In contrast to the variety of absolute or personal names of God in the Old Testament, the New Testament uses only two, according to the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia. From the 20th century onwards, "a number of scholars find various evidence for the name [YHWH or related form] in the New Testament.

The Diatessaron is the most prominent early gospel harmony. It was created in the Syriac language by Tatian, an Assyrian early Christian apologist and ascetic. Tatian sought to combine all the textual material he found in the four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - into a single coherent narrative of Jesus's life and death. However, and in contradistinction to most later gospel harmonists, Tatian appears not to have been motivated by any aspiration to validate the four separate canonical gospel accounts; or to demonstrate that, as they stood, they could each be shown as being without inconsistency or error.