The Diatesseron's Peshitta Pedigree.

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhi Kevin,

1) Conclusion: Rabbula did not suppress the Diatessaron, at least not in Persia

Reason(s): Six centuries later, an Arabic translation of the Diatessaron emerged.

I see your point,

Great!

but what's meant by "suppress?"

I really don't know. I don't hold to that view, it's a rather vague statement from Burkitt, not me.

Do you mean he simply discouraged its use after first promoting it? Or does "suppress" mean he attempted to collect the majority of its copies to destroy them? If by "suppress," you mean the former, then there's a considerable probability he did after discovering the following:

Testimony to the Diatessaron comes rather from the Syriac-speaking church of the East than from the Greek. Theodoret says of Tatian: "He composed the Gospel which is called Diatessaron, cutting out the genealogies and such other passages as shew the Lord to have been born of the seed of David after the flesh. This work was in use not only among persons belonging to his sect, but also among those who follow the apostolic doctrine, as they did not perceive the mischief of the composition, but used the book in all simplicity on account of its brevity. And I myself found more than 200 such copies held in respect in the churches in our parts. All these I collected and put away, and I replaced them by the Gospels of the four Evangelists" (Intro of the Diatessaton, Wace)

Theodoret may have collected copies and put them away, I don't know what Rabbula did or didn't do. He was not our buddy. He rather disliked us.

Rabbula endorsed the Diatessaron earlier than its fallout amongst church leaders, as indicated in the following introduction:

...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 century45 ) 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. (Roberts-Donaldson Intro)

How does that speak to Rabbula? The fact is that Burkitt made this up, there are absolutely no historical witnesses he turned to in his attempt to demonstrate suppression by Rabbula. And that theory becomes even more ridiculous in Persia, where he probably would have gotten himself killed should he have stepped foot onto that soil. They didn't like him, either. So I don't get it....Burkitt's theory, that is.

Whatever "violent efforts" mean.

I know Rabbula would have met a violent end had he attempted to step foot into Persia, let alone suppress anything over in our neck of the woods.

Does that mean inquisitional in the 16th century Roman Church sense? Does that mean they bad-mouthed it? The most I can say is that he probably changed his opinion later on and discouraged its use.

You'd have to ask the inventor of this theory, I don't hold to it at all.

2) Conclusion: Four distinct Gospels were used as a templete for Tatian's Diatessaron (170-175 CE)

Reason(s): Since the Diatessaron is a harmonization of four Gospels, there must have existed four Gospels prior thereto, in the possession of the churches, to begin with.

Agreed.

Good. That's agreement on two points now. We're making progress!

3) Conclusion: These four distinct Gospels, used as a templete for the Diatessaron, were the Peshitta Gospels (placed before or at 175 CE)

Reason(s): Because the Arabic translation of the Diatessaron is nearly, if not, the same as the Peshitta, the Peshitta Gospels are necessarily prototypal

Assumptions: The Gospels used by Tatian were known as Peshitta in his time. Also, these Gospels were canonized before/during his time. Finally, he merely harmonized these canonical Gospels without altering them.

I hesitant to accept this argument because of its assumptions.

They are assumptions based on the probabilities and the correlation of the Arabic text of the 11th c. and the Peshitta we have today.

In Andreas Juckel's article, titled "A Re-examination of Codex Phillipps 1388," Codex Phillipps is reexamined in light of the earlier Peshitta manuscript and the Old Syriac. According to German scholar Arthur Allgeier, this codex, which dates back to the 5th/6th century, share a considerable number of readings with the Old Syriac. Interestingly enough, with reexamination, we find contrary to Allgeier's finding, its "individual and singular parts" stay true to an "earlier" Peshitta manscript, forcing Juckel to acknowledge that "the re-examination of the codex advises scholars to re-examine all early Gospel codices in the same way ???Codex Phillipps??? is re-examined in the present article. The analysis of the individuality of the single codices will determine their ???Old Syriac??? heritage as well as their singular and harmonistic readings" (<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV6N1Juckel.html#S5">http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye/Vol6No1/HV ... el.html#S5</a><!-- m -->).

Codex Phillipps is a western text type (not from Persia). We've dealt with Juckel's article many years ago. See my previous reply to this manuscript here:

http://www.peshitta.org/forum/viewtopic....&sk=t&sd=a

Returning back to my point, he notes:

Accordingly, a ???pre-Peshitta??? as a fixed text (to be reconstructed and printed) cannot be taken as granted by the existence of the ???Old Syriac heritage???; it is possible that a complex development of the formerly fixed Peshitta enlarged or even produced this ???heritage??? (as far as it is not identical with the Peshitta majority text). The complexity of the development is given by the influence of the ???Old Syriac???, the Diatessaron and the Greek, which is tracable in the early Peshitta Gospel manuscripts. Therefore, to alter Gwilliam???s majority text by introducing the ???Old Syriac heritage??? would charge this new text with the petitio principii of a ???pre-Peshitta??? which is not yet properly traced nor sufficiently discussed. Only the re-examination of the early Gospel codices can offer evidence about the textual reality or the textual myth of a fixed ???pre-Peshitta??? and its possible future printed incarnation. For this more comprehensive re-examination the one of 'Codex Phillipps' offers a starting point. The true significance of this codex for the history of the Peshitta Gospels was not dicovered by A. Allgeier but by M. Black (ibid).

Were there 'proto-Syriac Gospels?' Unquestionably. But what did they look like?

No, there weren't. See my post above.

The form of the Gospel text used by the early Syriac Church is a topic of much debate.]The earliest form of the Syriac Gospels of which, however, we are certain is the Diatessaron, a Greek word means 'through [the] four [Gospels]'...]the Diatessaron was composed at a time when the notion of canonical Gospels was so young that the composer of the Diatessaron felt free to introduce material not found elsewhere in what we now call canonical Gospels: Matthew 4:4 and Mark 1:6, for example, talk of John the Baptist having lived off 'locusts and wild honey,' which is unusual to an ascetic since locust is a non-vegetarian diet. Tatian felt free to resolve the problem by modifying the text. He substituted 'locusts' with 'milk of the mountains,' the food of the promised land which is mentioned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6.3). The reconstruction of the text of the Diatessaron faces several difficulties. Two issues are to be tackled: What was the actual text? And since it is a mixture of the four Gospels, what is the sequence of verses and from which Gospel was each taken? To help resolve this, one of course must consider translations of the Diatessaron, but then one is faced with manuscripts from the sixth to fifteenth century which originate from as far east as Turfan, in China, and as far west as England. Whether scholars will be able to provide us with an acceptable reconstruction of the Diatessaron remains to be seen (The Diatessaron, George Kiraz)

In other words, he doesn't know for certain. And neither do we, which is why I wrote this article showing our possibility based on the evidence.

One must wonder if someone "felt free" to alter the Aramaic Gospels prior to "the notion of canonical Gospels." We may never know for certain.

An argument from silence, but sure.

So according to Juckel, we find the following:

1) There were proto- Syriac Gospels. However, it's uncertain if they were fixed.

IBID.

From Kiraz, we find the following:

1) The "notion" of canonical Gospels was new at the time of Tatian, but we cannot determine what the proto- Syriac Gospels looked like. Tatian took the liberty to edit passages therefrom in his Diatessaron. Consider the following passage:

"Theodoret [Bishop of Cyrus] says of Tatian: "He composed the Gospel which is called Diatessaron, cutting out the genealogies and such other passages as shew the Lord to have been born of the seed of David after the flesh" (ibid). This accusation seems to be in consistency with Tatian's christology. For one, he thought Jesus' flesh was imaginary (according to Jerome, Gal 6:8).

Sort of irrelevant, but ok.

From your argument, we find the following:

The Arabic translation of the DIatessaron matches the Peshitta nearly completely in its rendition.

Actually it matches it completely, the Arabic version from Persia.

Conclusion:

Thus we can deduce that the Peshitta matches the Arabic translation of the Diatessaron, a reworking of the unfixed, lost proto-Syriac Gospels. More specifically, we can induce that the Peshitta is the result of a reworked, uncontroversial Diatessaron, thus becoming straight, and not directly from the lost proto-Syriac Gospels. I say induce because it's possible that the churches were in possession of these proto-Syriac Gospels and decided to revert back thereto for the Peshitta. But we must assume that those proto-Syriac Gospels remained unaltered and were faithfully copied from generation to generation, word for word, until the fourth century. Given the originals are lost and no one memorized them, we can never know. We do know that the Peshitta emerged in the fourth century. What were its rivals, to which does it share the most similarities, and which rival(s) enjoyed enough popularity in the Church as to reasonably serve as its templete? The Diatessaron is the only qualified, solid candidate.


What sayest thou?

Well, I sayest that the Peshitta did not emerge in the fourth century, that it emerged from the hands of the Apostles themselves. That it is the basis behind the Diatesseron and the GNT. But you already knew that!