Episode Details

Around 170 CE, a Syrian Christian named Tatian noticed what a lot of readers have noticed since: the four Gospels don't always agree. So he fixed it. Tatian wove all four into a single, seamless account of Jesus' life. And for roughly two hundred years, in the Syriac-speaking churches of the East, that harmony was the Gospel. 
Then the church came for it. Bishops collected copies and destroyed them. Tatian was condemned as a heretic. Today not a single copy survives in its original language — we know the text only through a commentary, some translations, and a sixth-century Latin Bible that still carries its shape.
Bart unpacks what Tatian actually did to the Gospels, why the church found it so threatening, and what it means that an entire branch of Christianity once read a Bible we can no longer read.