Characteristics of the Diatessaron’s Sequence

This chapter elucidates the overarching structure of Tatian’s Diatessaron. The four separate Gospels differ among themselves in countless ways. To narrate Jesus’s ministry, Tatian incorporated all the Jewish festivals from the Gospel of John, but he rearranged the order of the feasts and the events surrounding them. Tatian’s narrative chronology has gone unrecognized in previous scholarship, because Ephrem’s commentary—albeit a key witness to the Diatessaron—suppressed most of the references to Jewish feasts. Besides the Diatessaron’s innovative chronology, Tatian often grouped characters and episodes thematically when rearranging the contents of the fourfold gospel. The Arabic harmony is the single best witness to the Diatessaron’s narrative sequence.