other · 170
Eusebius reports it with visible discomfort: their original founder, Tatian, formed a certain combination and collection of the Gospels, I know not how, to which he gave the title Diatessaron — through the four — and which is still in the hands of some. It was not a summary but a weave: the four narratives cut apart and reassembled into a single continuous life, with the genealogies dropped and the duplicates resolved. In Syriac-speaking churches it became simply the gospel, quoted and preached from as such; Ephrem wrote a commentary on it. Then, in the fifth century, bishops set about replacing it with the separate four and collecting the copies in. It survives today in Ephrem's commentary, in translations, and in a single small Greek fragment from Dura-Europos — the fullest and the most thoroughly destroyed book in this dataset.
To have one gospel instead of four, with the repetitions taken out and the order settled.
The Syriac churches read it instead of the separate gospels for two hundred years, and then destroyed nearly every copy.