Fragments of the Commentary of Ephrem the Syrian on the Diatessaron

INTRODUCTION.

THE Commentary of Ephrem Syrus has, for various reasons, hardly met with the welcome and the elucidation which so famous a work deserves. Probably this is due, on the one side, to the fact that it was, until the present pages were written, extant only in Armenian, and the paucity of scholars who are acquainted with that language has reacted upon the subject, and caused a somewhat cold treatment of the book itself; but it is also due, in part, to the odium anti-theologicum theological hatred/animosity which was provoked by the appearance of a work which was supposed, rightly or wrongly, to have an important bearing upon the history of the Canon; so that in some quarters there have been muttered rumours that the work was not rightly ascribed to the great Syrian father whose name it bears, while in other quarters of the critical world, especially those which lie most nearly adjacent to the city of Tübingen, it has been treated with a silence that must be, to the looker-on, who proverbially has the best view of the game, very significant.

Now it is unfortunate that this should be the case; unfortunate, I mean, that so many persons (myself amongst the number) are ignorant of Armenian, and that some persons (amongst whom I sincerely hope not to be included) limit their interest in a great work by the boundary of their theological or anti-theological predilections; and it is the more to be regretted, because the interest of the work does not lie primarily either in the fact that it is in Armenian, or in its possible bearing upon the evolution of the second century Gospels. Ephrem, himself, is a theological star of the first magnitude, and even if he should happen to be one of the worthiest representatives of Catholic orthodoxy, his windows always overlook the fields of the early unorthodox teachers, whom the Church has successively banned, but without the knowledge of whom the Church Historian cannot construct the map of the