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Checkered History of the Diatessaron.--What use the Arabic edition of Ibn-at-Tayyib was put to when made we do not know. Abd Isho (d. 1318) speaks in the highest terms of Tatian's work, saying, "...With all diligence he attended to the utmost degree to the right order of those things which were said and done by the Saviour; of his own he did not add a single saying." ¹ But the leaders of the Syrian church had not always thought so. Theodoret (loc. cit.) some nine hundred years earlier had written thus: "...Even those that follow the apostolic doctrines, not perceiving the mischief of the composition," used "the book too simply as an abridgment." A few years earlier Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa (d. 435), had said: ² "Let the presbyters and deacons give heed that in all the churches there be provided and read a copy of the Distinct Gospel," i.e., not the harmonized or mixed gospel. But obviously these men were trying to suppress traditional practice due to very different views. Theodoret (loc. cit.) found more than two hundred copies of the work "held in respect in the churches"; and the Doctrine of Addai (Edessa, third to fourth century) seems simply to identify the Diatessaron and the New Testament. ³ Outside of the Syriac speaking churches we find no signs of any such use of the Diatessaron. It would seem, therefore, that at a quite early stage the Diatessaron was very widely if not universally read in the Syriac churches, and commented on by scholars as the gospel; that in time it fell under the condemnation of some at least of the church leaders, who made violent efforts to suppress it; that it could not be suppressed; that a commentary on it was (perhaps in the fifth century ⁴ ) translated into Armenian; that it was still discussed by commentators, and new Syriac mss. of it made in the ninth century, and thought worth the labor of reproduction in Arabic in the beginning of the eleventh century; that mss. of the Armenian volume continued to be made down to the very end of the twelfth century, and of the Arabic edition down to the fourteenth century; but that this long life was secured at the expense of a more or less rapid assimilation of the text to that of the great Syriac Bible which from the fourth century onwards became more and more exclusively used--the Peshitta.