The Origins of Scholarship on the Fourfold Gospel

Abstract

In his Letter to Carpianus Eusebius refers to an earlier author named Ammonius of Alexandria who, he says, left to posterity the Diatessaron-Gospel. This chapter first identifies the Ammonius in question and proposes that he was a philosopher well-known for his philological scholarship. It also elucidates the title and significance of his work through a comparison with Origen’s Hexapla. The second half of the chapter turns to Eusebius’ adaptation of Ammonius’ composition and argues that it provided him with the ‘starting points’ that he reworked to produce his marginal apparatus. Eusebius’ experimentations with information visualization and textual organization in his Chronicle and Pinax for the Psalms provided him with the insights he needed to accomplish this reworking. Finally, this chapter argues that the ten Canon Tables possessed cosmological resonances in the light of Eusebius’ comments elsewhere about the theology of numbers and creation.