Rabbula was born in 350 CE, at Qenneshrin,
which is near
At first Rabbula supported the Antiochian
school of theology, but later he began to admire Cyril of Alexandria, who was
the leading proponent of anti-Nestorian teachings.
Once he
was made bishop of
Tatian, the Syrian student of Justin Martyr, had compiled a
harmony of the books of MaththiYahu, Mark, Luke and Yahuchanan. This harmony, called the Diatessaron
in the Greek, and Evangelion da-Mechallete
[the Good News of the Mixed],
in the Syriac, was widely used in the
Church of the East and the West. When Tatian began to
become extreme in some of his practices, according to later historians, such as
not eating meat or drinking alcohol and abstaining from marriage, another sect
developed. Tatian was excommunicated from the Church
of Rome and declared a heretic. The sect that developed was a puritanical Christian sect known as
the Encratites ("those who exercise self-control"). Because Tatian was considered a heretic, Rabbula,
nearly 300 years later, rejected the use of the Diatesseron,
and in 436 CE, instructed his priests to use, in all the churches, the 4 separate Gospels.
Between
411-435 CE, Rabbula altered an already existing
Aramaic (Syriac) version of the separated Gospels, the Peshitta, which included Shauls
letters and Acts, to
replace the Evangelion da-Mechallete
[Diatessaron], written by Tatian,
around 173 CE. The Peshitta was written in the Estrangela script. It has the same books of what became the
Greek Testament, whose canon was determined by the Church, minus the Jewish
letters of II Peter, II John, III John, Jude, and the Revelations of John, which were
still being debated by the Church. For
the