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Non-Syriac Texts of the Diatessaron.--Although Ephraem's Syriac commentary on the Diatessaron is for the present lost, there is an Armenian version of it 1 extant in two mss. dating from about the time of Bar Salibi and our Vat. ms. 2 A Latin translation of this work, published in 1876 by Moesinger, 3 formed the main basis of Zahn's attempt 4 to reconstruct the Diatessaron. Appendix X in Hill's Diatessaron (pp. 334-377) contains an English translation of the texts commented on by Ephraem, made from Moesinger's Latin, but collated with the Armenian by Professor J. Armitage Robinson, of Cambridge. A comparison of this document with our Arabic text shows a remarkable agreement in the order and contents, but just as remarkable a lack of agreement in the kind of text presented. The same phenomenon is met with when we compare our Arabic text with a document that carries us back three hundred years before the time of Ishodad, and therefore more than six hundred years before the Armenian mss.--the Codex Fuldensis of the Vulgate. 5 This ms. contains an arrangement of the gospel matter that its discoverer and publisher, Bishop Victor of Capua (d. 554), rightly concluded must represent the Diatessaron of Tatian, but for the text of which was apparently substituted that of the Vulgate. 6 We are now ready to weigh the testimony we have gathered. 7
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Published at Venice in 1836. ↩
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The two Armenian mss. are dated a.d. 1195. ↩
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Evangelii Concordantis Expositio, facta a S. Ephraemo (Ven., 1876). ↩
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Forschungen zur Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons, I. Theil. ↩
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Edited by Ernestus Ranke, Marb. and Lips., 1868. ↩
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For other forms of the Diatessaron, of no critical importance, see S. Hemphill, The Diatessaron of Tatian (London, 1888), Appendix D and the refs. there. ↩
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Further references, chiefly repetitions in one form or another of the statements we have quoted, may be found in a convenient form in Harnack, Gesch. d. altchrist. Lit. bis. Euseb., 493-496; cf. also the works mentioned by Hill (op. cit.) p. 378 f. ↩
