Tatian

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Tatian was a Christian writer of the second century, born in the lands he called Assyria — the Syriac-speaking East beyond the Roman frontier — who came to Rome, studied under Justin Martyr, and produced two works that gave him a long afterlife: a fierce defense of Christianity against Greek learning and a single woven version of the four gospels. The conventional dates place his birth around 120 and his death around 180, both inferred rather than recorded.

He tells his own story, in part, in the Oration to the Greeks. There he describes a restless education in the philosophies and mystery cults of the empire, a disillusionment with all of them, and a conversion brought on by reading the Hebrew scriptures, which struck him as older and plainer than the Greek wisdom he had been sold. The Oration is among the sharpest of the early Christian apologies: it does not seek common ground with Greek philosophy so much as deny that philosophy had anything the barbarians had not already possessed first. The argument that the Greeks borrowed their best ideas from older Eastern peoples runs straight through it.

His enduring work is the Diatessaron — Greek for “through four” — a harmony that interleaved Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one continuous gospel narrative, removing the seams and contradictions of reading them separately. In the Syriac-speaking churches this single text, not the four, was the gospel read in worship for some three centuries, until deliberate effort replaced it with the separated versions. No complete copy in its original language survives; the work is reconstructed from later translations, citations, and a fourth-century commentary, and even its original language — Greek or Syriac — is disputed.

After Justin’s death the heresiologists turn against him. Irenaeus reports that Tatian fell away into error, and later writers name him the founder of the Encratites, the “self-controlled,” who rejected marriage, meat, and wine as incompatible with the Christian life. How much of this organized movement Tatian actually founded, and how much was assembled around his name by opponents sorting the second century into schools, is uncertain; the asceticism is real in his own writing, the sect harder to verify. The same generation produced Marcion and the teachers gathered under the name of Gnosticism, and Tatian is often read alongside them as part of a wider second-century impulse to draw the visible world and the body away from the divine — though where exactly he stood on that spectrum the sources do not finally settle.

What is not in doubt is the reach of the harmony. For the churches of Syria and beyond, the life of Jesus arrived, for generations, in the shape one man had given it.

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