Introduction

[Extract] On May 17, 1934, following Kirsopp Lake’s announcement that a Greek fragment of Tatian’s Diatessaron had been unearthed in the excavations underway at the Roman frontier town of Dura-Europos (see Plates 1 and 2), F. C. Burkitt, Norrisian Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and “indisputably the greatest New Testament textual critic of [his] time,”[1] wrote a letter to The Times expressing great enthusiasm about the discovery. He concluded on a note of hopeful expectation: “the discovery is of the greatest interest and may throw some light on the genesis of the Diatessaron itself. The main question about the Diatessaron is whether we should regard it as the last attempt to make a new Gospel, or as the first attempt to translate the Canonical Four.”[2] The current volume takes up and expands upon this very question—hence our intentionally probing title, “The Gospel of Tatian.”