Tatian’s Diatessaron: The Arabic Version, the Dura Europos Fragment, and the Women Witnesses

Abstract

Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 180 CE) does not survive in its original form but only in later versions. Its content and wording, even its original language, can then be debated. However, there is a small, third-century fragment written in Greek (P. Dura 10), discovered in Dura Europos, identified as coming from the Diatessaron. Some have disputed this identification. The difficulty is that reconstructing the Diatessaron on the basis of later versions has proven problematic, so there is no agreed-upon text with which the fragment can be compared. This study presents current understandings of the Diatessaron and reviews the situation in regard to the Arabic version: a translation of the Diatessaron done in the 11th century from a Syriac text. It is argued that the Arabic Diatessaron manuscripts offer readings that are close to the Dura parchment, and this can be shown particularly in regard to the women’s presence as witnesses to the crucifixion, though there is a slightly different ordering of component parts. It is observed that the Dura fragment itself is not a perfect copy of any master text, but contains significant errors of reading, and thus it may be a writing exercise. As such it cannot be considered a definitive version of the Diatessaron, made by an expert scribe. It does, nevertheless, attempt to copy the Diatessaron, given that its content significantly overlaps with the Arabic version. This analysis uses more manuscripts than ever before assembled of the Arabic Diatessaron, so as to provide a reliable reading of the section that overlaps with the Dura fragment, and calls for a new edition, given that it provides a reasonably accurate representation of the content of Tatian’s work.

Tatian and the Arabic Diatessaron: Mark’s Ending as a Case Study

“…The nature of its text should be considered closest to Tatian’s text, in comparison to the rest of the Diatessaron witnesses. Consequently, it has also affirmed the findings of Monier and Taylor who compared the Arabic text with the Greek fragment (Dura Europos) and showed that the Arabic Diatessaron is closest to the Greek text, considering all witnesses of the Arabic text (Monier and Taylor 2021: 230).…”

“…As the number of discovered witnesses increased, studies such as Tijze Baarda’s confronted this ‘unwarranted neglect and disregard’ (Baarda 1986: 25) and managed to shift this view in recent literature (Crawford and Zola 2019: 6). In 2021, Mina Monier and Joan Taylor showed how the Arabic text, as constructed from the entire corpus of surviving witnesses, gives the closest possible reading to the only surviving Greek fragment of the Diatessaron (Dura Parchment 24), which is a third-century fragment with 14 lines and is given Gregory-Aland number 0212 (Monier and Taylor 2021). In light of this progress, we should expect to gain helpful insights from the presentation of Mark 16 in the Arabic Diatessaron.…”