163 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Harmony of the Gospels

it appears that he knew nothing of a Greek harmony.

In the sixteenth century O. Nachtigall found some

Greek fragments which he thought belonged to

the harmony of Ammonius (Evangelicae historice

ex 1111 Evangelistis continuata narratio, ex Am

monii Alexandrini fragmentis, Basel, 1550); but

these may have depended upon the Syriac and

may have been by a Greek writer, just as the

Instituta regularia of Junilius in Constantinople

depended upon the lec;,ures of the Syrian

Paul of Nisibis. The Arabic Diatessaron is not

a simple translation from the Syr

4. Recon- iac, but depends in part upon the

struction Gospel text of the Peshito. The

of the translator, or perhaps better the editor,

Diatessaron has permitted himself to make impor

Through the tant alterations; and in view of the

Versions. fact that it was often difficult to find in

the original the passages from which

the elements of the Diatessaron were taken, the

consequence is that, instead of the artistic Diates

saron, there is a rough Arabic work. Little use

could be made of the Arabic translation were there

not a Latin translation also, which latter is as closely

related to the Syriac as is the Arabic, and which

exists in the Codex Fuldensis, made under the direc

tion of Victor of Capua, c. 546 A.D. About the

lineage of this " One Gospel from Four " nothing

was known by Victor; it fell into his hands by

chance. But Victor clearly did not think that it

originated in the Latin Church; he knew only that

Eusebius had mentioned two works of the kind in

the Greek, and he thought he had a translation of

one or the other of these. That it was not an exact

and independent translation of a work in a foreign

tongue was evident from its agreement with the

text of the Vulgate. If it was based on a foreign

harmony, it had been worked over to accord with

the text of Jerome. As a result, this corresponded

exactly with the work done in the Arabic translation

of the Syriac, and the individual features of the

Diatessaron were lost. It has been shown that

while, as a whole, the Latin depends upon Tatian's

Diatessaron, the original form of the Latin has not

come down unchanged. It can not have depended

upon a Greek harmony, since in the Greek Church

up to the time of Victor neither Tatian's nor any

other harmony was known. The presence of the

original of the Latin translation is accounted for

by the many Syrian Christians in the West in the

fifth century. Victor's manuscript came to Fulda,

probably into the hands of Boniface, and became

the exemplar of all codices which contain this text.

From it was made the, German Tatian belonging to

820-830 A.D., now found in Codex 56 of St. Gall.

In the Middle Ages the Latin Tatian was much used,

and there are extant commentaries on it by Zacha

rias of Chrysopolis and Peter Cantor. Other har

monies were circulated in the latter half of the

Middle Ages, the relation of which to the Victor

manuscript needs investigation. One in particular

(Codex Monac. Lat. 10,025, of the thirteenth cen

tury) has interesting relationship both to the Syriac

and the Arabic, and it also seems to be independent

of the text of Victor. The original of the Victor text

has not been found; but that it had considerable

circulation is proved by the existence of texts independent of the Victor type in Dutch. It is from manuscripts of this type that the text published by O. Nachtigall (ut. sup.) was derived.

The Monotessaron of John Gerson (Opera, iv. 83-202, Antwerp, 1706) must be discriminated from this type as altogether modern. Since Augustine's unfinished De consensu evangeliorum this was the first attempt of the kind. The text is divided into 150 (151) rubrics, and in that in which the Sermon on the Mount fell the author engages in a critical discussion, and remarks on the concordantia dissonantia of the Gospels, considering them aids to faith. From harmonizing in the strictest sense Gerson is free. A work of independence, pains, and learning, and having important results upon further efforts, was that of Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, Harmonise evangelicce libri quattuor, . . . Basel, 1537. In the dedication Osiander

5. Modern bius, Augustine, and Gerson, and, be Works of sides these, two Evangelia dia tessaron the Kind. in manuscript in the monastery at Heilbronn, and the work of Zacharias of Chrysopolis, which last is a commentary on the Latin Tatian. While in this place Osiander appears to have passed by Ammonius, he mentions him in the preface alongside the others. What he regretted in all these works was a lack of reverence for the text of the Gospels in that this was changed in order and in letter, even arbitrarily. It was his desire to express in his work the full purport of the original text and to have shine through it all the original inspiration. If Christ himself (Matt. v. 18) had said that not one jot of the law of Moses was to fall, much more was every word and letter of the Gospels to be taken into account. From no consequence of this principle did Osiander shrink. He regarded as accounts of different events the cleansing of the Temple as given in the Synoptics and in John, and even distinguished between two events as narrated in Matt. xxi. 12; Luke xix. 45; and Mark xi. 15. And so throughout, slight differences in statement seemed to justify him in regarding the narratives as dealing with different events. Similarly his rule that each of the Gospel texts must stand in its own order involved him in difficulties solved in the same manner. And in this way he thought he had accom plished new results in a real Harmonia evangelica. This name was kept by those who, with as great regard for Scripture, were not carried to an excess of unnaturalness. This was the case with Calvin, in whose commentary on the separate Gospels and in his Commentarii in harmonium ex Matthaeo, Marco et Luca (1555) the material is divided into 222 sec tions. In this the genealogies of Matthew and Luke are referred to Joseph, the Sermon on the Mount of Matthew and Luke are worked together, and a similar plan rules throughout. In the work an unfavorable opinion is pronounced upon the work of Osiander. With a milder expression of opinion of Osiander's work was the Harmonia quatuor evangelistarum, by M. Chemnitz, published after his death by P. Leyser and continued by J. Gerhard (Frankfort, 1593-1611, improved and issued Frank fort and Hamburg, 1652). The Greek text is accom-