Tatian stitched four gospels into one story, and churches read it for centuries
In the 2nd century an Assyrian convert named Tatian blended Matthew, Mark, Luke and John into a single continuous life of Jesus. For the 3rd and 4th centuries his Diatessaron was virtually the sole version of the gospels Assyrian Christians read, until bishops ordered it replaced and one removed more than two hundred copies.
Tatian was born in what he called the land of the Assyrians, around 112 AD. He travelled to Rome, where disgust with pagan cults and a reading of the Old Testament turned him to Christianity. He studied under Justin Martyr and, like his teacher, opened a Christian school in the city. After Justin's death in AD 165 his story grows murky. Irenaeus says he was expelled from the church for extreme asceticism and for following the Gnostic teacher Valentinius, and a lost work of his reportedly called marriage an invention of the devil.
He moved east and is said to have founded a school in Mesopotamia whose influence spread into Syria and Asia Minor. His harmonised gospel, which Ephrem the Syrian called the Gospel of the Mixed, took root there. In the mid 5th century Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa, insisted that every church keep the four separate Gospels, and Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus, gathered up the old harmonies from his diocese.
The book refused to disappear. Ephrem's commentary on it survives in Armenian and Syriac, and versions exist in Arabic, Persian and Old Georgian. In the West, the Latin Codex Fuldensis of 545 AD follows the Vulgate wording but keeps Tatian's order of passages. Later offshoots surfaced in Old High German, Dutch, a Venetian manuscript, and a Middle English copy from 1400 once owned by the diarist Samuel Pepys.
His Address to the Greeks is a fierce polemic. Tatian argued that the Greeks had borrowed nearly every art from other peoples, from astronomy and geometry to the alphabet and metalworking, and told them to stop calling imitations inventions. He cast the pagan gods as demons led by Zeus, yet presented himself as a careful historian who had travelled widely and inspected the evidence in person.
Source: Tatian
