{"id":538,"date":"2026-10-19T17:39:33","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/tatians-diatessaron-and-the-harmony-of-the-gospels\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T17:39:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T17:39:33","slug":"tatians-diatessaron-and-the-harmony-of-the-gospels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/tatians-diatessaron-and-the-harmony-of-the-gospels\/","title":{"rendered":"Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron and the Harmony of the Gospels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the second half of the second century a Christian teacher from the eastern edge of the Roman world composed a book that, for a time, was more widely read in some churches than the four Gospels themselves. Its author, <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Tatian\">Tatian<\/a>, took the narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and wove them into a single continuous account of the life of Jesus, removing repetitions, reconciling differences of order and combining parallel passages into one. The work became known by a Greek musical term, <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Diatessaron\">Diatessaron<\/a>, \u201cthrough four\u201d, meaning a harmony made out of four parts.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-1\"><a href=\"#note-1\">1<\/a><\/sup> In the Syriac-speaking churches of Mesopotamia it was the usual form of the Gospel for generations, and its influence can be traced in Latin, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Dutch, German, Italian and English texts down to the late Middle Ages. Yet no complete copy of the work in its original language survives. Its text has to be reconstructed from translations, quotations, a commentary and a single small fragment of parchment found in the ruins of a Roman frontier town. This article follows the history of the Diatessaron from its composition to its suppression, its long medieval afterlife and the efforts of modern scholars to recover it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group at-a-glance\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"at-a-glance\">At a glance<\/h3>\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\n<li><strong>c. 120:<\/strong> Probable birth of Tatian, who describes himself as born in the land of the Assyrians.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 150\u2013165:<\/strong> Tatian studies in Rome under Justin Martyr.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 172:<\/strong> After Justin\u2019s death Tatian leaves Rome for the East.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 170s:<\/strong> Tatian composes the Diatessaron, a single narrative woven from the four Gospels.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>Before 256:<\/strong> A Greek Gospel-harmony fragment is written that will be buried at Dura-Europos.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>Mid-4th century:<\/strong> Ephrem the Syrian writes his commentary on the Diatessaron.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>411\u2013435:<\/strong> Rabbula, bishop of Edessa, orders the separate Gospels to be read in his churches.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>c. 423\u2013457:<\/strong> Theodoret removes more than two hundred copies from the churches of his diocese.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>546\u2013547:<\/strong> Victor of Capua corrects the Latin harmony preserved in the Codex Fuldensis.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>11th century:<\/strong> Ibn al-Tayyib\u2019s Arabic translation of the harmony is made from Syriac.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1888:<\/strong> Augusto Ciasca publishes the Arabic Diatessaron.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1933:<\/strong> The Dura parchment fragment is found.<\/li>\n\n\n<li><strong>1957 and 1963:<\/strong> The Chester Beatty Syriac manuscript of Ephrem\u2019s commentary is acquired and published.<\/li>\n\n<\/ul>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"tatian-the-assyrian\">Tatian the Assyrian<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"from-the-east-to-rome\">From the East to Rome<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What is known of Tatian\u2019s life comes mainly from his own surviving work, the Address to the Greeks, and from the notices of later Christian writers. At the end of the Address he describes himself as \u201cborn in the land of the Assyrians\u201d, educated first in the learning of the Greeks, and later converted to the philosophy that the Greeks called barbarian, that is, to the scriptures of the Jews and Christians.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-2\"><a href=\"#note-2\">2<\/a><\/sup> The phrase \u201cland of the Assyrians\u201d was used loosely in the period, and it probably refers to the region east of the Euphrates, in northern Mesopotamia or the borderlands of the Roman and Parthian empires. His first language may well have been Syriac, the Aramaic dialect of Edessa and its neighbourhood, though he wrote the Address in Greek and moved easily in the intellectual world of the Greek-speaking cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tatian travelled widely, as educated men of the period often did, and came to Rome, where he became a pupil of <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Justin_Martyr\">Justin Martyr<\/a>, the philosopher who had become a Christian and who taught in the city in the middle of the second century.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-3\"><a href=\"#note-3\">3<\/a><\/sup> Justin\u2019s own writings show that he used the Gospels in a way that sometimes combined the wording of different evangelists. Some scholars have suggested that Justin or his circle already used a harmonised collection of Gospel sayings, and that Tatian\u2019s later work built on this practice. Justin was put to death in Rome, probably around 165, and Tatian remained in the city for some years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-break-with-rome\">The Break with Rome<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/0103.htm\">Irenaeus of Lyon<\/a>, writing around 180, Tatian remained orthodox while Justin lived, but after his teacher\u2019s martyrdom he separated from the church, became puffed up with the conceit of a teacher and developed a doctrine of his own. Irenaeus credits him with teaching that marriage was corruption, with adopting ideas about invisible aeons similar to those of Valentinus and with denying the salvation of Adam.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-4\"><a href=\"#note-4\">4<\/a><\/sup> He links Tatian with the movement known as the <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Encratites\">Encratites<\/a>, from the Greek enkrateia, \u201cself-control\u201d, whose members rejected marriage, meat and wine.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-5\"><a href=\"#note-5\">5<\/a><\/sup> Later sources place Tatian\u2019s departure from Rome around 172 and say that he returned to the East and taught in Mesopotamia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Modern historians have treated the heresiologists\u2019 picture of Tatian with some caution. Ascetic tendencies were widespread in early Syriac Christianity, where for a time baptism may have been associated with a commitment to celibacy, and what appeared extreme to a bishop in Gaul may have been close to ordinary practice in parts of Mesopotamia. Whatever his exact position, Tatian\u2019s reputation as a heretic shadowed the later history of his Gospel harmony, and it would eventually be used as a reason for removing it from the churches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-making-of-the-diatessaron\">The Making of the Diatessaron<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"one-gospel-out-of-four\">One Gospel out of Four<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tatian\u2019s purpose in composing the Diatessaron is nowhere stated in a surviving source, but its form makes its intention clear. By the middle of the second century the four Gospels that later became canonical were widely, though not universally, accepted, and readers were aware that they did not always agree in order or detail. The Synoptic Gospels follow a broadly similar outline, while John places events such as the cleansing of the Temple at a different point and records several visits of Jesus to Jerusalem. Opponents of Christianity, such as the philosopher Celsus, pointed to these differences as a weakness. A single harmonised narrative offered one way of addressing the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Other solutions were available. <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Marcion_of_Sinope\">Marcion of Sinope<\/a>, who was active in Rome a little before Tatian, had accepted a single Gospel, a form of Luke, and rejected the rest.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-6\"><a href=\"#note-6\">6<\/a><\/sup> Irenaeus, by contrast, argued that there must be exactly four Gospels, no more and no fewer, comparing them to the four winds and the four quarters of the world. Tatian\u2019s harmony stands between these positions. It used all four Gospels, but it made them into one book. It began, according to the best evidence, with the opening of John, \u201cIn the beginning was the Word\u201d, and then followed a sequence that drew on the Synoptic order for most of the ministry of Jesus while incorporating the Johannine episodes at appropriate points.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-7\"><a href=\"#note-7\">7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"omissions-and-adjustments\">Omissions and Adjustments<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The harmony did not include everything in the four Gospels. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing in the fifth century, observed that Tatian had cut out the genealogies and the other passages that showed the Lord to have been born of the seed of David according to the flesh.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-8\"><a href=\"#note-8\">8<\/a><\/sup> Whether this omission reflected a theological concern, as Theodoret supposed, or simply the practical difficulty of reconciling the different genealogies of Matthew and Luke is debated. Other features of the text attested by the later witnesses have been interpreted as reflecting Tatian\u2019s ascetic views. Several sources, for example, report that the harmony described Anna the prophetess as having lived with her husband for seven days rather than seven years after her marriage, a reading that would emphasise the brevity of her married life. Some witnesses also describe a light appearing over the Jordan at the baptism of Jesus, a detail found in Justin and in two Old Latin manuscripts.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-9\"><a href=\"#note-9\">9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Such readings must be treated with care. Because the Diatessaron survives only in later and often revised forms, it is difficult to know whether a given reading goes back to Tatian, to an earlier Gospel tradition he used, or to a later scribe. A considerable part of modern scholarship has been devoted to developing criteria for distinguishing genuinely Tatianic readings from the noise of later transmission.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-10\"><a href=\"#note-10\">10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"greek-or-syriac\">Greek or Syriac?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the oldest questions about the Diatessaron concerns the language in which it was first written. The title is Greek, and Tatian wrote his other surviving work in Greek. On the other hand, the harmony is known above all from the Syriac-speaking churches, where it was read for centuries, and Tatian probably returned to the Syriac-speaking East after leaving Rome. Some scholars have argued that he composed it in Greek in Rome and that it was later translated into Syriac; others that he composed it in Syriac in Mesopotamia; others again that he prepared versions in both languages. The discovery of a Greek harmony fragment at Dura-Europos in 1933, discussed below, was at first taken as support for a Greek original, but its connection with Tatian\u2019s work has itself been questioned. The matter remains open.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-11\"><a href=\"#note-11\">11<\/a><\/sup><sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-12\"><a href=\"#note-12\">12<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-diatessaron-in-the-syriac-church\">The Diatessaron in the Syriac Church<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-gospel-of-edessa\">The Gospel of Edessa<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the Syriac-speaking churches of <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Edessa\">Edessa<\/a> and northern Mesopotamia the Diatessaron became the standard text of the Gospels.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-13\"><a href=\"#note-13\">13<\/a><\/sup> Eusebius, writing in Palestine in the early fourth century, reports that Tatian \u201ccomposed in some way a combination and collection of the Gospels, and gave this the name of the Diatessaron, and it is still in the hands of some\u201d.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-14\"><a href=\"#note-14\">14<\/a><\/sup> The Syriac legend known as the Doctrine of Addai, which tells of the conversion of Edessa in the apostolic age, describes the early Christians of the city gathering to hear the Old Testament and the New, \u201cthe Diatessaron\u201d, read in church. The legend is not historical as an account of the first century, but it reflects the practice of the time when it was written, probably around 400.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Diatessaron was not the only form of the Gospels in Syriac. Two manuscripts preserve a translation of the separate Gospels known as the Old Syriac, the Curetonian manuscript, named after the English scholar William Cureton who published it in the 1850s, and the Sinaitic palimpsest, discovered in the library of <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/codex-sinaiticus-and-the-sinai-manuscript-tradition\/\">St Catherine\u2019s Monastery<\/a> in 1892 by the sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson. Both contain readings that appear to have been influenced by the Diatessaron, which suggests that the harmony was known in Syriac before the separate Gospels were translated, or at least that it shaped the way they were read and revised. In the fifth century the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-peshitta-and-its-hebrew-vorlage\/\">Peshitta<\/a>, the standard Syriac version, replaced both the harmony and the Old Syriac Gospels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"ephrems-commentary\">Ephrem&#x27;s Commentary<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The most important single witness to the Diatessaron is a commentary on it by <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Ephrem_the_Syrian\">Ephrem the Syrian<\/a>, the poet and theologian who taught at Nisibis and later at Edessa and died in 373.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-15\"><a href=\"#note-15\">15<\/a><\/sup> Ephrem treated the harmony as the Gospel text on which a teacher naturally commented, and he quoted it extensively. His commentary was long known only in an Armenian translation, which was published in the nineteenth century and translated into Latin by Georg Moesinger in 1876. The Latin version made possible the first confident identification of the Diatessaron\u2019s order and wording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1957 the collector Alfred Chester Beatty acquired a Syriac manuscript of the commentary, written on parchment and probably dating from the late fifth or early sixth century, which preserves a large part of Ephrem\u2019s original text. It was edited by Louis Leloir in 1963, and further leaves later came to light and were published in 1990. The manuscript, Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, is now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the same collection that holds the Greek biblical papyri described in our article on <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/papyrus-46-and-the-chester-beatty-pauline-collection\/\">Papyrus 46 and the Chester Beatty Pauline collection<\/a>. An English translation of the commentary based on the Syriac and Armenian texts was published by Carmel McCarthy in 1993.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-16\"><a href=\"#note-16\">16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"suppression-in-the-fifth-century\">Suppression in the Fifth Century<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the fifth century the bishops of the Syriac church had come to regard the Diatessaron as a problem. Partly this was a matter of authority: the church had accepted the four separate Gospels as canonical, and a book that replaced them with a single work by a man remembered as a heretic was difficult to defend. Partly it was a matter of standardisation, as the Syriac churches drew closer to the Greek-speaking church of Antioch. Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, is reported to have ordered that every church should have a copy of the separate Gospels, called in Syriac the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, the \u201cGospel of the Separated\u201d, and that they should be read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Theodoret\">Theodoret<\/a>, who became bishop of Cyrrhus in northern Syria in 423, left a vivid account of his own action.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-17\"><a href=\"#note-17\">17<\/a><\/sup> He writes that he found more than two hundred copies of Tatian\u2019s book held in honour in the churches of his diocese, that he collected and put them away, and that he introduced the Gospels of the four evangelists in their place.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-18\"><a href=\"#note-18\">18<\/a><\/sup> The figure is striking for a single rural diocese and indicates how widely the harmony had been used. It also helps to explain why the original Syriac text did not survive: the copies were not merely neglected but deliberately withdrawn from use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-dura-europos-fragment\">The Dura-Europos Fragment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"a-town-on-the-euphrates\">A Town on the Euphrates<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Dura-Europos\">Dura-Europos<\/a> was a fortified town on the middle Euphrates, founded in the Hellenistic period and held by the Romans as a frontier garrison in the third century.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-19\"><a href=\"#note-19\">19<\/a><\/sup> Around 256 or 257 it fell to the Sasanian Persians after a siege, and it was abandoned. In preparing the defences, the Roman garrison had built up a great embankment against the inside of the western wall, filling with earth the buildings that stood along it. Among these were a synagogue with painted walls and a house that had been adapted as a Christian meeting place, with a baptistery decorated with wall paintings. The embankment preserved these buildings until excavators from Yale University and the French Academy uncovered them in the 1920s and 1930s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In March 1933, in the embankment near the Christian building, the excavators found a small piece of parchment written in Greek. It contained about fourteen lines describing the request of Joseph of Arimathea for the body of Jesus, combining phrases from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a single passage. Carl Kraeling published it in 1935 as a Greek fragment of Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-20\"><a href=\"#note-20\">20<\/a><\/sup> Because the town was abandoned in the 250s, the fragment must be earlier than that date, which makes it one of the earliest Christian manuscripts with a secure terminus. It is now kept at Yale and is catalogued in the list of New Testament manuscripts as 0212.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"tatian-or-another-harmony\">Tatian or Another Harmony?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For many years the Dura fragment was regarded as the only surviving piece of the Diatessaron in its original form. Later scholarship has been less certain. In 1999 David Parker, David Taylor and Mark Goodacre published a detailed study of the fragment which concluded that it could not be confidently identified as part of Tatian\u2019s work. They noted that its wording differs in places from what the eastern witnesses suggest the Diatessaron read, and that more than one Gospel harmony may have circulated in the second and third centuries.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-21\"><a href=\"#note-21\">21<\/a><\/sup> Others have continued to defend the connection. The debate illustrates a general problem: harmonising the Gospels was a natural thing for early Christians to do, and not every harmony need derive from Tatian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-arabic-and-persian-harmonies\">The Arabic and Persian Harmonies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"ibn-al-tayyibs-translation\">Ibn al-Tayyib&#x27;s Translation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While the Syriac Diatessaron disappeared from use, a translation of it survived in Arabic. In the eleventh century Abu al-Faraj Abd Allah ibn al-Tayyib, a physician, philosopher and priest of the Church of the East in Baghdad, made or revised an Arabic version from a Syriac text. Two principal manuscripts of this version were known in the nineteenth century, one in the Vatican Library and one in the Museo Borgiano, and on the basis of both the Italian scholar Augusto Ciasca published the Arabic text with a Latin translation in 1888.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-22\"><a href=\"#note-22\">22<\/a><\/sup> An English translation by Hope W. Hogg appeared in 1896 in the Ante-Nicene Fathers series, and it remains a convenient way of reading the harmony as a continuous text.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-23\"><a href=\"#note-23\">23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Arabic Diatessaron gives the order of the harmony with considerable fidelity, but its wording has been heavily assimilated to the Peshitta. The Syriac text from which it was made had evidently been corrected to agree with the standard Syriac Gospels, so that the Arabic version preserves Tatian\u2019s arrangement more reliably than his exact words. A Persian harmony, preserved in a manuscript in Florence copied in the sixteenth century from an exemplar of the thirteenth, follows a different order and draws on different sources, and its relation to Tatian\u2019s work is uncertain.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-24\"><a href=\"#note-24\">24<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-western-tradition\">The Western Tradition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"victor-of-capua-and-the-codex-fuldensis\">Victor of Capua and the Codex Fuldensis<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the Latin West the Diatessaron left a different kind of trace. Around 546, Victor, bishop of Capua in southern Italy, came upon an anonymous Latin Gospel harmony. In a preface he discussed its authorship and concluded, on the basis of Eusebius, that it was probably the work of Tatian. He had the harmony copied in a manuscript that also contained the Acts, the Epistles and the Apocalypse, and he corrected it with his own hand, adding notes that record dates in 546 and 547. The manuscript passed later to <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Saint_Boniface\">Saint Boniface<\/a>, the Anglo-Saxon missionary to the Germans, and after his death in 754 it was kept at the monastery of Fulda that he had founded, where it remains. It is known as the Codex Fuldensis.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-25\"><a href=\"#note-25\">25<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Codex Fuldensis preserves Tatian\u2019s order but not his wording: the text of the harmony was assimilated to Jerome\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-latin-vulgate-and-jeromes-translation-of-the-bible\/\">Vulgate<\/a>, which had become the standard Latin Bible by Victor\u2019s time. Despite this, a number of Old Latin readings survive in it, and it became the ancestor of much of the medieval Western harmony tradition. Its importance for the textual history of the Vulgate is also considerable, since it is one of the oldest dated manuscripts of the Latin New Testament.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-26\"><a href=\"#note-26\">26<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"harmonies-in-the-vernacular\">Harmonies in the Vernacular<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From the Fulda manuscript, or from texts related to it, a series of Gospel harmonies spread into the vernacular languages of medieval Europe.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-27\"><a href=\"#note-27\">27<\/a><\/sup> In the ninth century, at Fulda itself, the Latin harmony was translated into Old High German in a bilingual manuscript now at St Gallen. Around the same period an anonymous poet composed the <a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Heliand\">Heliand<\/a>, an epic in Old Saxon alliterative verse that retells the life of Christ in the idiom of Germanic heroic poetry, drawing on the harmony for its narrative order.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-28\"><a href=\"#note-28\">28<\/a><\/sup> In the thirteenth century a Middle Dutch harmony, known from a manuscript in Li\u00e8ge, was made; it attracted particular attention in the twentieth century because it contains readings that do not come from the Vulgate and that seem to agree with eastern witnesses to the Diatessaron. Italian harmonies in the Venetian and Tuscan dialects, and an English harmony known as the Pepysian Harmony, from a manuscript once owned by Samuel Pepys, belong to the same broad tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How these western harmonies acquired their non-Vulgate readings has been much discussed. One school, associated with scholars such as Daniel Plooij and Gilles Quispel, held that they preserved traces of an Old Latin Diatessaron that had circulated in the West before the Fulda manuscript and that carried readings going back to Tatian. Others have argued that many of the agreements can be explained by independent harmonisation, by the influence of familiar parallel passages and by the habits of medieval translators. Recent work has tended to treat the western vernacular harmonies with caution as witnesses to Tatian\u2019s original text, while recognising their value as evidence for the medieval reception of the Gospels.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-29\"><a href=\"#note-29\">29<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"reconstructing-a-lost-book\">Reconstructing a Lost Book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-problem-of-the-witnesses\">The Problem of the Witnesses<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The study of the Diatessaron is a classic problem in textual criticism. The original text is lost. The witnesses fall into two main groups: an eastern group, consisting of Ephrem\u2019s commentary, the Arabic and Persian harmonies, quotations in Syriac writers such as Aphrahat and the influence of the harmony on the Old Syriac Gospels and on Armenian texts; and a western group, consisting of the Codex Fuldensis and the medieval vernacular harmonies. Each witness has been affected by its own process of transmission and, in most cases, by assimilation to the standard Gospel text of its church, the Peshitta in the east and the Vulgate in the west.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-30\"><a href=\"#note-30\">30<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because of this, a reading can be confidently attributed to Tatian only when it is supported by witnesses from both groups that are unlikely to have influenced each other, and when it cannot easily be explained as a natural harmonisation or a later change. William Petersen\u2019s survey of 1994 set out the history of this research in detail and argued for a methodology based on such independent agreement.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-31\"><a href=\"#note-31\">31<\/a><\/sup> More recent work, including the essays collected by Matthew Crawford and Nicholas Zola in 2019, has questioned some of the older assumptions, examined the evidence of Ephrem\u2019s commentary more closely and asked how far a reconstruction of the original wording is possible at all.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-32\"><a href=\"#note-32\">32<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-value-of-the-diatessaron\">The Value of the Diatessaron<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even in its fragmentary and indirect state, the Diatessaron is of great importance for the history of the Gospel text. If it was composed around 170, it is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the use of the four Gospels together, earlier than most surviving Greek manuscripts and roughly contemporary with Irenaeus\u2019 defence of a fourfold Gospel. It shows that by Tatian\u2019s time the four were already regarded as a set, even if they could be combined into a new book. Its readings, where they can be recovered, belong to the second century and can occasionally shed light on the early history of particular verses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Diatessaron also influenced the Gospel text itself. Scribes copying the separate Gospels in the Syriac, Latin and even Greek traditions were familiar with harmonised forms of familiar passages, and the tendency to assimilate one Gospel to another, which textual critics observe in many manuscripts, may in some cases have been strengthened by the memory of the harmony. In this way a book that was officially withdrawn from use continued to leave traces in the texts that replaced it.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-33\"><a href=\"#note-33\">33<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"other-ways-of-reading-four-gospels\">Other Ways of Reading Four Gospels<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-eusebian-canons\">The Eusebian Canons<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tatian\u2019s solution to the problem of four Gospels was not the only one to take hold. In the early fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea devised a system of cross-references that allowed readers to keep the four Gospels separate while seeing where they ran parallel. He divided each Gospel into numbered sections and drew up ten tables, or canons, listing the passages common to all four, those shared by three, by two, and those found in one Gospel alone. A small number written in the margin beside each section referred the reader to the appropriate table, and from there to the parallel passages in the other Gospels. The Eusebian canons became a standard feature of Gospel books in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic and Gothic, and their decorated arcades, as seen in manuscripts such as the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-garima-gospels-of-ethiopia\/\">Garima Gospels<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/the-lindisfarne-gospels-and-the-anglo-saxon-manuscript-tradition\/\">Lindisfarne Gospels<\/a>, became one of the great themes of medieval book art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In effect, the canon tables offered the advantages of a harmony without its disadvantages. A reader could compare parallel accounts and see how the evangelists agreed, but the individual Gospels remained intact, with their own order and wording. It is perhaps no accident that the canons spread in the same period in which bishops such as Rabbula and Theodoret were withdrawing the Diatessaron. The separate Gospels, provided with a scholarly apparatus for comparing them, could do much of what the harmony had done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"augustine-and-the-agreement-of-the-evangelists\">Augustine and the Agreement of the Evangelists<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the Latin West, Augustine of Hippo addressed the same problem in a different form. Around 400 he wrote a treatise on the agreement of the evangelists, De consensu evangelistarum, in response to pagan critics who claimed that the Gospels contradicted one another. Augustine worked through the Gospels passage by passage, explaining apparent discrepancies of order and detail. He did not attempt to replace the four Gospels with one, but his arguments supplied a theological rationale for reading them together, and his treatise was widely used by later harmonisers. In the fifteenth century the French theologian Jean Gerson composed a Latin harmony he called the Monotessaron, and in the sixteenth the Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander published a harmony that attempted to include every word of all four Gospels, sometimes by supposing that similar events had happened more than once.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-34\"><a href=\"#note-34\">34<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-harmony-in-armenian-and-georgian\">The Harmony in Armenian and Georgian<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The influence of the Diatessaron also reached the Caucasus. The Armenian version of the Bible, made in the early fifth century after the invention of the Armenian alphabet, was translated partly from Syriac, and scholars have detected harmonising readings in early Armenian Gospel texts that may derive from the Diatessaron or from Old Syriac Gospels shaped by it. Ephrem\u2019s commentary was itself preserved in Armenian, a sign that the harmony was studied in the Armenian church at a time when the separate Gospels were already in use. Similar traces have been suggested for the early Georgian Gospels, which were translated in part from Armenian. The evidence from these versions is indirect and much debated, but it shows that the Diatessaron formed part of the common inheritance of the Syriac-influenced churches of the East.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-35\"><a href=\"#note-35\">35<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"the-structure-of-the-harmony\">The Structure of the Harmony<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"how-the-story-was-told\">How the Story Was Told<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Arabic version, together with Ephrem\u2019s commentary, allows the general structure of Tatian\u2019s work to be followed. After the prologue of John, the harmony turned to Luke\u2019s account of the annunciation to Zechariah and the birth of John the Baptist, then to the annunciation to Mary, the birth of Jesus and the visit of the shepherds, before taking up Matthew\u2019s account of the magi, the flight into Egypt and the return to Nazareth. The ministry of John the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus followed, combining details from all four Gospels, and then the temptation in the wilderness, the calling of the first disciples and the wedding at Cana from John\u2019s second chapter.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-36\"><a href=\"#note-36\">36<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the ministry, Tatian drew on all four Gospels to create a sequence that included the Sermon on the Mount, the parables of the kingdom, the miracles in Galilee and the journeys to Jerusalem described by John. The cleansing of the Temple, which John places at the beginning of the ministry and the Synoptic Gospels at the end, was placed by Tatian late in the narrative, in the Synoptic position. The passion narrative wove together the accounts of the Last Supper, the arrest, the trials before the high priest and Pilate, the crucifixion and the burial, and the harmony ended with the resurrection appearances, the commission to the disciples and the ascension. The result was a continuous narrative roughly three quarters the length of the four Gospels taken together.<sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-37\"><a href=\"#note-37\">37<\/a><\/sup><sup class=\"fn-ref\" id=\"ref-38\"><a href=\"#note-38\">38<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This structure shows that Tatian worked with the order of the Gospels, not only with their words. In places where the evangelists disagreed about sequence, he had to choose, and his choices, preserved in the Arabic and in the Fulda manuscript, offer a glimpse of how a second-century reader understood the chronology of the life of Jesus. For later readers in the Syriac church, who heard the harmony read in their liturgy, this was simply the story of the Gospel, and Ephrem commented on it as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"conclusion\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron is one of the most influential lost books of early Christianity. It was composed by a man whom later writers remembered as a heretic, read for generations in the churches of Syria and Mesopotamia, commented on by Ephrem, removed from use by bishops such as Rabbula and Theodoret, and yet transmitted in other forms across the medieval world, from Baghdad to Fulda and from Li\u00e8ge to Venice. Its history shows the variety of ways in which early Christians handled the problem of four Gospels: by accepting one, by insisting on four or by making four into one. It shows, too, how a text can survive its own suppression, reshaped by translators and correctors until its original wording is almost lost, while its structure continues to govern the way the story is told. The work of reconstructing it, from a Syriac commentary in Dublin, an Arabic translation in Rome, a Latin manuscript at Fulda and a scrap of parchment from the Euphrates, remains one of the most demanding tasks in the study of the biblical text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"notes\">Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list post-notes\">\n\n<li id=\"note-1\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Diatessaron\">Diatessaron<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-1\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-2\">Tatian, <em>Address to the Greeks<\/em> 42, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/0202.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-2\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-3\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Justin_Martyr\">Justin Martyr<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-3\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-4\">Irenaeus of Lyon, <em>Against Heresies<\/em> 1.28.1, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/0103.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-4\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-5\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Encratites\">Encratites<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-5\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-6\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Marcion_of_Sinope\">Marcion of Sinope<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-6\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-7\">Hope W. Hogg (trans.), \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/1002.htm\">The Diatessaron of Tatian<\/a>\u201d, in <em>Ante-Nicene Fathers<\/em>, vol. 9 (Edinburgh, 1896), introduction and text, translated from the Arabic. <a href=\"#ref-7\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-8\">Theodoret of Cyrrhus, <em>Compendium of Heretical Fables<\/em> 1.20. <a href=\"#ref-8\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-9\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-9\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-10\">Ulrich B. Schmid, \u201cThe Diatessaron of Tatian\u201d, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (eds), <em>The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research<\/em>, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115\u2013142. <a href=\"#ref-10\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-11\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-11\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-12\">Matthew R. Crawford and Nicholas J. Zola (eds), <em>The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Nature and Text of the Diatessaron<\/em> (London: T&amp;T Clark, 2019). <a href=\"#ref-12\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-13\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Edessa\">Edessa<\/a>\u201d and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Syriac_Christianity\">Syriac Christianity<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-13\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-14\">Eusebius of Caesarea, <em>Ecclesiastical History<\/em> 4.29.6, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/250104.htm\">English translation<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref-14\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-15\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Ephrem_the_Syrian\">Ephrem the Syrian<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-15\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-16\">Carmel McCarthy, <em>Saint Ephrem\u2019s Commentary on Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of Manchester, 1993). <a href=\"#ref-16\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-17\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Theodoret\">Theodoret<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-17\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-18\">Theodoret of Cyrrhus, <em>Compendium of Heretical Fables<\/em> 1.20. <a href=\"#ref-18\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-19\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Dura-Europos\">Dura-Europos<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-19\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-20\">Carl H. Kraeling, <em>A Greek Fragment of Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron from Dura<\/em>, Studies and Documents 3 (London: Christophers, 1935). <a href=\"#ref-20\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-21\">D. C. Parker, D. G. K. Taylor and M. S. Goodacre, \u201cThe Dura-Europos Gospel Harmony\u201d, in D. G. K. Taylor (ed.), <em>Studies in the Early Text of the Gospels and Acts<\/em> (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999), 192\u2013228. <a href=\"#ref-21\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-22\">Augusto Ciasca, <em>Tatiani Evangeliorum Harmoniae Arabice<\/em> (Rome, 1888). <a href=\"#ref-22\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-23\">Hope W. Hogg (trans.), \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/1002.htm\">The Diatessaron of Tatian<\/a>\u201d, in <em>Ante-Nicene Fathers<\/em>, vol. 9 (Edinburgh, 1896), introduction and text, translated from the Arabic. <a href=\"#ref-23\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-24\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-24\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-25\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Saint_Boniface\">Saint Boniface<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-25\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-26\">Ulrich B. Schmid, \u201cThe Diatessaron of Tatian\u201d, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (eds), <em>The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research<\/em>, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115\u2013142. <a href=\"#ref-26\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-27\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Gospel_harmony\">Gospel harmony<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-27\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-28\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Heliand\">Heliand<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-28\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-29\">Ulrich B. Schmid, \u201cThe Diatessaron of Tatian\u201d, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (eds), <em>The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research<\/em>, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115\u2013142. <a href=\"#ref-29\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-30\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-30\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-31\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-31\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-32\">Matthew R. Crawford and Nicholas J. Zola (eds), <em>The Gospel of Tatian: Exploring the Nature and Text of the Diatessaron<\/em> (London: T&amp;T Clark, 2019). <a href=\"#ref-32\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-33\">Ulrich B. Schmid, \u201cThe Diatessaron of Tatian\u201d, in Bart D. Ehrman and Michael W. Holmes (eds), <em>The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research<\/em>, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 115\u2013142. <a href=\"#ref-33\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-34\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Gospel_harmony\">Gospel harmony<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-34\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-35\">William L. Petersen, <em>Tatian\u2019s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship<\/em> (Leiden: Brill, 1994). <a href=\"#ref-35\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-36\">Hope W. Hogg (trans.), \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/1002.htm\">The Diatessaron of Tatian<\/a>\u201d, in <em>Ante-Nicene Fathers<\/em>, vol. 9 (Edinburgh, 1896), introduction and text, translated from the Arabic. <a href=\"#ref-36\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-37\">Hope W. Hogg (trans.), \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/1002.htm\">The Diatessaron of Tatian<\/a>\u201d, in <em>Ante-Nicene Fathers<\/em>, vol. 9 (Edinburgh, 1896), introduction and text, translated from the Arabic. <a href=\"#ref-37\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n<li id=\"note-38\">Grokipedia, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/grokipedia.com\/page\/Diatessaron\">Diatessaron<\/a>\u201d. <a href=\"#ref-38\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n\n<\/ol>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the second half of the second century a Christian teacher from the eastern edge of the Roman world composed a book that, for a time, was more widely read in some&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}