Ammonius of Alexandria

Almost nothing survives about the man himself. What survives is his idea, and every study Bible printed since has been built on it. Ammonius was a Christian scholar in Alexandria in the third century. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing a hundred years later, describes what he did: Ammonius took the Gospel of Matthew as his spine, and set beside it, in parallel columns, the passages from Mark, Luke, and John that told the same events. He called the result the Diatessaron-Gospel — a name that simply means through the four. That is the first Gospel synopsis anyone is known to have made. Before it, a reader who wanted to compare how Matthew and Luke told the same story had to hold two scrolls open and remember. After it, the comparison sat on the page. Ammonius's method had a flaw, and Eusebius said so. Because everything was arranged around Matthew, the order of the other three Gospels was broken up to fit. A reader gained the comparison and lost the flow of Mark or Luke as its own book. So Eusebius rebuilt the tool. He kept Ammonius's parallels as raw material but converted them into numbers, dividing each Gospel into short numbered sections and then listing which sections matched which in ten tables — the Eusebian canons. He explained the whole system in a short covering letter to a man named Carpianus, and he credited Ammonius by name for the work he was standing on. The numbered sections in the margins of Greek and Latin Gospel manuscripts for the next thousand years are still called the Ammonian sections because of that credit. His dates are not fixed. The third century is as close as the evidence gets; some scholars place him around AD 220, and some have argued he was a teacher of Origen. He is often confused with Ammonius Saccas, the pagan Platonist who taught Plotinus, and the two are probably different men. He was not a bishop, not a martyr, and not a theologian anyone quotes. He was a scholar with a table and four books, who worked out how to put them side by side. The Gospel harmony in the back of a modern Bible is his descendant. Sources: Eusebius, Letter to Carpianus; Eusebius, Church History VI.19; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Ammonius of Alexandria.