The Gospel of Tatian

is in all likelihood the same as "The Gospel of the Encratites", which is attributed to him.

Tatian the Assyrian was born around 120 CE. He was the author of "The Diatessaron", also known as "The Gospel of the Mixed", a Biblical paraphrase, or "harmony", of the four Canonical Gospels; it became the standard text in Syrian churches for several centuries, when it was replaced by the earliest version of the canon that they have now, an unmixed version known as the Peshitta or Syrian Vulgate, with each of the four Canonical Gospels read separately.

Born in Assyria, he encountered Christianity when he went to Rome, seeking an alternative to the "paganism" of his native land, and ironically induced to reject that "paganism" by his reading of the Tanach, probably in Aramaic translation. His teacher in Rome was Justin Martyr, later Saint Justin, another native of Nablus (see "The Gospel of Simonides"), another "pagan" by upbringing, who had explored the world of Greek philosophy, trying Pythagoreanism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism before deciding that Christianity suited him best.

Following Justin's example, and relying on his protection, Tatian opened a school in Rome, where he developed the philosophy known as Encratitism, an ascetic lifestyle that he learned from another of the city's gnostics, Valentinius. After Justin's death - not, despite his name, by martyrdom - Tatian found himself without a protector, and many enemies. Expelled from the church, he fled to Alexandria, where he taught the young Clement, and later moved on to Mesopotamia, where he again opened a school, this time successfully; its influence spread as far as Antioch.

Unlike his Gospel, and despite the efforts of both Rabbula, the Bishop of Edessa, and Theodoret, the Bishop of Cyrrhus, to find and destroy all copies of the work, versions of "The Diatessaron" have survived, one famously in the library of Samuel Pepys - an English translation dated around 1400 CE.

Tatian also penned a treatise entitled "On Perfection according to the Doctrine of the Saviour" in which he furthered the Gnostic belief that marriage is a means of tying the flesh to the ephemeral world, and therefore an abomination, which may not be the best argument against marriage, though it is still better than his attribution of the invention of marriage to the Devil.

Tatian believed in what might be called "Intrinsic Monotheism", the notion that Humankind was created with a natural tendency towards monotheism, but that this was one of the attributes surrendered as a punishment for abusing God's trust in Eden. What the serpent brought, in other words, was not sin in general so much as polytheism in particular, and the only way back is, first, to abandon the practices of the flesh associated with polytheism, and then to commit oneself to moral behaviour. Not terribly different from the message of the major Yehudan Prophets, Yesha-Yahu (Isaiah) in particular.

Tatian regarded God as spirit (pneuma), but rejected the stoical concept of a physical pneuma. On Creation, he regarded God as having existed for all time, but choosing to be alone before the act of creation, though he had within him the power to initiate Creation. This may have been the first expression of the Creationist theory known as "ex nihilo" or "creation from nothing", and Tatian was definitely one of the earliest explicators of John the Evangelist's concept of "Logos", rendering it as "dynamis logike - power expressed in words".

He died in 180 CE.

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