Harmonizing the Truth: Eusebius and the Problem of the Four Gospels

HARMONIZING THE TRUTH: EUSERIUS AND THE PRORLEM OF THE FOUR GOSPELS By THOMAS O'LOUGHLIN In the late third century Eusebius of Caesarea, better remembered now for his work as a historian of the church, produced an apparatus for the reconciliation of the disagreements found in the four Christian gospels.1 It was a remarkable work in its own right for it preserved, as the tradition demanded, the plurality of the gospels, while allowing them to be presented and studied as a single entity, "the gospel," and so succeeding in Tatian's aim in his Diatessaron2 — as exegesis and apologetics demanded. Moreover, though now largely forgotten, it remained an important element within theology for centuries. This paper's aim is to locate the significance of Eusebius 's work in its original setting in the world of late antiquity and the Christian defense of pagan challenges to the gospels' integrity, and then to follow the influence of his work within just one strand of the tradition: that which forms the background of western, Latin theology. So it will note how that work was adopted and adapted by Jerome, how it then passed on to the late-patristic Latin schoolmasters who sought to transform all learning into convenient modules of defined value, and then was taken up by others in just one region of the Latin West, the insular world, such as the anonymous scribes of the Book of Kells, the Stowe Missal, and the Book of Deer, for whom Eusebius's work was a mystery that they could not simply abandon , even when they could not understand it.3 Throughout this period, the Eusebian Apparatus roused the intellect of scholars, teachers, and scribes, but in each milieu the significance and perceived utility of the Apparatus was different. The history of ideas is about changes within intellectual and textual continuities, and with the Apparatus we have a clearly identifiable This paper is based upon the 2008 Souter Lecture in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland ; I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. David N. Dumville for extending the invitation . I would also wish to express thanks to Traditio'^ anonymous reader whose comments and suggestions have done much to enhance this paper. See W. L. Petersen, Tatian's Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship (Leiden, 1994). This choice of just one region is based on my desire to follow the Apparatus along a definite line of tradition such that each moment in the tradition can be seen to be based on the previous moment that transmitted the material to it. While better examples might be found by selecting items from across the Latin West, such a manner of proceeding would not allow us to observe with precision how succeeding generations of scholars approached their inheritance in new ways. ¿ TRADITIO scholarly tool that does not in itself change over the period, but whose reception and exploitation vary greatly. What Is the Eusebian Apparatus? If one picks up the most widely used modern scholarly edition of the gospels in Greek, the twenty-seventh edition of Nestle-Aland,4 one can see in the inside margins of the text a series of little numbers; they are in a smaller point size than the numbers indicating chapters and verses that are embedded in the text; they are in roman rather than italic type fonts (for they must not be confused with the kephalaia numbers, which are also in the inner margin yet in a larger point size and italic),0 and they are a mixture of arabic and roman numerals. The Arabic numerals run in sequence throughout each gospel, from 2 to 355 in the case of Matthew, 233 in Mark,6 342 in Luke, and 232 in John. Each number identifies a "section" of the text, which might be as short as a few words or as long as several of our commonly used chapters. What constitutes a "section" is not a narrative unity such as a story or an incident or a piece of teaching, but rather whether or not that snippet — and it is worth repeating that this snippet may often be less than a sentence and occasionally not even a...