Syrian Church became divided into two sects, the Nestorians and the Monophysites. Since Rabbula was the leader of the Monophysites and a "determined opponent of the Nestorians" it becomes impossible to maintain that he produced the Peshitta for had it been framed under his auspices his rivals would never have adopted "so quickly and so unanimously the handiwork of their greatest adversary" as their received New Testament text.1 Hills sums the argument against Burkitt: "Why was it that the Peshitta was received by all the mutually opposing groups in the Syrian Church as their common, authoritative Bible? It must have been that the Peshitta was a very ancient version and that because it was so old the common people within the Syrian Church continued to be loyal to it regardless of the factions into which they came to be divided and the preferences of their leaders."2 In light of all the preceding, this author - like Dr. Pickering - finds it difficult to understand how F.F. Bruce, Colwell, Kenyon, etc. could thus allow themselves to state dogmatically that Rabbula produced the Peshitta.3 The foregoing thoroughly rebuts the Hort-Burkitt theory concerning the Peshitta and conclusively shows that the Syrian text which bears witness to the KJB readings is older by 100 years than either Vaticanus or Sinaiticus.

"The Diatessaron", a Gospel Harmony in which Tatian of Assyria wove into one narrative the material contained in the 4 gospels (c.153-172), still survives in three works. Tatian was supposedly a converted pupil of Justin Martyr. Irenaeus charged that after the martyrdom of Justin, Tatian apostatized and wandered into heretical Gnosticism.4 Tatian was further branded as: having wrongly interpreted I Corinthians 7:5 such that he condemned marriage as a corrupt licentiousness and a service of the devil, denying that Adam was saved due to Paul's saying "all die in Adam", and refusing to drink wine at Communion. After his death, his followers substituted water for wine in the Lord's Supper, abstaining permanently from meat, wine, and marriage due to the supposed intrinsic uncleanness in the three. However neither his extant apologetic treatise against the Gentiles (Greeks) nor his Gospel Harmony depicts any traces of Gnosticism or other heresy.5 Tatian vindicates Christianity and exposes the contradictions, absurdities, and immoralities of Greek mythology with vehement contempt while also proving that Moses and the prophets were older and wiser than the Greek philosophers.

All this notwithstanding, the issue is not whether Tatian was an extreme ascetic or even whether he wandered to the borders of Gnosticism or the fact that he left out the genealogies of Jesus and made misjudgments producing inaccuracies in his connected account of the life of Christ Jesus from the 4 Gospels. These do not affect the points that are before us which center about the fact that Theodoret (390-458 A.D.) found more than 200 copies of the Diatessaron circulating in Asia Minor and Syria in his day which had been there from before 170 A.D.6 Tatian reads with the KJB at Luke 2:33 and John 9:35 which uphold the Deity of Christ and the virgin birth. Thus the Diatessaron conclusively proves: (1) the existence and ecclesiastical use of the four Gospels, no more and no less, in the middle of the 2nd-century, and (2) an Old Syriac witness exists to the King James readings which is 200 years older than Vaticanus B or Sinaiticus.

1 Burgon, The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark, op. cit., p. 56.

2 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., p. 174.

3 Pickering, The Identity of the New Testament Text, op. cit., p. 91.

4 Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. II, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976; rpt. of 1910 orig.), pp. 493-495, 727-730.

5 Ibid., pp. 727-728.

6 Price, The Ancestry of our English Bible, op. cit., p. 189.

103


continued...