The Letter to Carpianus, with the Eusebian Canons

Patristic · Letter · before 339/340; the date cannot be determined · Greek

Eusebius writes to a man called Carpianus to explain a device he has made for reading the four gospels against one another. Ammonius of Alexandria had already set the parallel passages of Mark, Luke and John alongside Matthew, but in doing so had broken the sequence of the other three, so that only Matthew could still be read straight through. Eusebius keeps all four intact instead: he numbers the sections of each gospel and builds ten tables — the first listing what all four have, then what three have, then what two have, and the tenth what each gospel has alone. A reader meeting a passage looks up its number, finds the table it belongs to, and is told at once where the others tell the same thing, or that nobody else tells it. The letter and the ten tables travelled together at the front of gospel books for more than a thousand years, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic and Geez, and the arcaded pages made to hold them are the reason the oldest illuminated gospel books are decorated at all. The numbers themselves are still printed in the margins of critical editions of the Greek New Testament.

McGiffert's Prolegomena to the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers edition of the Church History catalogues Eusebius' works and gives the canons their own entry — «Ten Evangelical Canons, with the Letter to Carpianus prefixed (kanones deka; Canones decem harmoniae evangeliorum praemissa ad Carpianum epistola)» — followed by the Ammonius account and a canon-by-canon description. He also records that «the date of the construction of these canons it is quite impossible to determine», which is why this row's year is a terminus rather than a date.

To: Carpianus