The Diatessaron

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The Diatessaron (c. 160-175) is the most prominent early Gospel harmony; and was created by Tatian, an early Christian Assyrian apologist and ascetic. Tatian sought to combine all the textual material he found in the four gospels-Matthew, Mark Luke, and John-into a single coherent narrative of Jesus's life and death. However, and in contradistinction to most later gospel harmonists, Tatian appears not to have been motivated by any aspiration to validate the four separate canonical gospel accounts; or to demonstrate that, as they stood, they could each be shown as being without inconsistency or error. Tatian's harmony follows the gospels closely in terms of text but, in order to fit all the canonical material in, he created his own narrative sequence, which is different from both the synoptic sequence and John's sequence; and occasionally creates intervening time periods that are found in none of the source accounts.