It was among a large number of Syriac manuscripts acquired by the British Museum in 1842 from a monastery in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt. The first is a manuscript dating from the fifth century. Yes, indeed! In fact, two such precious Syriac manuscripts were found. Visible in the margin is the underwriting of the Gospels The palimpsest called the Sinaitic Syriac. In addition, since Tatian, when compiling the Diatessaron, did not make use of any of the so-called apocryphal gospels in the way he did the four accepted Gospels, it is evident that the apocryphal gospels were not viewed as reliable or canonical. They must therefore have been written earlier.
However, ancient manuscripts of the Diatessaron that have come to light since then have proved that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were already in wide circulation by the middle of the second century.
and 170 C.E., and thus could not be authentic accounts of Jesus’ life. Why? In the 19th century, some scholars argued that the Gospels were written as late as the second century, between 130 C.E.
The Diatessaron is of great interest to us today. ” Later, Ephraem the Syrian (c. 310-373 C.E.) produced a commentary on the Diatessaron, thus confirming that it was in general use among Syrian Christians. Thus, it appears that Syriac, not Latin, was the first vernacular into which parts of the Christian Greek Scriptures were translated.īy about 170 C.E., the Syrian writer Tatian (c. 120-173 C.E.) combined the four canonical Gospels and produced, in Greek or Syriac, the work commonly called the Diatessaron, a Greek word meaning “through four. As the number of Syriac-speaking Christians increased in the second century, there arose a need for the good news to be translated into their tongue.
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