Abstract
This chapter examines the implications the Eusebian canon tables had for the reading of the text of the gospels. Although Werner H. Kelber has suggested that the canon tables represent a milestone in the closing of the biblical text, I use the work of anthropologist Jack Goody to argue that, on the contrary, they are an information technology that opens up the text of the fourfold gospel to new kinds of analysis. This claim is then illustrated through a close examination of the modified canon tables apparatus Victor of Capua included along with the text of his Latin translation of Tatian’s Diatessaron in the sixth-century Codex Fuldensis. Victor’s modified version of the Eusebian apparatus made this manuscript the most paratextually complex book that had ever existed in the Latin tradition, allowing the reader to identify the portions of the four gospels Tatian was using for each line of his unum ex quattuor euangelium.
