GREEK PAPYRI—METZGER 
codex presented the Catholic Epistles 
in a most unusual sequence, one 
which is almost never met with else- 
where: I, II, III John, and James.” 
Although the fragment now to be 
described is made of vellum and not 
papyrus, its intrinsic interest and great 
importance for one part of the textual 
criticism of the New Testament almost 
demand that it be included in an 
enumeration of the recently published 
papyri of the New Testament. Be- 
cause of the special nature of the text 
of this fragment, a few words must be 
devoted to setting forth something 
about the origin of an early Christian 
document whose suspected influence 
upon the text of the Gospels in the 
course of their transmission has been 
investigated and variously assessed by 
many textual critics. 
Tatian’s Diatessaron *! 
Every attentive reader of the Gospels 
has observed that sections in each of 
the Four Gospels resemble more or 
less closely sections in one or more of 
the others. Particularly close in 
phraseology are parts of the Synoptic 
Gospels. In a day when books were 
not produced so rapidly or so cheaply 
as today, more than one early Chris- 
tian scholar must have lamented the 
high cost of separate copies of all 
Four Gospels. Although many may 
have been distressed about this cir- 
cumstance, the first, so far as we know, 
who did anything about it was a 
Syrian from Mesopotamia, Tatian by 
name. Deciding to make a harmony 
30 Kase incorrectly supposes that this 
sequence is unique; a Sahidic manuscript 
at Rome (Propag. Borg. 63) has the same 
order, and apparently does not contain any 
of the other Catholic Epistles (C. R. Gregory, 
Textkritik des Neuen Testamentes, vol. 2, 
p. 857, Leipzig, 1902). 
31 A staggering amount of literature has 
grown up dealing with problems involving 
Tatian’s Diatessaron; the most complete re- 
cent survey is Curt Peters’ 235-page treat- 
ment, ‘‘Das Diatessaron Tatians, seine Uber- 
lieferung und sein Nachwirken in Morgen- 
und Abendland sowie der heutige Stand 
seiner Erforschung,”’ Orientalia Christiana 
Analecta, vol. 123, Rome, 1939. 
449 
of the Four Gospels, he arranged the 
several sections of each Gospel into 
a more or less logical and chrono- 
logical order, combining phrases pre- 
served by only one Evangelist with 
those preserved by another. By omit- 
ting a very few sections (such as the 
genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and 
Luke, the former of which traces our 
Lord’s lineage from Abraham down- 
wards and the latter of which traces 
it backwards to Adam), Tatian pre- 
served practically the entire contents 
of four separate books woven into one. 
Scholars have debated at great length 
whether the work was composed first 
in Tatian’s native tongue, Syriac, or 
in Greek. The name by which it came 
to be known, Diatessaron, involves a 
Greek phrase meaning “through [the] 
four [Gospels].” 
Tatian’s work became quite popular. 
As late as the fifth century Theodoret, 
who became bishop of Cyrrhus or 
Cyrus on the Euphrates in upper Syria 
in the year 423, found that more than 
200 copies of this harmony were in 
use within his diocese. Because 
Tatian had become heretical in his 
later life, and because Bp. Theodoret 
believed that orthodox Christians were 
in danger of being corrupted by using 
Tatian’s harmony, he destroyed all of 
the 200 copies and put in their place 
the separate Gospels of the four 
Evangelists. *” 
As a result of Bp. Theodoret’s zeal, 
and doubtless others like him, today 
the complete Diatessaron exists only 
in translations of the original. One of 
these is a commentary written by St. 
Ephraem (who was mentioned earlier 
in connection with a Greek palimp- 
sest) on the Syriac text of Tatian’s 
work, and in which he quoted exten- 
sively from the lost harmony. Unfor- 
tunately the Syriac text of St. 
Ephraem’s commentary has also been 
lost, but in 1836 the Armenians of the 
Mechitarist monastery of San Lazzaro 
at Venice published a copy of an 
32 Theodoret, Treatise on Heresies, Book I, 
Chap. 20. 
