Testing Joosten

Jan Joosten posits that the Diatesseron existed in Syriac and owns two witnesses in the subsequent Assyrian Gospel transmission. One was an "Old Syriac", incompetently translated, and - before its well-earned retirement - haphazardly-and-independently corrected in the Sinaitic palimpsest (autograph?) and in the Curetonian transmission. The other is the Peshitta with a much better handle on the Greek, alive and well with the Assyrian Church today. All translators involved were East-Syrians. The lower stratum, which is the Syriac Diatesseron proper, further exposes West Aramaic terms in its Christian vocabulary, like slb for the Romans' cross. The stratum beneath them all is the four-Gospel canon in Greek in a "Western" form that is, prior to the Alexandrine standard and also prior to certain little tweaks we get in actual Western MSS like Bezae and Claromontanus.

For Joosten's theory to work, we must imagine the OS and the P, independently, Reverse-Engineering the Gospels. OS had good reason for its process, namely that its author's Greek was barbarous. With some Greek Bible on one side and the Diatesseron on the other, the two scribes transferred the harmonised text of Diatesseron corresponding to the lines they read in the Greek. Then they checked their work against the Greek, often sparing the harmonising variants of the Syriac for fear of resistance out in the Zagros and Armenian foothills.

Although the lowest stratum was an ancient Greek collection of Gospels, Joosten's thesis implies that - when the revisors split them all up again - their Greek collection was likely not that same base collection. The whole point of the project, remember, was to bring Eastern Christian lections into harmony with the Greek West. I don't read where the Eunomian emperors (and one pagan) had ever asked, say, Ephrem to throw out his Diatesseron; anyway his commentary spread eastward, into Nisibin and beyond. Certainly as of AG 650 the Sasanians had their eyes upon Nisibin and, under shah Shapur II, they launched a brutal persecution at home.

For backstory of the Syriac four-gospel canon I'd suspect the adoption of Nicaea, in its full Dyothelete form at that. Maybe the school of Nisibin, adopting Theodosius' reforms AD 380s so, let's have a nice even AG 700. Yazdegerd's synod at Mahoze spring 410/721 would have nailed down the Peshitta as the official text. After that, most of the Old Syriac witnesses got shifted to monasteries for their parchment only.

By AG 700 Antiochene Fathers like Chrysostom and soon the young Mar Nestorius (pbuh) weren't using "Western" texts anymore. Peshitta should be following Chrysostom and trending "Byzantine". Maybe the Old Syriac had some Alexandrine if they were Rejecting Modernity.

If Joosten is right, any text shared between Old Syriac and Peshitta will be Diatesseronic and "Western". We might not be fortunate to call upon Ephrem for witness, but we should find such text translated to Arabic. Deviations between the four-Gospel codices (where not individual scribal errors) will represent corrections, after the fact. I predict the corrections will follow the Antiochene text-type, "protoByzantine".

Moreover: Joosten believes that Tatian himself did the Diatesseron in Syriac. It is, then, Tatian who inserted the West-Aramaic features like the slb-cross. More: since Tatian's Greek was supposedly excellent, where errors appear in the Old Syriac, such errors are the fault of him who edited that slate of Gospels. Those bugs will creep wherein the Diatesseron did not cover, abandoning that translator to his own (poor) understanding.

I also expect Tatian's personal biases in the base text. Tatian was a famous Encratite. He was also a feminist, refusing 1 Timothy as Marcion had done. In Tatian's time feminism overlapped with antiJudaism. Hence those famous anti-Jew readings in pro-woman Bezae (and not in, say, Claromontanus). We will be seeing Marcionites retaining a Diatesseron in those northern hills. I don't expect Bezae-like variants to survive in our extant four-Gospel codices; for a start, 1 Timothy is in Peshitta (now). I expect, rather, our Gospel codices to restore the proper Greek into Syriac differently, from independent translation. I especially expect variants in Syriac Luke, of interest to Marcionites.

To the extent Joosten has made his case that the Syriac Diatesseron stands behind all the Syriac Gospels, prior to the Councils of Ephesus and attendant Miaphysite schism, prior to the Alexandrine standard - this just means it's old. It doesn't make it Tatianic.

FOLLOWUP 4/23: Assuming we do this: my take on Old Syriac Luke 23 and 24.