Victor of Capua in the sixth century speaks of Tatian’s work as a ‘Diapente’ rather than a ‘Diatessaron’ [Endnote 240:3].  If we are to believe the Syrian writer Bar-Salibi in the twelfth century, Ephrem Syrus commented on Tatian’s Diatessaron, and it began with the opening words of St. John.  This statement however is referred by Gregory Bar-Hebraeus not to the Harmony of Tatian, but to one by Ammonius made in the third century [Endnote 241:1].

Here there is clearly a good deal of confusion.

But now we come to the question, was Tatian’s work really a Harmony of our four Gospels?  The strongest presumption that it was is derived from Irenaeus.  Irenaeus, it is well known, speaks of the four Gospels with absolute decision, as if it were a law of nature that their number must be four, neither more nor less [Endnote 241:2], and his four Gospels were certainly the same as our own.  But Tatian wrote within a comparatively short interval of Irenaeus.  It is sufficiently clear that Irenaeus held his opinion at the very time that Tatian wrote, though it was not published until later.  Here then we have a coincidence which makes it difficult to think that Tatian’s four Gospels were different from ours.

The theory that finds favour with Credner [Endnote 241:3] and his followers, including the author of ‘Supernatural Religion,’ is that Tatian’s Gospel was the same as that used by Justin.  I am myself not inclined to think this theory improbable; it would have been still less so, if Tatian had been the master and Justin the pupil [Endnote 241:4].  We have seen that the phenomena of Justin’s evangelical quotations are as well met by the hypothesis that he made use of a Harmony as by any other.  But that Harmony, as we have also seen, included at least our three Synoptics.  The evidence (which we shall consider presently) for the use of the fourth Gospel by Tatian is so strong as to make it improbable that that work was not included in the Diatessaron.  The fifth work, alluded to by Victor of Capua, may possibly have been the Gospel according to the Hebrews.

2.

Just as the interest of Tatian turns upon the interpretation to be put upon a single term ‘Diatessaron,’ so the interest of Dionysius of Corinth depends upon what we are to understand by his phrase ‘the Scriptures of the Lord.’

In a fragment, preserved by Eusebius, of an epistle addressed to Soter Bishop of Rome (168-176 A.D.) and the Roman Church, Dionysius complains that his letters had been tampered with.  ’As brethren pressed me to write letters I wrote them.  And these the apostles of the devil have filled with tares, taking away some things and adding others, for whom the woe is prepared.  It is not wonderful, then, if some have ventured to tamper with the Scriptures of the Lord when they have laid their plots against writings that have no such claims as they’ [Endnote 242:1].  It must needs be a straining of language to make the