The Priority of the Stuttgart–Liège–Zurich Harmonies

Among witnesses to the Diatessaron, eastern ones better preserve Tatian’s narrative sequence. Western witnesses typically evince the same order. But when they differ, Codex Fuldensis is typically assumed to preserve the most primitive narrative sequence, since it is the oldest extant western manuscript. This chapter challenges that fundamental assumption. Paratextual data in Fuldensis offers valuable clues about the codex’s material production. In rare, yet significant cases, Victor of Capua and his scribe omitted or repositioned short Gospel episodes. The placement of such material in the much younger Stuttgart, Liège, and Zurich harmonies shows that they occasionally take priority over Fuldensis. In support of an earlier tenet in Diatessaron studies, these medieval Dutch and German harmonies sometimes independently attest the same Old Latin harmony underlying Codex Fuldensis.

Tatian's Diatessaron

In the late-second century, Tatian the Assyrian constructed a new Gospel by intricately harmonizing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Tatian’s work became known as the Diatessaron, since it was derived “out of the four” eventually canonical Gospels. Although it circulated widely for centuries, the Diatessaron disappeared in antiquity. Nevertheless, numerous ancient and medieval Gospel harmonies survive in various languages. Some texts are altogether independent of the Diatessaron, while others are definitely related. Yet even Tatian’s known descendants differ in large and small ways, so attempts at reconstruction have proven confounding. This book forges a new path in Diatessaron studies. Covering the widest array of manuscript evidence to date, it reconstructs the ancient compositional practices and redactional tendencies by which Tatian wrote his Gospel. Then, by sorting every extant witness according to its narrative sequence, the macrostructure of Tatian’s Gospel becomes clear. Despite many shared agreements, there remain significant divergences between eastern and western witnesses. This book argues that the eastern ones preserve Tatian’s order, whereas the western texts descend from a fourth-century recension of the Diatessaron. Victor of Capua and his scribe used the recension to produce the Latin Codex Fuldensis in the sixth century. More controversially, the book offers new evidence that late medieval texts such as the Middle Dutch Stuttgart harmony independently preserve traces of the western recension. This study uncovers the composition, transmission, and reception history behind one of early Christianity’s most elusive texts.

The Diatessaron, Canonical or Non-canonical? Rereading the Dura Fragment

Among those texts that vied for a position as authoritative Scripture, but were eventually rejected by ecclesiastical authorities, was the so-called Diatessaron of Tatian. Having been compiled from the four canonical gospels, Tatian's work occupies a liminal position between the categories of ‘canonical’ and ‘apocryphal’, since the majority of its content was common to users of the fourfold gospel, though this content existed in a radically altered form and was tainted by association with an author widely accused of heresy. In order to demonstrate the originality of Tatian's gospel composition, this article gives a close reading of the only surviving Greek witness to it, a fragment of parchment found in excavations at Dura-Europos. Dura's very location as a borderland between Rome and Persia corresponds with the fact that in this outpost garrison city Christians were using a gospel text that would have appeared markedly strange to those in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. The wording that can be recovered from the Dura fragment shows how Tatian creatively and intelligently combined the text of the four gospels to produce a new narrative of the life of Jesus, choosing to leave out certain elements and to make deliberate emendations along the way. However, it was precisely such originality that made his gospel appear problematic, so in order to rescue his text from censure, later scribes had to domesticate it by making it conform throughout to the canonical versions. Comparison of the Dura fragment with the medieval Arabic gospel harmony and with the Latin version in Codex Fuldensis illustrates well this process whereby Tatian's gospel went from being a rival to the fourfold gospel to a designedly secondary, and therefore acceptable, work.

Clement of Llanthony’s Gospel Harmony and Augustine’s De Consensu Evangelistarum

Clement of Llanthony’s twelfth-century Latin gospel harmony is an important British witness to the tradition of producing a continuous narrative from the four gospels that is almost as old as the gospels themselves. Close analysis of the text reveals that Clement’s harmony has no demonstrable links with the Tatianic Diatessaron tradition exemplified in the Codex Fuldensis but, rather, is possibly the earliest attempt to construct a life of Christ from Augustine’s treatise De Consensu Evangelistarum, which was written to prove the ‘harmony’ of the gospel accounts as a defence against those who pointed out their apparent contradictions.

Fuldensis, Sigla for Variants in Vaticanus, and 1 Cor 14.34–5

This article identifies two previously unnoticed items of textual evidence that support the view that 1 Cor 14.34–5 (‘Let women keep silence in the churches …’) was an interpolation. I conclude that Bishop Victor ordered the rewriting of 1 Cor 14.34–40 in the margin of Codex Fuldensis (see photograph on page 261) with w. 34–5 omitted and that there is a text-critical siglum that indicates the scribe's awareness of a textual variant at the beginning of 1 Cor 14.34 in Codex Vaticanus (see photograph on page 262). This text-critical evidence, plus the evidence from the non-Western Greek ms. 88* and Vulgate ms. Reginensis with w. 34–5 transposed after v. 40, makes an already strong case for interpolation even stronger. The text-critical sigla in Vaticanus open a new window onto the early history of the NT text. While tangential to the main argument of this article, this may well be its most important contribution.