Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron / Letters: Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus (folios 1-10)

Object Information

Title:: Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron / Letters: Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus (folios 1-10)

Description:: Parchment manuscript containing two distinct texts written in Syriac. The first ten folios reproduce an exchange of letters between Severus of Antioch and Julian of Halicarnassus relating to the corruptability or incorruptability of the body of Christ written in a mixture of estrangela, nestorian and serta scripts in the 8th or 9th century in Egypt. The remaining sixty-five folios contain a substantial portion of Ephrem's Diatessaron Commentary written is estangela and dated to the late 5th or early 6th century. The two sections were acquired in 1957 and bound together in 1960. The Diatessaron was a gospel harmony written by Tatian (120–173 AD), a second-century Christian theologian. Although highly influential in the early development and spread of Syrian Christianity, it was eventually replaced in the Syriac-speaking Church by the four-gospel codex, and only a single fragment of Tatian’s Diatessaron has survived in Greek translation. That any of the Syriac text survives at all is down to the work of Ephrem (c. 306–373 AD), the most celebrated Father of the Syrian Church. His commentary on the Diatessaron includes quotations from Tatian’s original Syriac text, and is therefore a unique witness to the earliest phase of Syrian Christianity. Although later, translated copies of Ephrem’s work survive, this is the only known copy in Syriac.

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