Dura Parchment 24

Dura-Europos church in Dura Europolis

On March 5, 1933, during the excavations conducted by Clark Hopkins amongst the ruins of a Roman border-town, Dura-Europos, on the lower Euphrates, under the embankment which filled in the street inside the wall and also covered the Christian church and the Jewish synagogue, the parchment fragment now known as Dura Parchment 24 was found. Susan M. Hopkins was the first to recognize it as a portion of the Gospel.[3][4]

The fragment was examined by Carl H. Kraeling, who published its text in 1935, with an extensive discussion. Kraeling concluded that the fragment was a copy of Tatian's Diatessaron.[5] It was re-edited, with a minor corrections, by C. Bradford Welles in 1959.[6] In 1999, David Parker, Mark Goodacre, and David Taylor published a third attempt at reconstructing the text.[7]

There is a dispute over the identity of the manuscript. Daniel Plooij agreed with Hopkins that "[t]here is no reasonable doubt that the fragment is really Tatian".[8] Parker, Taylor, and Goodacre, however, argued against identifying the fragment with Tatian's Diatessaron.[7] Jan Joosten defended Hopkin's identification of the manuscript with the Diatessaron, arguing from a partial agreement in sequence between the elements in the Dura Fragment and witnesses to Tatian's harmony.[9] Ian N. Mills criticized Joosten's method for identifying witnesses to the Diatessaron and showed that the Dura Fragment contradicted Ephrem's Commentary on the Diatessaron.[10]

The manuscript was added to the list of the New Testament manuscripts by Kurt Aland in 1953.[11]

It is not, strictly speaking, a manuscript of the New Testament — it contains only phrases from the text of the Gospels. On a single parchment leaf (10.5 cm by 9.5 cm), the following texts were copied: Matthew 27:56–57; Mark 15:40,42; Luke 23:49,50,51; John 19:38. Generally, it has been regarded as a fragment of Tatian's Diatessaron (Gospel harmony). Only one side of the leaf has been used, and may well have come from a scroll.[12] The text was written one column per page, 15 (or more) lines per page, 30–35 letters per line, in uncial letters.[1]

Parts of the leaf have decayed, resulting in some loss from the text — approximately the first five to seven letters of each line. Additionally, some other letters are not legible. Classic nomina sacra abbreviations were employed by the scribe, with the typical linear superscript.[13] The text is written in a good book-hand. There are three kinds of alpha: the older capital, the uncial, and the 3rd-century-cursive–type. The letters tau and eta (in the word της — 'the') have unusual characters, and were written with ligatures. The letter mu is characterized by a deep saddle.[14]

The text of the manuscript has some unusual orthographic features, which have been found nowhere else. For example, the letter upsilon (Υ) appears at several points in the text, but not connected with it in any way that has yet been understood. (See text transcription below, with lower case upsilon — υ.)

The surviving leaf of the scroll or codex described here, was found in 1933, during excavations among the ruins of Dura-Europos, known to have been destroyed by Shapur I King of Persia in 256. This means the manuscript must have been written before 256 (known as a terminus ad quem).[14] The time between Tatian's original composition and the production of this copy could not have been longer than 80 years (though it could have been shorter).[21]

Before this find, the only copies of the Diatessaron known to modern scholarship were translations into languages other than Greek—notably Latin, Arabic, and Armenian. This fragment is potentially much more direct evidence that Tatian composed his Diatessaron with great diligence. "Probably he worked from four separate manuscripts, one for each of the Gospels, and, as he brought together phrases, now from this Gospel and now that, he would no doubt cross out those phrases in the manuscripts from which he was copying."[21]

The fragment does not help in the discussion of a Greek or Syriac origin of the Diatessaron. Burkitt pointed two differences between its text of Luke 23:51 and the Old Syriac manuscripts of the Gospels (the kingdom of Heaven ] the kingdom of God), in agreement with the accepted Greek text.[22] Baumstark, on the other hand, identified several presumed Syriasms in the diction, as well as the unusual spelling of Arimathea, Ερινμαθαια, in terms of Syriac origin.[15]

• List of New Testament uncials
• Diatessaron
• Textual criticism

• Waltz, Robert. "An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism". A Site Inspired By: The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism. Retrieved 2011-04-22.
• Leslie McFall, Tatian's Diatessaron: Mischievous or Misleading?, JTL, vol. 56 (1994), pp. 87–114.
• Digital scan of the parchment housed at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library