The blogging on this mid-June, Monday morning will be a bit unusual in a couple of ways. First. it needs to begin with an announcement of a sort. Monday Morning Blogging is moving for the summer to a new eddress and becoming, again just for the summer, Summer Sundays Blogging. The reason for this is that the good folk at God’s Politics have invited all of us to join them on a kind of summer “vacation at home away from home.” The hyperlink for the summer is:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?
tag=Summer%20Sundays&blog_id=37
There is no real reason to record it, however, unless you want to do so; because it will be running here on this site all summer in order that everybody who wishes to, can move to the summer site with just one click from the present one.
Summer, as God’s Politics and Mother Nature define it this year, commences next Friday, 20 June. It commences, in fact, at 7:59 p.m. edt, which, as most of us have probably already guessed, is the precise moment of the Summer Solstice. And Summer, 2008 will end, logically enough, on Monday, 22 September at 11:44 edt, which is, of course, the Autumnal Equinox. So the next time we are together should be next Sunday, 22 June, not next Monday, 23 June. Hope to meet all of you there….pt
* * * * *
The second unusual thing about this morning’s blog is related to the first: namely that before we go setting off to talk about the words of Jesus in a more general way and in company with a wider audience, I want to talk about The Words of Jesus – A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord in a contextual or historical way, though I certainly hope that intention will not prove to be a daunting one. I want to talk, not about The Words as we have been thinking of them this spring, but rather as what The Words of Jesus really is as a book, and about the category of Christian literature to which it belongs.
The truth of the thing is that as a book and in one way, The Words of Jesus is no more [and hopefully no less] than the most recent or current example of a form of Christian literature that has a history as old, almost, as Christianity itself. The Words of Jesus, by category or genre, is principally a Sayings Gospel; but it is also something else. It is a “harmony of the Gospels” or a “Gospel Harmony” and comes up out of that literary tradition just as surely as it does out of the Sayings one.
The first Gospel Harmony that we have extant is the Diatessaron. It was composed, some time between 150 and 160 c.e., by a Christian scholar/philosopher named Tatian. Translated, Diatessaron means, appropriately enough, “through four;” and the hedging on whether or not Tatian’s Diatessaron was the first Gospel Harmony rests on the fact that scholars think he probably had a prior Greek Harmony, now lost to us, from which he worked.
Whether that theory be true or not is a bit of a moot point, for the real point is that Tatian’s Diatessaron melded all four of our now-canonical Gospels into one narrative. While, unlike a Sayings Gospel, Tatian included both the Sayings and the context or narrative around them in his work, he blended or omitted duplications and organized the flow of the whole around a plot line that was essentially taken from the Gospel of Luke. But the real real point here is two-fold.
The Diatessaron was the authoritative Christian text for Syriac Christianity until the fifth century. The Syriac Church was composed originally of those churches who spoke a variant of Aramaic. Antioch was its politico-cultural capital, as well as the seat of the Church’s Patriarch. Edessa and Nisibis, both located in what today is Turkey, and Ctesiphon, in today’s Iraq, were likewise major centers for the Syriac Church, which borrowed heavily from Rabbinic Judaism and Mesopotamian culture for its foundation.
Among other things and probably in part because of these theological and cultural influences, Syriac Christians did not regard either the Pastoral [or Apostolic] Letters or the Revelation of St. John as canonical or authoritative. While Tatian was located for years in Rome and was originally a student and follower of Justin Martyr there, he was, none the less, a Syrian by birth and a polyglot who could write in Syriac or Latin or presumably Greek with equal ease. It is possible, then, that some of the impetus behind his compilation of a Gospel Harmony had its origin in part in his early life in Syrian culture and religious thought.
Whether that be true or not, the fact still is that sometime in the early fifth century, a bishop of the Syriac Church decided that, in conformity with the rest of Christian practice, each of the churches under his oversight should include not only Tatian’s Diatessaron, but also at least one copy of each of the four, now canonical, Gospels as they are when independent of one another. Following that, in 423 c.e., Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus on the Euphrates in Upper Syria, went a step farther. He collected all the copies of the Diatessaron he could locate in his diocese—200 of them, we are told– and “took them away,” whatever that euphemism may mean. Theodoret’s action was taken as much for political as theological reasons, for the pressures that would culminate in 451 c.e. at the Council of Calcidon were already in play. The effect of his action none the less was that, in time, the melded or harmonized Diatessaron ceased to be the text of choice or even of legitimate use for the Syriac Church. Its influence proved to be so lasting, however, that well over a century later, Muhammad would still speak of the Christian Gospel as being one text, rather than four.
But the other part of the point to be mentioned among us before we move for the summer is that while the Diatessaron was the formal text for Syriac-speaking Christians for centuries, it also existed in the other tongues of the Mediterranean world where it generated not only texts but also commentaries or study tools based upon it. Tatian’s work likewise spawned the literary tradition of the Gospel Harmony; and one of the hallmarks of that tradition is that, like the Diatessaron, the harmonies are usually written in the vernacular, an approach that renders their content very present and very immediate for readers. That tradition of the melded or harmonized Gospel written in the language of the people held until the time of the Reformation when new ways of seeing Christian scripture took pride of place in Christian thinking and when Scripture itself was re-positioned as the sole and un-arbitrated, unmediated authority for belief and action.
It should not, in other words, be lost on us that in this time of new re-formation, we find ourselves moved once again toward what our forefathers and foremothers in the faith found to be of such inestimable and precious worth to their hearts and souls. In approaching The Words of Jesus or any careful Gospel Harmony, we are simply reclaiming, as the children’s song says, “something that’s been lost and must be found.” And that, it seems to me, is a good thought with which to wrap up our first Spring together.
See you next Sunday.
