Tatian

Tatian, commonly called Tatian the Assyrian, was a Christian apologist, theologian, and writer of the second century. In his own Address to the Greeks he states that he was born in the land of the Assyrians, that is, in Mesopotamia, of pagan parentage. He received a Greek rhetorical and philosophical education and traveled widely in search of learning, becoming acquainted with various mystery cults and schools of philosophy. Dissatisfied with what he came to regard as the immorality and emptiness of pagan culture, he converted to Christianity, which he presented as an older and morally superior “barbarian” wisdom. He went to Rome and became a hearer and disciple of Justin Martyr. After Justin’s martyrdom in the mid-160s, Tatian left the city.

While associated with the Roman Christian community he composed the Oratio ad Graecos (Address to the Greeks), a fierce polemic against Greek mythology, philosophy, art, and civic religion. He argued that Greek culture was derivative, immoral, and demonic, and that true wisdom had been preserved among the “barbarians,” above all in the writings of Moses and in the Christian preaching. The work is one of the most uncompromising early Christian attacks on Hellenism and survives complete. His most influential composition, however, was the Diatessaron (literally “through four”), a continuous narrative harmony of the four canonical Gospels. Whether originally written in Greek or in Syriac remains debated; it became the ordinary form in which the Gospel story was read in the Syriac-speaking churches of the East for some two centuries. Ephrem the Syrian wrote a commentary on it. In the fifth century bishops such as Rabbula of Edessa and Theodoret of Cyrrhus suppressed the Diatessaron in favor of the four separate Gospels of the Peshitta, destroying many copies. No complete original text survives, but the work can be reconstructed in large part from later Arabic, Latin, and Persian versions and from quotations.

Ancient heresiologists, beginning with Irenaeus of Lyons, charged that after Justin’s death Tatian fell into heresy. He became associated with the Encratites, an ascetic current that rejected marriage as fornication, abstained from meat and wine, and used water rather than wine in the Eucharist. Irenaeus further accused him of Valentinian-style speculation about invisible aeons and of denying the salvation of Adam. Similar or expanded accusations appear in Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius of Caesarea, and Epiphanius of Salamis. After leaving Rome he returned to the East, probably to Syria or Mesopotamia, and is said to have founded a school. The precise place and date of his death are unknown; he is generally placed in the later second century.

Despite the condemnation of his later teaching, the Diatessaron remained a foundational text of Syriac Christianity, and the Oratio is an important witness to second-century apologetic. Tatian is not venerated as a saint in the Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches, owing to the ancient charges of heresy. Modern scholarship continues to discuss the original language of the Diatessaron, the exact nature and extent of his “Encratite” or Gnostic leanings, and his place in the development of Syrian Christianity.