Fragments of the Commentary of Ephrem the Syrian on the Diatessaron

as (p. 21) the passage where he says that Joseph was so gentle as not to expel her from the house, sed cum ea habitaret but that he lived with her; but it even turns up in the objection made by an ideal Adoptionist those who believed Jesus was human and adopted by God interlocutor who says (p. 26)

This instance is the more curious, since the Cureton reading was probably intended as an Anti-Adoptionist correction. But the fact is that the reading must have acquired great prevalence, for we find traces of it in later Syriac commentators also.

Or take the passage to which we draw attention on p. 34 (Luke ii. 34), in which from the repeated word dubitare to doubt we are able to restore the text of Tatian in a place where a later reviser of Ephrem has substituted a reading more in accordance with the Greek.

A very interesting case will be found in the account of our Lord's healing of the leper², where Ephrem comments as follows:

The Lord showed him two things for these two, a rebuke, cum ei irasceretur when He was angry with him, and mercy, cum sanaret when He healed him. Because He said, Si vis if You will, iratus est He was angry.........Therefore the Lord per indignationem through indignation showed that He does not heal out of respect of persons.......................................... Wherefore the Lord, because of these thoughts, ei iratus est was angry with him and subsequently gave him a command.........But also notice that Christ was not angry at him, but at the leprosy.

The continual play upon the words iratum esse to be angry shows that the text used by Ephrem had this expression. This is the more important because, as far as I know, up to the present time, the only evidence for such a reading was the Western text (with D, d, a ff²) in Mark i. 41, where Codex Bezae has ὀργισθείς having become angry. The diffusion of this reading in Syriac as well as in Greco-Latin texts is therefore demonstrated.

Or turn to the passage (Luke i. 6) where Zachary and Elisabeth are said³ to be ‘Immaculate in all their region.’ A reference to the foot-note of Mösinger shows that the text should have been printed ‘Immaculati in omni habitatione sua’ immaculate in all their dwelling; and a few pages further on the same reading is betrayed where Ephrem says

¹ From the fact that Ephrem does not directly reply to this ingenious objection, one is almost tempted to suspect that it is the gloss of an Adoptionist reader.
² Mösinger, p. 144.                                ³ Mösinger, p. 7.