On October 23, 2011, we began a series on Lord’s Day mornings titled “Diatessaron”. “Diatessaron” is Greek for “fourfold” or, more literally, “through four,” and was the title of a similar harmony of the four canonical gospels, combined in the second century by a man named “Tatian.”
Our Diatessaron is a synthetic, chronological, conflated text of the gospels using the Literal Majority Translation as the underlying English text. It is “synthetic” in that it presents the content of all four gospels in one running account; “chronological” in that the events are included in their historical order; and “conflated” in that the wording is a combining of texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into one record, the resultant text of which is not identical to any of the four, but has all the fullness of information found in all. The source of the wording is indicated by fonts (which we are terming “Matthian,” “Markan,” “Lukan,” and “Johannine”) which reveal which gospel account it is taken from.
Not so much as a “then,” “and,” “but,” “so,” or any particle of connection is added to our Diatessaron text that is not found in the Scriptural gospels. In addition, our Diatessaron is not meant to replace the reading and study of the four gospels as they stand. We are not “writing our own Bible”, a thought odious to us and all Biblicist Christians. The Diatessaron is merely a creative teaching device which we are currently employing to help broaden our knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.