The Gospel According to Peter: A Study

by Walter Richard Cassels

On the whole we may perhaps claim to have established a strong presumption that the Petrine writer employed a Harmony which, in its general selection of extracts, and in some of its minuter arrangements, very nearly resembled the Harmony of Tatian. This is not equivalent to saying that he used Tatian, because there is some reason to think that there may have been a Harmony or Harmonies earlier than Tatian.... Thus the relation of the Petrine writer to Tatian remains for the present an open question; but enough has been said to render such a relation probable, if further inquiries should lead us to place the Gospel of Peter after the publication of the “Diatessaron.”[61]

It must frankly be asserted that the whole of this comparison with Tatian, and the views so curiously expressed regarding the result, are the outcome of a [pg 038] preconceived idea that the Petrine author compiled his Gospel mainly from the canonical. The divergencies being so great, however, and the actual contradictions so strong, it becomes necessary to account for them in some way, and the theory of the use of a Harmony is advanced to see whether it may not overcome some of the difficulties. It would have been more to the purpose to have inquired whether the so-called “Diatessaron” did not make use of the Gospel according to Peter, amongst others.

In connection with this it may be well to refer to some remarkable observations of Professor J. Rendel Harris regarding the relation of the Gospel according to Peter and Tatian's Harmony. When the fragment was first discovered, he was naturally struck by its great importance. “The Gospel of Peter, even in the imperfect form in which it has come down to us, is the breaking of a new seal, the opening of a fresh door,” he said, “to those who are engaged in the problems presented by Biblical and Patristic criticism,”[62] and he very rightly proceeded to try to find out “whether Peter has used Tatian, or Tatian Peter, or whether both of them are working upon common sources.”[63] He first refers to “a curious addition to the story of the Crucifixion, which can be shown, with a very high probability, to have once stood in the Harmony of Tatian.” The most interesting and instructive part of the reference is that Mr. Harris had made and published, some years before the discovery of the fragment before us, certain notes on the Harmony of Tatian, in which he had employed “the method of combination of passages in different writers who were known to have used the Harmony, or different texts which were suspected of having borrowed [pg 039] from it, to show that in the account of the Crucifixion there stood a passage something like the following:

“They beat their breasts and said, Woe unto us, for the things which are done to-day for our sins; for the desolation of Jerusalem hath drawn nigh.”[64]

It is unnecessary here to quote the way Mr. Harris arrived at this passage, which he frankly states, but at once go on to compare it with our fragment. He sums up:

Now the reader will be interested to see that the missing sentence which I restored to Tatian's text has turned up in the Gospel of Peter, for we read that: “The Jews and the elders and the priests, when they saw what an evil deed they had done to themselves, began to beat their breasts and to say, Woe to our sins, for the judgment and the end of Jerusalem is at hand.” Did the false Peter take this from Tatian, or was it the other way? or did both of them use some uncanonical writing or tradition?[65]

“There is nothing in what follows in the Arabic Harmony,” Mr. Harris points out, “which suggests an allusion to the desolation of the city, or an imprecation upon, or lamentation over, themselves.”[66]

Very few will feel any doubt that this is taken from our Gospel according to Peter, or possibly—for of course there is no absolute proof—from the tradition which the writer of that Gospel also used, and not by the writer from the Harmony; and it may be suggested that the omission of this and similar passages from versions [pg 040] of the Harmony may have been influenced by the fact that, not forming part of our Gospels, and not agreeing with the preconceived theory of a Harmony of our four Gospels, such passages were excluded as interpolations.

Another instance given by Mr. Harris is the statement in the fragment: “Then the sun shone out, and it was found to be the ninth hour,” which he compares with the language of “Tatian's” commentator: “Three hours the sun was darkened, and afterwards it shone out again.”[67] And further:

Another case of parallelism is in the speech of the angel to Mary: “He is not here, for he is risen, and has gone away to the place from whence he was sent.” At first sight this looks like a wilful expansion on the part of the writer of the Gospel; but on a reference to the Persian father Aphrahat, who is more than suspected of having used the text of Tatian, we find the words, “And the angels said to Mary, He is risen, and gone away to him that sent him,” which is very nearly in coincidence with the text of the false Peter.[68]