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While Cureton, and Burkitt were busy translating and publishing the manuscripts found in Egypt and Russia, one of the most important texts of Syriac Christianity, The Diatessaron, could not be located. The absence of a manuscript of The Diatessaron was a source of much concern. In May, 1877, an article was published in Contemporary Review, by Bishop Lightfoot. In his article he states, "What a pity that Ephraem's Commentary on The Diatessaron is not now forthcoming!"
Yet, exactly twelve months before, in May of 1876, Dr. Moesinger, Professor of Theology in the University of Salzburg, had published it in Venice. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, an Armenian priest named Mechitar, established himself on the small island of San Lazaro, in the lagoon of Venice, where he founded a community for the education of the Armenian people through the medium of their own language. In the manuscript library of the monastery, an Armenian translation of Ephraem's Commentary on The Diatessaron was used to educate the monks. Written in the fifth century from the Syriac, the monks printed an Armenian edition of St. Ephraem's works in a four volume series, the second of which contains The Diatessaron.
Prior to the work of these imminent scholars, Western Christians believed the Bible to have been derived from Greek source material. As the scholars began their work in earnest, they learned that the earliest Christian scriptures had been written in Greek, but that the first compilation of these documents had been accomplished by Tatian, a Syrian Christian. Tatian translated the first Gospel compilation into an Aramaic language dialect known as Northern Aramaic, or Syriac. He called his Gospel the Diatessaron. The Diatessaron was a continuous narrative. It was not divided into separate chapters written by separate authors as later Bibles reflected. In Palestine, where Jesus lived, the Southern Aramaic language was predominant. The fact that both Syrians and Palestinians spoke dialects of the same language led to close ties culturally and also in spiritual matters.
Though The Diatessaron had been published as early as 1836 in Venice, it remained completely unknown to Western scholars until Moesinger translated it into Latin. Even after it's publication in 1876, it took another five years to reach the University of Dublin, where the Reverend Samuel Hemphill, a professor of Biblical Greek, published The Diatessaron of Tatian - A Harmony of the Four Gospels Compiled in the Third Quarter of the Second Century.