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Updated: May 7, 2025
On the other hand, I have been very attentive to collect the shreds preserved by the Fathers of the Church, of the ancient Gospels which formerly existed parallel with the canonical Gospels, and which are now lost such as the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Gospels styled those of Justin, Marcion, and Tatian.
But he indulged a spirit of revenge equally repugnant to prudence and to justice, when he degraded their native country of Lycia from the rank of Roman provinces; stigmatized a guiltless people with a mark of ignominy; and declared, that the countrymen of Tatian and Proculus should forever remain incapable of holding any employment of honor or advantage under the Imperial government.
And, firstly, no one doubts that, toward the year 150, the fourth Gospel did exist, and was attributed to John. Explicit texts from St. Justin, from Athenagorus, from Tatian, from Theophilus of Antioch, from Irenæus, show that thenceforth this Gospel mixed in every controversy, and served as corner-stone for the development of the faith.
Christian apologists of the second century, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, and very specially Justin Martyr, implicitly relied upon them as indisputable. Even the oracles of the pagan Sibyl were regarded by Christian writers with an awe and reverence little short of that which they inspired in the minds of the heathen themselves.
This time it is a Greek book which we open; it has the works of the Christian apologists Athenagoras and Tatian, and a spurious epistle of Justin Martyr, copied in 1534 by Valeriano of Forlí. A single MS. now at Paris, written in 914, is the ancestor of all our copies of these texts; but it has been shown that this Eton book is not an immediate copy of that, but of one now at Bologna.
The fifth work, alluded to by Victor of Capua, may possibly have been the Gospel according to the Hebrews. 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. 'As brethren pressed me to write letters I wrote them.
"Those, however, who called the Gospel used by Tatian the Gospel according to the Hebrews, must have read the work, and all that we know confirms their conclusion. The work was, in point of fact, found in wide circulation precisely in the places in which, earlier, the Gospel according to the Hebrews was more particularly current.
Justin the Martyr, and Tatian, make distinctions between soldiers and Christians; and the latter says, that the Christians declined even military commands. Clemens of Alexandria, gives the Christians, who were cotemporary with him, the appellation of "peaceable, or of the followers of peace," thus distinguishing them from the soldiers of his age.
Now S. Clement was a disciple of Pantænus, and he speaks of him and of two others, said to be probably Tatian and Theodotus, as "preserving the tradition of the blessed doctrine derived directly from the holy Apostles, Peter, James, John, and Paul," his link with the Apostles themselves consisting thus of only one intermediary.
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. But that Harmony, as we have also seen, included at least our three Synoptics.
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