Steven Avery
Administrator
Facebook - Dura-Europa
https://www.facebook.com/groups/NTT...t_id=1009283339158666&comment_tracking={tn:R}
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https://www.facebook.com/groups/NTT...t_id=1009283339158666&comment_tracking={tn:R}
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Petersen gave a hearty amen to the Parker, Taylor, Goodacre study above! (Which in a sense vindicated his own notes.)
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Petersen Review
http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/v07/Taylor-ed2002rev.html
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24. Perhaps the most significant chapter in the volume is that by three of the conference's hosts, David Parker, David Taylor (who is also this volume's editor), and Mark Goodacre. Their study, titled "The Dura-Europos Gospel Harmony" (pp. 192-228) is, in the eyes of this reviewer, the last word on the famous "Dura Fragment" (Gregory/Aland 0212). It examines the frequently cited and generally accepted contention that this small, fourteen-line parchment was from a Greek copy of Tatian's Diatessaron. This identification was first claimed by the parchment's editor, C. Kraeling, and has been accepted rather uncritically by many later writers (F. C. Burkitt, M.-J. Lagrange, H. Lietzmann, K. Aland, B. Metzger, et al.). It has been taken as proof by many of these same scholars, as well as others, that the Diatessaron was originally composed in Greek and then translated into Syriac. Nevertheless, not all scholars agreed. From the beginning, the Dutch Diatessaron expert Daniël Plooij disputed both assertions. First, he cited textual evidence which suggested that the fragment had been translated into Greek from a Syriac Vorlage. Second, he suggested that the fragment was not part of the Tatianic tradition. Rather, Plooij pointed to the existence, in Syriac, of harmonies of the Passion Narrative that were unrelated to the Diatessaronic tradition. Since the few lines of the Dura Fragment center on Joseph of Arimathaea's securing Jesus' body, the subject matter of the Fragment was not a priori incompatible with what one would expect to find in a Greek fragment translated from one of these Syriac, non-Diatessaronic Passion harmonies. The evidence amassed by Plooij, along with the independent evidence of a Syriac Vorlage adduced by Anton Baumstark, convinced many experts in Diatessaronic studies that the Dura Fragment is most likely not from a Diatessaron. As a consequence, it has nothing to contribute to discussions about the original language of the Diatessaron.
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From Petersen (relating directly to the OP
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24. ... The evidence amassed by Plooij, along with the independent evidence of a Syriac Vorlage adduced by Anton Baumstark, convinced many experts in Diatessaronic studies that the Dura Fragment is most likely not from a Diatessaron. As a consequence, it has nothing to contribute to discussions about the original language of the Diatessaron.
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25. ... Indeed, a close examination suggests composition in Greek, not Syriac. .... Of the ten textual "items" they compare, only one is "Tatianic," and only two are "possibly Tatianic." By contrast, five are "non-Tatianic." Two more are "indeterminable. Our authors conclude: "The bulk of evidence is strongly against the fragment's being a part of Tatian's Diatessaron" (p. 225). The fifth and final section seeks to determine what kind of a Greek gospel text(s) underlies the Fragment. No decisive conclusion can be reached, for readings aligned with MS B et al. (the "Alexandrian" text) are found, but so are readings distinctive of MS D (the "Western" text), as well as readings characteristic of later Byzantine witnesses. The Fragment's text fails to align decisively with any known "group" or "family" of Greek MSS.
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26. It has long been known that numerous gospel harmonies circulated in the early church: Justin Martyr apparently used one in Rome years before Tatian created the Diatessaron; the "Gospel of the Hebrews" seems to have been a gospel harmony; Clement of Alexandria seems to have sometimes cited the gospels in a harmonized form, leading Cerfaux to suggest that he might have been using a harmony; we have reports from the early church that harmonies were created by Ammonius of Alexandria and Theophilus of Antioch. Parker, Taylor, and Goodacre correctly point out the danger of assuming, as many have done with the Dura Fragment, that any harmonized text from the early church is automatically to be identified with Tatian's Diatessaron. Such an identification can only be done after a careful, analytical analysis of the text, for other harmonies were known and in use.
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Note that in the review Petersen is also discussing the ABCD system of UBS in (and (9) and went back-and-forth with K. D. Clarke and K. Bales (links on top.)
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Petersen's low point in the review, he tries (2) a psycho-babble attack on Burgon, mostly simply a hortian nothing, although his rag on Burgon's still holding till the 2nd century Peshitta is worth noting and considering. This is a review of an article by James L. North about the Oxford Debate:
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"The Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, Held at New College on May 6, 1897: An End, Not a Beginning, for the Textual Receptus,"
https://books.google.com/books?id=XxJJGf1eBhgC&pg=PA1
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The Dura Parchment and the Diatessaron (2003)
Jan Joosten
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1584632?seq=1...
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This looks high-class. Maybe one of our readers with a handy-dandy JSTOR account (personal or go to a university) can tell us a bit more from Joosten.
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Tobias Nicklas tells us that Joosten gives a "critique" of the P-T-G non-Diatessaron position:
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Traditions about Jesus in Apocryphal Gospels (2010)
Tobias Nicklas
https://books.google.com/books?id=LuKMmVu0tpMC&pg=PA2097
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Ulrich B. Schmid gives us more details in a summary:
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The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. Second Edition (2012)
The Diatessaron of Tatian
Ulrich B. Schmid
https://books.google.com/books?id=YVwzAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA124
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"In 1999 D.C. Parker, D.G.K. Taylor, and M.S. Goodacre challenged the consensus regarding the harmony fragment from Dura-Europos, contesting the view that it is a remnant of Tatian's Diatessaron." The method that they employed was to reconstruct the Diatessaron sequence of the narrative and its readings that are parallel to the Dura-Europos fragment from Eastern and Western harmony sources, thereby basically accepting the criteria as set out by Petersen.' Later on, every piece of reconstructed Diatessaron narrative was compared to the pertinent elements of the Dura-Europos text. Ten items were compared. In only three of them did the Dura-Europos text appear to be "Tatianic" or "Possibly Tatianic," whereas in five it was considered "Non-Tatianic." Jan Joosten disputed the findings of Parker, Taylor, and Goodacre on methodological grounds and provided an alternative assessment of the narrative sequence of eight out of the fourteen lines of text from the Dura-Europos fragment, concluding that it largely corresponds to what can be reconstructed from Eastern and Western harmonies as being the Diatessaron's basic narrative sequence. What is important from a methodological point of view is Joosten's attempt to compare larger sets of harmonistic sequences rather than individual readings, which used to be the default perspective for most of Diatessaron scholarship in the past."
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Hurtado simply notes the back and forth:
https://books.google.com/books?id=w5FpP9ZxqlYC&pg=PA23
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