AND HISTORICAL RESKARCH UPON THE NEW TESTAMENT. 145 



There is another respect in which the Diatessaron has practi- 

 cally settled much-discussed questions about the Gospels. It 

 is the bearing which it has upon quotations from, and references 

 to, the Four Gospels in the Apologies and Dialogue of Justin 

 Martyr. The Diatessaron shows plainly that what Justin called 

 ''the Memoirs of the Apostles'' (or "Apostles and their Com- 

 panions," as he puts it in one place, and adding in reference to 

 them " which are also called Gospels ") were none other than 

 our Four Gospels. These he speaks of as being read in the 

 public worship of the Christians of his day {Apology I, 67) along 

 with the writings of the prophets, showing that the Gospels were 

 regarded as Sacred Scriptures just as the writings of the 

 prophets were. 



Professor M. Maher {The Month, London, iSTovember, 1892) 

 sums up the evidence thus : — 



" If Tatian, knowing the whole church as he did [he travelled to 

 various countries in his diligent search for philosophical and 

 religious information], devoted himself to the construction of an 

 elaborate harmonized Gospel narrative, in which the paragraphs, 

 texts, and fragments are interwoven with the utmost pains and 

 ingenuity, and the very greatest care directed to the preservation of 

 even the smallest word of our Four Gospels, it can only be because 

 these Four Gospels, or at least part of their contents, had before 

 this time been received by the Church as a sacred deposit of divine 

 truth." 



As to the text of the Gospels as interwoven in the Diatessaron, 

 Harnack remarks {Encyc. Brit., Article " Tatian"): 



*' As regards the text of the Gospels we can conclude from the 

 Diatessaron that the text of our Gospels about the year 160 alreadj^ 

 ran essentially as we now read them." 



Thus the Diatessaron shows us that there was no process of 

 Gospel evolution at tliat period at least ; the Gospels were then 

 a finished product. 



As Professor Eendel Harris finds that " Justin quoted, at 

 least at times, not from our separate Gospels, but from a 

 harmony of the Gospels " {Diatessaron of Tatian, p. 54), and 

 Dr. Sanday says {Bampton Lectures, p. 301, note) " It would not 

 be improbable that some sort of rough draft might have been 

 used by both master and scholar before its publication," it 

 seems quite natural to suppose that the Diatessaron, in its first 

 form, was composed from Greek Gospels, as Harnack supposes 

 from its Greek name, even as both Justin and Tatian were Greeks, 



L 



