Editing Tatian (section)

== Historiography ==
Unlike Justin, who had related the new Christian doctrine to philosophy, Tatian manifests a violent rejection of the forms of philosophical literature with which he is familiar and consequently turns to a safer literary genre: the writing of history.
He thus recapitulates his treatise: <blockquote>Thus I believe I have summarily but with all my rigor analyzed the treatises of the sages, their 'chronologies' (χρόνοι) and their archives (ναγραφαί), each one in particular" (Tatian Oratio ad Graecos 41.2-3).</blockquote>
Tatian gives the voice for the first time in the Christian lexicon to ναγραφή, annals or documentary chronology.
Tatian claims that the Greeks learned historiography from the Egyptians (Oratio ad Graecos 1.1), who possessed exact techniques for chronology (38.1). For the Syriac the Greeks are skillful literati, bad philosophers, but they can never be good historians, for "for those who have a disjointed chronology it is impossible to say what is true of history" (31.4). The Greeks are embellishers of language and, in general, with respect to productive and artistic techniques they are skilled imitators, not creators or discoverers: "stop calling imitations inventions" (Oratio ad Graecos 1.1).
He then asserts that the Greeks received from other cultures all the disciplines that they managed to practice: divination by dreams, prognostication by the stars, observation of the flight of birds, the art of sacrifice, astronomy, magic, geometry, the alphabet, poetry, singing, the mysteries, plastic arts, anagraphic records, the manufacture of musical instruments and metallurgy (1.1-2) he specifies in each case the nation from which the knowledge that the Greeks have of the arts comes from.
However, although he does not recognize the inventive capacity of the Greeks, Tatian describes himself as a prudent historian on the model of [[Thucydides]], whom he never names. He presents himself as a scholar of documentation "with all my rigor <for you>" (Oratio 41.2.13) Thucydides' principle. He also distinguishes between annals and documents that are within the historian's reach and things that fall outside his direct knowledge (Oratio ad Graecos 20.2), another of Thucydides' principles. He then accepts the caution of the Greek historians who rejected the mythological 'archaeology' with which the ancient ethnographers and historians ([[Titus Livy]]) had covered the dark path between the known facts and the legendary origin of each city or ethnic group. Another characteristic of the rigorous historian is the personal inspection of places and cities with the discernment of the various types of documentation and sources:
<blockquote>Well then, all these things I do not expound because I learned them from another but because, traveling through many lands I have been a teacher of your own doctrines and have examined many arts and conceptions and finally I was able to study with attention the variety of statues brought by you to the city of Rome. For I do not seek to confirm my doctrines, as the vulgar do, with opinions foreign to my own, but 'I wish to compose anagraphs' (τὴν ἀναγραφὴν συντάσσσειν βούλομαι) on all those things which by myself I have understood (Oratio ad Graecos 35.1).</blockquote>
What Tatian seems to propose is thus not a philosophy, theology, or exegesis of some revealed text, but a historical truth that attentive study can achieve. 
Nor does he do mythology because in impugning the mythologists as a whole, he uses an argument consonant with the critical historians: Greek theology is mythology, literary invention, with no content of truth. For the first time the voice μυθολογία appears in the Christian lexicon (Oratio ad Graecos 40.1); it specifically signifies the falsification of the philosophy of Moses perpetrated by the Greeks. Their poetry is shameful but, nevertheless, not false in an absolute way, because the 'gods' exist and act: they are the 'demons', who impinge on the deviation of human behavior and are the ones who manage the destructive and evil culture of the whole Greek παιδεία. Greek theology, then, is seen not as a praeparatio evangelica but as a degradatio mosaica, that is, as an imitative corruption of the writings of the Bible (40.1).
Consequently he ends up sustaining several theses, the main one being that Moses is older than all the legislators and writers of humanity (31; 36.2-40.1); that there is no plurality of gods but creational monarchy (Oratio ad Graecos 29.2); that there is no plurality of worlds but only one with only one final judgment to come, which is to be universal (Oratio ad Graecos 6.1).<ref>Alesso, Marta. (2013). Hermeneutics of literary genres: from antiquity to Christianity.Buenos Aires : Institute of Classical Philology. pp. 71-77.</ref>
The literary genre of the Oratio is still that of apologetics, with elements of diatribe and protreptic. Sterling has called it "apologetic historiography."<ref>Sterling, G. (1992) Historiography and Self-definition, Josephos, Luke-Acts and Apologetic Historiography, Leiden.</ref>