Abstract
Anyone who has studied early Christian literature has likely been intrigued by the Diatessaron, the harmony of the four canonical Gospels produced by the second-century Assyrian writer Tatian. This work is perhaps most compelling, because it does intentionally what most readers of the New Testament Gospels do naturally in practice: parallel, conflate, and attempt to integrate. Barker’s monograph updates, clarifies, and corrects the scholarship that has been dedicated to understanding and disentangling the diverse, interwoven versions and alterations of the Diatessaron between antiquity and the later Middle Ages. As such, it constitutes a new starting point for work on this important text tradition.
The book is surprisingly thin. The reason this can be so is that this book does not introduce the reader to the Diatessaron or Tatian and his legacy, much less second-century Christianity or the early reception history of the Gospels. Barker, writing to fellow experts, assumes knowledge of all these things. The book gets straight to the point, laying out its method and scope in six short pages. By taking a structural approach and “comparing the order of the pericopes across every extant witness to the Diatessaron” (4), supplemented by redaction criticism, Barker makes a technical argument which clarifies the branches and recensions of the Diatessaron. In particular, Barker shows that Codex Fuldensis and the Stuttgart–Liège–Zurich harmonies—late iterations of the “Western” version of the text—are “twin branches descending from a Western Archetype in Old Latin,” leaving room for the possibility that the archetype also circulated in Greek (5).
Chapter 1 does the valuable work of briefly overviewing the Diatessaron witnesses, several of which have not received previous scholarly attention. The Eastern witnesses include the Arabic harmony, Ephrem’s commentary (extant in Syriac and Armenian), and Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, while the Western witnesses consist of the Latin Codex Fuldensis and its High German translation, on one hand, and the Middle Dutch and Middle High German Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies, on the other. The Arabic harmony is most significant because it testifies to Tatian’s sequence and needs a new critical edition, while Ephrem’s and Aphrahat’s contributions to establishing the text’s sequence are piecemeal. The Western witnesses are present in a plethora of manuscript witnesses, which Barker outlines in just a few pages. Useful additions to this chapter are the brief overviews of the Persian Gospel harmony and Middle Italian (Tuscan and Venetian) harmonies, the latter of which only derive from the Diatessaron (Codex Fuldensis), as does Peter Comestor’s 12th-century Historia Evangelica. Not so with Clement of Llanthony’s 12th-century Concordia quattuor evangelistarum. The most interesting contribution of this chapter is its analysis of Yale University Dura Parchment 24 (from c. 200), which Barker argues displays a “family resemblance to legitimate descendants of Tatian” (22), resembling most closely the Arabic harmony. Also helpful is the methodological distinction Barker delineates “between ‘not identical’ and ‘unrelated’” (25) by drawing upon inter alia the Tuscan and Venetian harmonies and that of Clement of Llanthony.
Chapter 2 overviews Tatian’s compositional processes, paying attention to how this would have worked ‘on the ground’ and to how Tatian would have had to approach the project (what Barker calls “Mental Processes and Material Production”). Barker posits that the Diatessaron’s wording requires that Tatian had “ongoing visual contact with four source texts,” yet allows that he may have worked alone (30). By critically re-examining scholarly assumptions about things like memorization and the capacities of media (like wax tablets), Barker frames Tatian’s project within a matrix of real-world ancient practices. He illustrates how Tatian’s project would have developed with a two-page demonstration of how Codex Fuldensis combines four Gospel accounts. He estimates the length of the Diatessaron and how long its production would have taken. At the end of this chapter, Barker tacks on a one-page argument to the effect that Tatian did not mean his project to replace the canonical Gospels, but to complement them.
Chapter 3 is the most important in the book for understanding the Diatessaron itself as an ancient text. Here Barker demonstrates Tatian’s tendency to group Gospel material thematically by tracking how he orders the Passovers mentioned in the Gospels (three in John, one in the Synoptics) and reorders all the Jewish festivals present in the Gospel of John such that John 6–12 “neatly proceeds through a calendar year” (49). (Barker sees Tatian’s chronology of Jesus’ ministry as “the most distinctive trait of the Diatessaron” [57].) Barker also shows how Ephrem, whose commentary has been taken as evidence that Tatian passed over a good deal of the festivals in his compilation, helps establish that Tatian included a reference to the Passover at the pericope of the feeding of the five thousand, though the Western witnesses omit this mention. We also find a discussion of how medieval harmonies tend to correct/restore what Barker calls the ordo difficilior, i.e. “a harmony’s [in this case, the Diatessaron] earlier innovative rearrangement of canonical material” (52). This chapter also showcases other dynamics of the Diatessaron’s structure and shows (importantly) that the Arabic harmony is “the single best witness to the Diatessaron’s narrative sequence” (57).
Chapter 4 outlines the changes typical of the Western Archetype of the Diatessaron, which include the elimination of duplicate stories, combining the Sermon on the Mount/Plain with the mission discourse, narrative/geographic relocation of scenes, thematic grouping of pericopes, and additions (e.g. of the pericope adulterae). In other words, the Western tradition of Diatessaron witnesses evince the kinds of changes that we would expect from a process of narrative transmission on the basis of redaction criticism; indeed, the alterations in the Diatessaron’s various witnesses testify to the same kinds of redactional activity that scholars have conventionally imputed to the authors of the Gospels. Nor is it a simple matter in reading through the changes made to posit a schema that explains all the alterations of a given tradition coherently. Nor does this chapter really attempt this, noting rather trends and phenomena within the reception of the Diatessaron’s sequence.
Chapter 5 turns attention to the Western witnesses as a group, which generally agree when diverging from the (better) Eastern texts. Barker shows convincingly that Codex Fuldensis consistently contains the best (read: original) reading among Western witnesses (and note that the wording between these witnesses is still often verbatim). Also significant here is a feature of manuscript materiality whereby paratexts become readings. Codex Fuldensis included Eusebian canon and section numbers in its harmony, and descendants of this manuscript supplemented these with glosses of Gospel passages, which eventually penetrated the main text. Remarkably, this led to the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies agreeing with Tatian by inserting a particular text at a particular place (in this case John 7:40–43 within the Beelzebub controversy) even though their parent tradition (the Western Archetype) did not contain that reading there. Here is a testament to the importance of accident within complicated textual histories.
Chapter 6 does the opposite of Chapter 5 by tracking the “rare, yet significant cases” (88) in which the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies preserve better versions of the Diatessaron’s Western Archetype than does Fuldensis. Just so with the Capernaum synagogue exorcism (Mark 1:23–28; Luke 4:33–37), preserved in the medieval harmonies (with some language of the Vetus Latina) but not in Fuldensis (which Victor of Capua had standardized with the Vulgate’s language, since Tatian had been pronounced heretical, thus rendering his language ‘dangerous’). The reason for this pericope’s non-preservation in Fuldensis can be chalked up to the form of these manuscripts as liturgical devices (i.e. lectionaries) with paratexts, produced between Victor and his scribe with the use of numbering from Eusebius’ canon tables, a Gospel harmony as a source text, and sometimes drawing on Victor’s memory. Barker concludes that Fuldensis and the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies are “twin branches stemming from the Western Archetype” (108); the latter archetype Barker (following Ulrich B. Schmid) likens to a “black swan,” claiming to have found “a handful of Diatessaronic black swan feathers,” by which he means a number of pointers to a non-extant text. Since black swan events are popularly associated with major effects (see the recent work of Nassim Taleb), applying the term to one branch of one ancient Gospel harmony’s recension history seems playfully absurd.
Chapter 7, the final chapter of the work, outlines Barker’s theory of the Diatessaron’s transmission and reception, based on his theory of a Western Archetype underlying Codex Fuldensis and the medieval Dutch/German harmonies. This opposes theories that place glossed Latin harmonies (based on Fuldensis) as the basis for the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies and confirms Barker’s findings that suggest an Old Latin Diatessaron as basis for the latter. Barker does not deny that theories of glossed Latin harmonies do explain some variant readings, and he allows for external influence by (e.g.) the Glossa Ordinaria in some of these harmonies’ readings. Barker’s theory allows for Fuldensis and the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies alternately to contain the earliest readings (measured against the Arabic harmony). Barker charts his stemma on page 118. Finally, a short conclusion precedes an Appendix that contains a chart paralleling the sequences of the Arabic Harmony, the Stuttgart-Liège-Zurich harmonies, and Codex Fuldensis.
Barker’s monograph is a brutally efficient scholarly tool, accomplishing the correction, reorientation, and clarification of a mass of scholarship in a few handfuls of pages. As such, it is a valuable implement for scholars of early Christianity generally; for specialists of the Gospels and Tatian, this book is a landmark. While its readership is unlikely to extend much further, Barker’s book marks a notable step forward in our understanding of Tatian’s Diatessaron, its sequence of pericopae, and its history of redaction and recension.