The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Ammonius of Alexandria
died c. 300Early Church
The Alexandrian who first laid the four Gospels out in parallel columns, inventing the Gospel synopsis.
Summary
- Lived died c. 300.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
- 257–260Valerian targets the leadershipValerian went after the church's structure rather than the crowd: bishops, priests, and deacons first, then Christians of senatorial and knightly rank, and the cemeteries where they met. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded on September 14, 258; Sixtus II of Rome was seized in a catacomb the same year. When Valerian was captured by the Persians, his son Gallienus reversed the policy in 260, and the church got about forty years of quiet.
- 303–311Eight years of pressure, and the handers-overSome clergy surrendered the Scriptures to be burned to save their people, and were afterward called handers-over, *traditores*, the root of our word traitor. Eusebius, who lived through it, describes executions in Palestine and Egypt in numbers he says he saw with his own eyes. The bitterness over who had held firm would split the North African church in the next era.
In their own words
“Dysentery is a difficult disease to cure. He, who received healing from Paul, led many to faith. Therefore miracles are mostly performed among and for unbelievers.”
CATENA ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 28.9 · on Acts 28:9
“After this had happened, the rest of the sick on the island came and were cured as well.”
“They did not investigate like skeptical people, because they had already believed, but like people who were unaware of the prophets' ancient doctrine. Or rather, they believed more because, after examining the Scriptures, they saw that the circumstances of the incarnation of the Lord agreed …”
CATENA ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 17.12-13 · on Acts 17:12
“As a result, many of them believed, along with quite a few prominent Greek women and men.”
“How did this man, who had only been baptized according to John's baptism, have the Holy Spirit, but his followers did not? To this it must be said that for this reason was he boiling with the Spirit: being enlightened by the grace of God, …”
CATENA ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 18.25 · on Acts 18:26
“And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him in and explained to him the way of God more accurately.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Ammonius of Alexandria at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Set the Gospels side by side in parallel, the work behind Eusebius's canon tables and the column-by-column synopses ever since. Tatian's woven Diatessaron came earlier.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.