Tatian.

        Soon after the middle of the second century a rhetorician from the East, Syria or Assyria, journeyed westward to Athens and Rome in the pursuit of his studies. His name was Tatian. He says he came from Assyria, but Clement of Alexandria calls him a Syrian (Miscellanies iii. 81). He claims to have traveled widely about Greece, although his apparent familiarity with Greek works of art may be owing to his use of some Greek book describing them. In Rome he met Justin and became a Christian, although he was not among the group arrested at the time when Justin was martyred (A.D. 163-167). Later he returned to Syria, and it was probably there, about A.D. 167, or perhaps a decade later, that he wrote his Address to the Greeks. It is usually classed as an apology, but it is just as much a bitter attack upon Greek pretensions to leadership in arts and letters. Tatian declares that all the great inventions really came from the barbarians, with whom he identifies Jews and Christians. He points out the disagreement among philosophers and ridicules Graeco-Roman plays and athletics. He declares, and tries to prove, that Moses is more ancient than Homer and dwells upon the immoralities celebrated in Greek sculpture. With all this polemic he interweaves a sketch of Christian views, especially about demons and morals and declares himself a champion of this barbarian philosophy.

        Tatian is a sprightly, if somewhat intemperate, writer, and he certainly does not share Justin's favorable attitude toward many aspects of Greek thought. But it must be remembered that he wrote under great provocation, for his teacher had been executed under a philosopher-emperor, and another persecution was begin logyning. In addition, he combines his acceptance of Christianity with a kind of cultural primitivism not uncommon among rhetoricians even in Greece. He writes with the utmost rhetorical vigor and shows a keen satirical delight in exposing what he regards as the foibles and faults of Greek philosophy, art, and religion.

        After the death of Justin, Tatian broke with the church and returned to the East, where he became the leader, if not the founder, of the Encratite sect, discouraging marriage and denying the salvation of Adam. Irenaeus discusses his heretical views in the Refutation i. 28; some of them are either anticipated or hinted at in the Address. Eusebius tells us that Tatian left a great multitude of writings, but most of these are unknown. He himself refers in the Address (15:2) to a book On Animals, of which nothing is known except what is repeated in the Address-examples taken from natural history to show that unredeemed man is not superior to the beasts that perish. He also seems to refer to a treatise On Demons (Address 16) and to a future work to be called Against Those Who Have Discussed Divine Things (40). Eusebius had also heard that Tatian had ventured to paraphrase certain utterances of Paul to improve their style. Perhaps this rumor should be connected with the book of Problems mentioned by Tatian's former pupil Rhodo; in it Tatian promised to explain the obscure and hidden parts of the scriptures.[44] Clearly Tatian was deeply concerned with exegesis of the New Testament, as we learn from the one fragment of his book On Perfection according to the Savior which has been preserved (Clement, Miscellanies iii. 81). Here Tatian takes the anti-ascetic verses of I Con 7:3-6 and twists them in an Encratite direction. No doubt he thought he was improving Paul's style. Rufinus' statement that Tatian wrote a Chronicon, or chronological work (Church History vi. 11) probably arose from confusion over the concluding chronological chapters of the Address.

        Tatian's great work, however, was his Diatessaron, or interweaving of the Four Gospels into one continuous narrative. This was probably written in Greek, for a Greek fragment of it, written probably early in the third century, was discovered at Dura- Europos on the Euphrates in 1933 and was published by C. H. Kraeling two years later; but its chief significance was in the Syriac version into which Tatian immediately put it, apparently for missionary use in Syria. It had a remarkable success, became the first Christian scripture of the Syriac-speaking Christians, and was not displaced from their scriptures until the appearance of the Peshitto New Testament in A.D. 411. Tatian with his Syriac Diatessaron seems to have been the founder of Syriac Christianity. Eusebius and Epiphanius both mention Tatian and the Diatessaron, but our best glimpse of it comes from Theodoret, who was bishop of Cyrrhus, west of the Euphrates. In his Epitome of heresy written about A.D. 453 he relates (1:20) that he found more than two hundred copies of the Diatessaron held in honor among the churches, which he gathered up and replaced with the gospels of the four evangelists. This process was probably generally followed after the introduction of the Peshitto version in 411, and the result is that, although Peshitto manuscripts are numerous, not a single copy of the Diatessaron in Syriac has yet been found.

        It has survived, however, in an Arabic version, published by Ciasca in 1888, and a Latin form of it in the Vulgate text takes the place of the Four Gospels in the Codex Fuldensis, A.D- 541-46. Efrem (d. 373) wrote a commentary on it in Syriac; this work has recently been found,[45] and a sixth-century Armenian version of it was published in a Latin translation by Moesinger in 1876. An Old German version of the Fuldensis Latin and a Dutch version made from the Syriac itself have also appeared. The recent discovery of a small Greek fragment at Dura-Europos has already been mentioned and encourages the hope that substantial parts at least of the early Greek or Syriac forms of this remarkable work may yet be found.

        Tatian must have been a strong personality, as not only Rhodo but Clement of Alexandria seem to have been among his pupils; for when, at the beginning of the Miscellanies I. 1. 11, Clement speaks of his teachers, the first of them, whom he describes as born in Assyria and heard by him in Greece, is generally identified as Tatian. In the so-called Little Labyrinth Hippolytus mentions Tatian as an apologist. But numerous writers refer to him as a heretic-Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, and the author of the Acts of Archelaus. What the Fathers found most unpardonable in Tatian was his idea that Adam was not sated-a view that he was said to have originated, although later writers, like the author of the Acts of Pilate, held that Adam was saved when Christ descended into Hades and preached the gospel, to the dead (24:2). Medieval miniatures show Christ emerging from Hades, leading Adam by the hand.