-1611, improved and issued Frankfort and Hamburg, 1652). The Greek text is accom-
Harmony of the Gospels Harms