Tjitze Baarda. Essays on the Diatessaron. Contributions to Biblical
Exegesis & Theology, no. 11. Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1994. ISBN: 90-390-0113-8.
Pp. 314. HFl. 79.90; US $46.50.
1. For more than three decades, Prof. Baarda has immersed himself in what
Arthur Vööbus called "one of the most difficult topics in all the field of
New Testament textual criticism"--namely, Tatian's Diatessaron. A Dutchman
by birth, Baarda took a doctorate in Semitic languages at the Free
University of Amsterdam, where he studied under R. Schippers. After some
years teaching there, he moved to Utrecht where he became the successor of
W.C. van Unnik. More recently he returned to the Free University, where he
is Dean of Theology and Professor of New Testament. Now nearing retirement,
he has published more than thirty articles on the Diatessaron. A selection
of these was collected and published on the occasion of his twenty-fifth
anniversary of teaching at the Free University. It appeared in 1983 and was
titled Early Transmission of the Words of Jesus: Thomas, Tatian and the
Text of the New Testament. The volume under review collects fifteen
additional articles, fourteen of which were published between 1986 and
1993. A lecture delivered at the 1992 Codex Bezae conference held in
Montpellier, France, appears here in print for the first time. One of the
fourteen previously published pieces was formerly available only in the
original Dutch; it now is offered in English. Before considering the
details of three of the articles and remarking on some of the noteworthy
aspects of Baarda's work, it will be helpful simply to list the titles of
the fifteen articles:
1. "The Diatessaron of Tatian and Its Influence on the Vernacular
Versions: The Case of John 19:30"
2. "Diafwni/a-Sumfwni/a: Factors in the Harmonization of the
Gospels, Especially in the Diatessaron of Tatian"
3. "A)noi/cas-a)naptu/cas: The Text of Luke 4:17 in the
Diatessaron"
4. "The Flying Jesus: Luke 4:29-30 in the Syriac Diatessaron"
5. "Jesus and Mary (John 20:16f.) in the Second Epistle on Virginity
Ascribed to Clement"
6. "To the Roots of the Syriac Diatessaron Tradition (TA 25:1-3)"
7. "The Sabbath in the Parable of the Shepherd (Evang. Verit. 32:18-34)"
8. "'If You Do Not Sabbatize the Sabbath ...': The Sabbath as God or
World in Gnostic Understanding (Ev. Thom., Log. 27)"
9. "'A Staff Only, Not a Stick': Disharmony of the Gospels and the
Harmony of Tatian (Mt 10:9f parr.)"
10. "'He Holds the Fan in His Hand ...' (Mt 3:12, Lk 3:17) and Philoxenus:
Or, How to Reconstruct the Original Diatessaron Text of the Saying of
John the Baptist?"
11. "Philoxenus and the Parable of the Fisherman: Concerning the
Diatessaron Text of Matthew 13:47-50"
12. "'Chose' or 'Collected': Concerning an Aramaism in Logion 8 of the
Gospel of Thomas and the Question of Independence"
13. "The Parable of the Fisherman in the Heliand: The Old Saxon Version of
Matthew 13:47-50"
14. "Clement of Alexandria and the Parable of the Fisherman: Matthew
13:47f. or Independent Tradition?"
15. "John 1:5 in the Oration and Diatessaron of Tatian: Concerning the
Reading of katalamba/nei"
Clearly these are not articles written for the beginner; indeed, they
presuppose a command of half a dozen languages--including Coptic, Arabic,
Syriac, Armenian, Persian, Aramaic, and Old Saxon--in addition to the usual
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as the modern scholarly languages. There
is no disputing it: a Continental education is not without its advantages.
2. Baarda is a particularist; that is, he searches out individual details,
researches them exhaustively, marshals all of the relevant secondary
literature, and then sketches the possibilities. And he is one scholar who,
after having exhausted himself (and sometimes the reader) with notoriously
thorough and even-handed analyses, is not afraid to say that, at the end of
the day, he does not have an answer. There are no great overarching
theories at work here: Baarda is far too well read, knows too many
exceptions, to pawn off simple--though perhaps satisfying--answers. Rather,
what one observes at work in these articles is the mind of one of the
world's greatest textual scholars and philologists at work. No one can read
these studies and not be humbled, enlightened, and awed. Indeed, any
textual critic who thinks he or she "knows" what is going on should read
these studies, for the sources at Baarda's command, both primary and
secondary, make our best work pale in comparison. For some examples, let me
summarize three of the articles.
3. One of the most accessible (and entertaining) of the articles is "The
Flying Jesus." Baarda, whose dissertation was a two-volume study of the
text of the Gospel of John in Aphrahat, noticed that Aphrahat (Dem. II.17;
Aphrahat died about 350), when discussing the confrontation at Nazareth
(Luke 4:16-30), states that "He showed the power of his majesty when He was
cast down from the height into the depth and was not hurt" (p. 59, italics
mine). According to the canonical account, however, despite the fact that
the crowd has taken him to a precipice, intending to "cast him down," Jesus
is not thrown from the hill, but mysteriously escapes by "passing through
the midst" of the crowd (Luke 4:29-30).
4. The causal reader is inclined to dismiss Aphrahat's account as his own
overly dramatic invention. But Baarda knows both the ancient and modern
sources too well to fall into this trap. In 1881 Theodor Zahn had already
noted the reading, when he set about reconstructing the text of the
Diatessaron. Basing himself on the Armenian version of Ephrem's Commentary
on the Diatessaron, Zahn determined that a similar reading probably stood
in Tatian's second century harmony. Baarda then turns to Ephrem's
Commentary and presents evidence from both the Armenian version and the
Syriac text (discovered only in 1957 and published in 1963). In no fewer
than nine instances in the Commentary Ephrem either directly states or
obliges one to infer that Jesus was, indeed, cast from the precipice by the
mob and "flew," unhurt, down to Capernaum. Turning then to Ephrem's Syriac
hymns and metrical sermons, Baarda unearths another seven instances of the
same. One theme in much of Baarda's work is his preference for
reconstructing each family of the Diatessaron (Eastern and Western)
separately. He does so here, offering a reconstruction of the Syriac
Diatessaron's text as:
they stood up and they led Him out [from] the town and brought Him by
the side of the hill, [on which their town was built,] in order to
cast Him down. [When?] they cast Him down from the height into the
depth [and?] He did not fall and was not hurt/harmed.... through their
midst He passed [and?] He flew [in the air?] and He descended [from
above] to Kapharnaum [pp. 79-80, italics omitted].
Suddenly, the odd and abrupt kathlqen of Luke 4:31 takes on a
whole new meaning.
5. But this is not all, for there is also a Western Diatessaronic
tradition. Here Baarda continues to unearth new evidence for the reading:
among other sources, it occurs in the "Rijmbijbel" of Jakob van Maerlant
(in Middle Dutch, composed in 1271), which is dependent upon Peter
Comestor's "Historia Scholastica," which also has the reading and is a
Diatesaronic witness. Most remarkably, Augustine preserves part of the
tradition in his Contra Faustum 26.2: He quotes the Manichaean Faustus in
order to refute him and in so doing reproduces the "throwing" of Jesus from
the hill. Augustine does not comment on the varia lectio. Baarda notes,
The agreement between Faustus and the Syriac texts suggests that the
Manichaean was acquainted with the Diatessaron or at least with
traditions that took their origin in this harmony. Remarkably enough,
Augustin [sic] in his refutation does not mention the fact that
Faustus used an argument for which [there] was no support in the
canonical gospels. We cannot, therefore, exclude the possibility that
Augustin knew this very tradition from his Manichaean past [p. 78].
(Your reviewer notes that other parallels between Augustine and the
Diatessaron are known; they were first detected by Louis Leloir, and others
have been adduced by Gilles Quispel [most recently in VC 47 (1993),
374-378], and now by Baarda.)
6. The Diatessaron was composed c. 172, on the basis of the form in which
the gospels then circulated. It evidences unique parallels with the text
found in Justin Martyr's gospel citations and with variant readings in
other of the very earliest gospel citations. Indeed, if Baarda has
successfully reconstructed the Diatessaron's text in this passage (and any
unbiased reader who examines his evidence will assent), then he has
stipulated the oldest recoverable version of this passage. No other
documents prior to 172 preserve it.
7. Briefly, to the other two articles. First, in
"Diafwni/a-Sumfwni/a: Factors in the Harmonization of the
Gospels, Especially in the Diatessaron of Tatian," Baarda brings his
knowledge of antiquity and ancient Christianity to bear on the question of
the stimuli which led to harmonization, especially in the second century.
He notes three factors, two of which are general, and one of which is
specific to Tatian. The first of the general factors was the criticism of
Christianity by pagan critics, such as Celsus (fl. 180), who mocked the new
religion by pointing out the inconsistencies among the gospels. One
possible response was to claim only one gospel was authoritative, as
Marcion had done. Another response, adopted by Tatian and others, was to
reconcile the divergent accounts by conflating them into a single account.
8. The second general stimulus was the "scholarly historical method" of the
period (N.B.: quotation marks in the rest of this paragraph are for
conceptual clarity and are those of the reviewer; they do not mark extracts
from Baarda's text), which proceeded much as we do today: when confronted
with inconsistent or contradictory information, that which is judged most
reliable is adopted as the "framework," and the other details, where
plausible, are "fitted in" around this "Leithistorie." The creators of
harmonies saw themselves as doing just what secular historians did: the
early gospels were "dispatches from the field" which might well be garbled
or confused. The harmonist's task, like that of a general, was to collate
the reports, skillfully eliminating the erroneous, restoring the correct
sense of garbled reports, and recognizing (and giving greatest weight to)
the most reliable reports. Baarda cites examples of secular historians in
antiquity who pursued the same goals with identical methods (e.g.,
Josephus).
9. The third motive, unique to Tatian, was his philosophical understanding
of "truth" as unitary. He proclaimed himself to be "the herald of truth"
and mocked the Greeks (in his Oratio ad graecos) for their contradictory
teachings and schools; this he contrasted with the "unity" of Christian
"truth"--of course, this unity was a fiction, for late second-century
Christianity was already a fractured, squabbling mess of Marcionites,
gnostics of all stripes (Valentinians, etc.), Jacobite Christians (= Judaic
Christians), Pauline Christians, Montanists, etc.; nevertheless, it was a
good rhetorical ploy on Tatian's part. Baarda therefore concludes that
Tatian was driven by a combination of these motives (he gives greatest
weight to the last) to create the greatest gospel harmony of all time, the
Diatessaron.
10. The last article we will consider is "'A Staff Only, Not a Stick':
Disharmony of the Gospels and the Harmony of Tatian (Mt 10:9f parr.)." This
article analyzes Tatian's technique of harmonization and highlights one of
the most striking contradictions uttered by Jesus. In Matthew 10:10 and
Luke 9:3, Jesus instructs his disciples not to take a rabdos as
they sally forth to preach. But in Mark 6:8, he instructs exactly the
opposite: they are to take a rabdos--indeed, nothing but a
rabdos. Commentators have puzzled over these parallel passages
and made all sorts of suggestions to resolve the direct contradiction
which, to the best knowledge of your reviewer, is not resolved in any Greek
manuscript. Tatian's solution (first noted by Theodor Zahn in 1881) was to
use two synonyms in Syriac. According to the Syriac Diatessaron (as found
in Ephrem's "Commentary," the Arabic Harmony, Syrus Sinaiticus, and the
Adysh MS [Georgian]), Jesus told his disciples to take a xw+r)
("staff"), but not a $b+) ("stick"). What is striking is that
this solution could have been introduced into the contradictory Greek text
as well (rabdos::bakthria), but no Greek manuscript
does so. Baarda supplements the meager evidence of Zahn (who should not be
criticized: most of the Diatessaronic witnesses were unknown a century ago)
and uses the example to explore Tatian's sophisticated techniques of
harmonization.
11. As the present review has made clear, this volume is not bedtime
reading, for it places great demands upon the reader. It should surprise no
one that many decades ago, upon his induction, Baarda was one of the
youngest men ever to take a seat in the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
Similarly, it should surprise no one that his work stands as a model of
classical Dutch scholarship: philologically oriented (as it has been since
the time of Heinsius, Scaliger, Cassander, and Grotius), encyclopedic in
its learning, attentive to minute details (recall that "god is in the
details"), modest in its conclusions, and limpid in its logic. This is
scholarship at the very highest level, and anyone who comes in contact with
it will learn from it. Advanced scholars should use it as a model, while
the aspirant can strive toward the lofty mark set by the man Sebastian
Brock once called "the light from the East" (Holland is, after all, east of
Oxford).
© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 1996.
William L. Petersen
Department of Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University