Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Is that a portion of a famous lost gospel by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth?
[00:00:09] Here is an intriguing and mysterious fragment of an ancient gospel. That is to say, the manuscript of this book was entirely lost, except for this little bit that just happened to turn up. I'll bet my bottom dollar, but none of my other dollars, that you will think it is a fragment of one of the gospels of the New Testament. Wrong. It is a clever combination of various gospel accounts into one narrative, a gospel harmony scholars have long debated. Is it a portion of the most famous ancient gospel harmony of them all? The massive work known as the diatessaron? I'll explain below, which we are desperate to get our hands on but probably never will. It has been lost. No manuscripts survive. Here's the tiny fragment of the something we have with a discussion to follow. Both the translation, its mine, and the introduction, slightly edited, are taken from my book, done with slatgoplasia. The other Gospels Oxford University Press, 2014.
[00:01:09] There you can find translations and discussions of about 40 other of our earliest non canonical gospels.
[00:01:16] There is an ellipsis at the beginning and end that indicate that everything before and after the surviving words has been lost of Zebedee and Salome, and the wives of those who had accompanied him from Galilee to see the one who was crucified. But it was the day of preparation. The Sabbath was dawning. When evening came, on the day of preparation, which is the day before the Sabbath, a man came who was a council member from Arimathea, a city of Judea. His name was Joseph. He was a good and righteous man and a disciple of Jesus, but in secret, because he feared the Jews. He was waiting for the kingdom of God. This one had not agreed with the council. Dot, dot, dot a gospel harmony, the diatessaron it was difficult for us to know whether or not to include the one possible surviving fragment of Tatians, enormously important diatessaron in an edition of the apocryphal gospels. On the one hand, the diatessaron did not principally contain apocryphal tales about Jesus, but was a harmony of the four eventually canonical gospels, which wove their various accounts into one long continuous narrative. On the other hand, the diatessaron was a gospel text that did not finally make it into the canon, even in the syrian church, where it was probably written and certainly promulgated. And in that sense it is apocryphal. Moreover, some scholars have argued that Tatian used one or more non canonical gospels in composing his work. Tatian was a christian philosopher theologian from eastern Syria who went to Rome in the mid second century and studied under the great christian apologist Justin. After Justin's martyrdom in 165 CE, Tatian returned to his homeland. Justin himself may have used some kind of harmony of the synoptic gospels. Many of his gospel quotations appear to embody conflated forms of the text, but there is no certainty that he used the fourth gospel. Tatian, on the other hand, created a new gospel harmony with all four of the gospels that were to become canonical, hence the name of his great work, the diatessaron, meaning through the four.
[00:03:34] It continues to be debated among scholars whether Tatian produced his gospel harmony in greek or syriac. It was in any event the gospel used in Syria for at least two centuries, and it became popular in other places in Christendom, where it was either translated or used as the basis of gospel harmonies in local languages down through the Middle Ages. Eventually, the diatessaron was replaced in Syria with an edition of the separate gospels in the Peshitta translation, and remarkably, copies of the diatessaron were not reproduced or preserved, so that today its reconstruction is one of the most difficult tasks confronting textual scholars, who have to rely on such sources as the commentary written on the diatessaron by the syriac church, Father Ephrem, and the many vernacular harmonies that were more or less closely tied to it in such languages as Arabic, Persian, Latin, Middle German, Middle Dutch, Middle Italian, and Middle English.
[00:04:30] In some small measure that changed when the ancient city Durra on the Euphrates was uncovered in one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th century. Durra had been destroyed by war in 256 to 57 CE.
[00:04:44] It was then deserted and lost until accidentally unearthed by british soldiers after the First World War. Among the significant finds in Durra was the remains of a house that had been converted for use as a church building around 231 CE.
[00:05:00] This is the first hard evidence of a physical structure used as a church from the ancient world, some 200 years after the days of Jesus himself.
[00:05:10] Also found in the excavations in Dura were a number of manuscripts, including a small scrap of parchment, nine by 11 cm, written on one side, that contains a greek gospel account drawn from the passion narrative. The fragmentary copy relates the passages in which women were said to have watched the crucifixion from afar and in which Joseph of Arimathea requests the body of Jesus. This account has extensive verbal similarities with each of the gospels of the New Testament, but is identical to none of them. This circumstance led the first editor of the text Carl Kraling to suggest that it was in fact a portion of a greek version of the diatessaron.
[00:05:51] That judgment is not altogether certain, given the fact that there were other Gospel harmonies produced in the early centuries of the church as well. See the Gospel of the Ebionites for another example. But this fragmentary text certainly presents at least one such account, whether from the hand of Tatian or not.
[00:06:09] We have taken the text of the fragment from the edition of Dieter Lourmann. The blog online concludes with a bibliography listing six sources for further reading.
