The First English Translation of the World’s Oldest Surviving Latin Gospel Harmony

Between the years 541-546, Victor of Capua commissioned a Latin transcription of the New Testament, which would come to be known as Codex Fuldensis (now housed in Fulda, Germany, as Cod. Bon. 1). Oddly, the Gospels are reproduced in harmonized form and this manuscript proves to be the oldest surviving translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron, a gospel harmony from the second century. Unfortunately the text has been “vulgatized” to read like Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which erases distinct second-century readings. Our research focuses on the transcription and translation of the Capitula, or table of contents, which consist of 182 chapter headings. Our findings not only offer the first English translation of this work, but a study of how the Capitula differ from the text of the harmony. The Capitula contain “Old Latin” readings that predate Jerome’s Vulgate, and therefore may provide clues as to how Tatian’s second-century harmony was first translated into Latin from either Greek or Syriac.