In the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a scholar lifted a palimpsest from a shelf and found beneath it the oldest surviving translation of the Gospels in Syriac, a language that had carried scripture from Edessa to the edges of the Persian empire. The manuscript she found was damaged, incomplete and hard to read, and it preserved a text whose readings had already been superseded by the time it was copied. That combination, a fourth-century witness to a third-century text, is the reason Syriac still matters to students of the Greek New Testament: it carries readings of the Greek that no Latin witness can show, and it carries them in a form the churches of the East actually used.<\/p>\n
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, and the dialect has a home. It is generally held to have originated in or around Edessa, modern Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, where the kings of the local Abgarid dynasty, whose line can be traced back to about 130 BC, used a script of their own that by the first century had developed distinctive characteristics. The first dated inscription in that script, now called Syriac, comes from Birecik, west of Edessa, and dates to AD 6. From the first century onwards, and increasingly in the second and third, pre-Christian tomb inscriptions survive in stone and mosaic in Urfa and its neighbourhood, and from the third century there are legal texts written on parchment. These early inscriptions preserve archaic features that later standardised Syriac lost, which is one reason they matter to linguistic history: Syriac is by far the best documented of the Aramaic dialects, and it stands closest among them to the older literary Aramaic of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods.<\/p>\n
The city itself was in a peculiar position. Under Roman rule from the time of Pompey in 64 BC, Greek served as the administrative language of urban elites while local Aramaic dialects remained the vernacular of rural agriculturalists, traders and village institutions. Edessa, or Urhay, rose as the intellectual centre of the kingdom of Osroene, and it was there that local Aramaic hardened into Classical Syriac and supplied the vocabulary in which early Christian literature was written. The Constitutio Antoniniana of AD 212 extended Roman citizenship across the eastern provinces, integrating Aramean populations into the civic order, but it did not displace their speech. What it did instead was place a vernacular in closer contact with the institutions of empire, and in the centuries that followed, the language of the traders and the villages became the language of the catechists, the bishops and the debating schools.<\/p>\n
The spread of Syriac was not confined to churches. It served Christians, some Jews in Edessa, polytheists and Manichaeans alike, and it travelled with the trade routes from the Mediterranean to South India and on to Central Asia, Tibet, China and Mongolia. Syriac literature was written by communities living on the borders of the great Near Eastern empires, and it often sheds light on those empires precisely because it was produced outside their official languages. The literary golden age of the language ran from the fourth to the seventh century, producing an extensive corpus of original prose and poetry alongside a long series of translations from Greek. After the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, Syriac was gradually displaced by Arabic as the written language of government and high culture, though it continued in use for several centuries afterwards and survives today in the churches of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey and south-west India, as well as in the neo-Aramaic dialect Turoyo still spoken around Midyat.<\/p>\n
The script of the manuscripts followed the language. Syriac script began as an Aramaic script of the Achaemenid Persian period, adopted by the Aramaeans of Syria, who had themselves borrowed it from the Phoenicians, and it became the vehicle for a lingua franca used across the Persian empire. After the fall of Persia, local variants developed at Jerusalem, Petra and Palmyra, and at Edessa. There were at least two early forms, a monumental script for public inscriptions and a cursive script for legal texts and everyday writing; from the monumental form there developed in the early Christian period the elegant book hand used for copying biblical and theological texts. The first dated literary manuscript in this script is dated to 411, but it already shows such maturity that the scribal tradition must have been established some time before. This formal script came to be called Estrangela, a word probably of Greek origin meaning rounded. A cursive form continued alongside it and became the basis of the script called Serto, used for literary texts from the eighth century and particularly associated with the West Syriac churches, while a third, more angular variant developed in the East, associated with the Church of the East and known from about 600. Vowels were not fully represented in writing for a long time, though some diacritical points were used to separate otherwise identical consonants; eventually, as in Hebrew and Arabic, Syriac acquired vowel signs placed above and below the letters, in two systems that probably emerged in the eighth century, a western system adapted from Greek vowels and a little later an eastern system consisting of points.<\/p>\n
The scriptoria of south-eastern Anatolia worked at a scale and with an ambition that can still be measured in the shelfmarks of surviving codices. On the limestone plateau of Tur Abdin, the Mountain of the Servants of God, bounded by the Tigris to the north and east and by Mardin to the west, some eighty villages held roughly a hundred churches and seventy monasteries in the nineteenth century. Mor Gabriel, claimed in textual sources to have been founded in AD 397 although most of its buildings date from the sixth century, preserves a main church with opus sectile pavement and remarkable wall mosaics carrying a Greek inscription executed by workmen from Antioch; together with the mosaics at St Catherine’s, these are the only sixth-century Byzantine mosaics surviving east of Constantinople. Deyrul Zafaran, whose church and burial chamber date from the sixth century, was the seat of the Syriac Orthodox patriarch between 1293 and 1932, and the twelfth century is remembered in Tur Abdin as a time of literary renewal, the period of John, bishop of Mardin, who built many churches and monasteries. In those churches and monasteries the liturgy was and still is celebrated in ancient Syriac, the Edessan dialect of Aramaic, which serves as a bridge language in the translation movements from Greek to Arabic.<\/p>\n
Before the separate Gospels there was a harmony of them. The Diatessaron, the Syriac name meaning the Gospel of the mixed, is usually dated to the early 170s and is generally attributed to Tatian, probably in Syriac rather than Greek, though its authorship and original language remain debated. It was quoted by Aphrahat and by Ephrem, and Ephrem composed a commentary on it that preserves much of its text; no copy of the Diatessaron itself survives, and Ephrem’s commentary, in a manuscript now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, is the only Syriac witness to it that still exists. The Diatessaron remained in liturgical use until at least the early fifth century, when it lost its canonical status and was replaced by the four separate Gospels in the form now called the Old Syriac.<\/p>\n
Two defective manuscripts of the Old Syriac Gospel survive, and they are the oldest substantial witnesses to the Greek New Testament in any translation. The first is the Curetonianus, now London, British Library, Add MS 14451, an 88-leaf vellum codex in two columns of 27 to 33 lines, its text area roughly 210 by 175 millimetres within a leaf of 305 by 245 millimetres, written in a bold Estrangela of the latter half of the fifth century. The second is the Sinaiticus, Sinai Syriac 30, a palimpsest of the fourth or fifth century discovered in 1892 by Agnes Smith Lewis at St Catherine’s, whose upper text was subsequently identified as a collection of lives of holy women. The manuscripts are later than the texts they carry, which may be as old as the second or third century, the Sinaitic being the earlier of the two; and because they differ from each other, they represent two recensions of the Old Syriac rather than one.<\/p>\n
That difference matters, because it exposes the character of the Old Syriac text. Readings of what is usually called the Western type occur in both manuscripts, and they may be attributed either to the Greek exemplar behind the translation or to the influence of Tatian’s Diatessaron, so the question cannot be settled from the manuscripts alone. There is also some evidence of an Old Syriac Gospel text of the Caesarean type, a distinct family associated with the library of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine. Traces of Palestinian dialect survive in the Sinaitic recension, which has led some scholars to argue that its translators were converts from Judaism; the Curetonian text has largely been purged of Palestinian elements and revised towards a later Greek text. Whether the Old Syriac was made in Edessa is disputed: the older opinion that it originated there was rejected in favour of Adiabene, north of the Tigris in the Armenian highlands, and the origin of the version remains an open question.<\/p>\n
The physical history of the Curetonianus is written in its own colophons and marginal notes. A note on folio 1r states that the manuscript was formerly the property of the monk Habub, who brought it to the monastery of Bayt Yaldat Alaha in the city of Saqita, and a note following the Gospel of Luke on folio 88r records that it was repaired at the same monastery in the year 1533 of the Seleucid era, that is 1222 of the common era. It was brought to the British Museum from the convent of St Mary Deipara, the Monastery of the Syrians in the Egyptian desert, by Henry Tattam in 1842; three leaves of it are now in Berlin. William Cureton, who first published it in 1858, gave it his name, and Francis Crawford Burkitt edited it again in 1904 with the readings of the Sinai palimpsest alongside. The manuscript is defective: the British Library catalogue records the end of the Gospel of Mark with more complete versions of the other three Gospels, the text of Matthew occupying folios 1v to 38v and amended at several points to bring it into line with later recensions.<\/p>\n
What the Old Syriac preserves is visible when the versions are set side by side. Sebastian Brock’s edition prints John 1 to 12 in parallel columns for the Sinaiticus, the Curetonianus and the Peshitta, and the differences accumulate as the passage proceeds. At John 6:9 the Sinaitic has a boy who is there with five loaves and two fish on him, the Curetonianus a boy who is here and has on him five loaves and two fish, the Peshitta a boy who is here and has on him five loaves of barley and two fish. At 6:12 the Sinaitic reads gather the fragments so that nothing perishes, the Peshitta so that nothing at all perishes. At 6:13 the Sinaitic has them filling twelve baskets with what was left over from those five loaves of barley and those two fish, and then adds that the men who were eating of this bread were five thousand, a clause absent from the Peshitta. These are the sorts of small divergences that accumulate in a tradition long exposed to the pressure of a changing Greek exemplar, and they are the reason the Old Syriac is read not as a single text but as two recensions of a family.<\/p>\n
The revision that replaced the Old Syriac in the churches was the Peshitta, and the name itself tells a story of institutional memory. It is used both for the translation of the Old Testament made in the second century on the basis of the Hebrew text, and for the revision of the Old Syriac New Testament which became the standard version around the year 400. The name is not attested until the ninth century, when Mushe bar Kipho, who died in 903, used it in his commentary on the Hexaemeron and his introduction to the Psalter, explaining that he knew of two translations in Syriac, the Peshitta and the version made from the Greek Septuagint by Paul of Tella. The word is usually taken to mean the plain or straightforward translation, which is an apt description of a text designed to be read aloud and to be used.<\/p>\n
The Peshitta settled into a fixed canon. It contains twenty-two books of the New Testament, lacking the Second and Third Epistles of John, Second Peter, Jude and Revelation, and it also omits the passage about the woman taken in adultery at John 7:53 to 8:11, as do the Old Syriac and the Harklean, along with a few isolated verses such as Luke 22:17 to 18. In the eastern tradition those books were preserved in other versions, most famously in the remnants of the Philoxenian text of 507\/8, published by John Gwynn in 1897 and 1909, of which the oldest dated manuscript, British Library Add MS 14,623, was written in 823. The canon of the Peshitta is therefore not a decision against the Antilegomena so much as the outcome of a working compromise, and it shaped the liturgical year of the eastern churches for well over a millennium.<\/p>\n
How the Peshitta came into being has been argued over for more than a century. Francis Crawford Burkitt attributed it to Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, who is said to have vigorously suppressed the use of the Diatessaron in the Syrian church. Arthur Vooebus challenged that attribution in 1951, illustrating how Rabbula’s own writings and those of his contemporaries do not bear it out, though Edessa, with its famous theological school, may well have been the place from which the final form of the revision was propagated. Sebastian Brock accepted the later suggestion while doubting the older one, remarking that the theory that Rabbula himself made the revision now seems unlikely. A third possibility is that the revision was the work of several hands over a long period, and that the name of Rabbula became attached to its final phase. What is clear is the direction of travel: the revision brought the Old Syriac closer to the Greek, and it did so decisively enough to be retained by both sections of the Syrian church after the division of 431.<\/p>\n
The Peshitta is therefore both a translation and a witness, and its character as a witness has been assessed with care. The history of the Syriac versions is characterised by a steady gravitation towards the Greek text, and in general the Peshitta is closer to the Greek than the Old Syriac was, though on occasion it preserves a Diatessaronic reading where the Old Syriac reflects the later Byzantine text. It retains readings that agree with the Western text type, those of Codex Bezae and the Old Latin, but many of its readings cannot be linked to any extant Greek witness at all. Those unique readings are what give the Peshitta its standing in New Testament textual criticism, as the work of the British scholar Gwilliam showed early in the twentieth century, and the careful collation of the Pauline and Catholic Epistle manuscripts by Barbara Aland and Angelika Juckel between 1986 and 2002 has confirmed that the text of those epistles underwent no major revision during its transmission. The price of that stability is visible in the marginal notes of the Old Syriac, which record readings that the Peshitta silently discarded.<\/p>\n
Its geographical spread was correspondingly wide. The Peshitta was the working Bible of the Syriac Orthodox, of the Church of the East and of the Maronite and Melkite communities, in churches from Anatolia and the Caucasus through Iraq and Syria to the Lebanon and the Arabian peninsula, and its versions were carried by missionaries as far as south India, where the Syriac Christian communities of St Thomas are traditionally traced to the first century. The old links between the eastern text and the Hebrew Bible are worth noting in a single sentence, since they are the subject of another essay: the Old Testament Peshitta often preserves readings that belong to a Syriac Pentateuch tradition rather than to the Hebrew text behind it, and in the small number of demonstrable cases it offers a correction to the Masoretic tradition it was thought to depend on. Its Old Testament text is in fact a first-rate witness to the Hebrew Bible, closely resembling the Masoretic text in its vocalisation as well as its wording, though that line of enquiry belongs elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Philoxenus of Mabbug, who died in 523, was troubled by the same problem that every translator of the Greek faces: the freedom with which a text can be rendered in another language. He was unhappy with the loose renderings in the Peshitta of verses with theological weight, among them Matthew 1:1 and 1:18 and Hebrews 5:7 and 10:5, passages that bear directly on the question of the incarnation, and he said as much in his commentary on the prologue of John, complaining that the older translators had made mistakes in many things, whether intentionally or through ignorance, and that these mistakes concerned not only what was taught about the economy in the flesh. In 507\/8 he commissioned a new translation of the New Testament, executed by his chorepiscopus Polycarpos, in which the Antilegomena were rendered for the first time. That version, the Philoxenian, survives only in quotations preserved in Philoxenus’s own commentaries, and even those had already been mislabelled, the text that survives in manuscript being in fact the Harklean version that was later given the misleading title of a Philoxenian text.<\/p>\n
The Harklean version was produced by Thomas of Harqel, or Tumo, in 615\/16, at the Enaton near Alexandria, that is in the holy convent of the Antonines. The subscriptions to the Harklean Gospels, to Acts and to the Pauline epistles record the year 927 of Alexander in the fourth indiction. Its method was that of a scholarly recension, a turroso, and it was built on two principles. The first was a decisive turn towards the Greek, a mirror translation that keeps close to the wording of the Greek exemplar, following the practice of the Syro-Hexapla, the Syriac rendering of the fifth column of Origen’s Hexapla that had been made by Paul of Tella in 616\/17 and that reproduced the Hexaplaric signs. The second was the introduction of a critical dimension into the history of the Syriac New Testament. Tumo did not simply translate a Greek manuscript: he took a translated model and supplemented it with textual material drawn from additional Greek manuscripts, and then he presented that material so that it could be read as variants of the Greek truth rather than confused with it. Additions and omissions from his Greek model could be set in the main text, while exchanges of words or passages had to be placed in the margin and tied to the corresponding word in the text by a graphic sign. The obel was used to mark Syriac words which did not match the Greek but were needed for an intelligible rendering. In modern terms, Tumo attached a critical apparatus to his version, and in doing so he was a pupil of Origen.<\/p>\n
The history of the manuscripts shows how completely that apparatus was later allowed to decay. About a hundred manuscripts of the Harklean survive, ranging from the eighth to the nineteenth century, but only about twenty are furnished with the marginal and asterisked additions. The oldest dated Gospel manuscript, Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. I,40, written in 756, already omits all the marginal annotations, although Greek notes remain in it. At the other end of the range one of the latest manuscripts, Oxford, New College 333, of the twelfth or thirteenth century, which carries the whole New Testament and breaks off at Hebrews 11:27, has the fullest margin of any. The first printed edition of the Harklean, published between 1778 and 1803, was based on this late manuscript, which in fact accumulates the marginalia of two different stages of development. The dominance of the printed text was only recently balanced by Vatican Syriac 268, a manuscript from the Nitrian collection in the British Library which preserves the most original text and margin of the Harklean Gospels, with a large number of unrevised non-Byzantine and pre-Byzantine readings. It carries a date of 1170 in the Seleucid era, that is 858\/59, on a nearly illegible folio, but that is not the date of the manuscript itself, and it is assigned to the eighth or ninth century on palaeographical grounds.<\/p>\n
A second revisional stage, traceable in the Gospels only, is ascribed to Dionysios bar Salibi according to a subscription in Oxford, New College 334 and British Library Add MS 17,124 of 1233\/34, both with marginal notes. Connected with this stage are some fifteen late manuscripts, of which Baghdad, Chaldean Monastery no. 25, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale Syriac 53 and Oxford, New College 333 are furnished with marginal and asterisked annotations. The rarity of the Harklean manuscripts outside the Gospels is severe: only two manuscripts of Acts are available today, Oxford, New College 333 and Cambridge, University Library Add. 1700 of 1169\/70, and only the first of them carries the marginal annotations. St Mark 37 in Jerusalem is the only early witness to the Pauline letters, and Revelation is represented by some ten late manuscripts, one of which, Mardin, Orthodox 36\/2, has a subscription together with marginal and asterisked readings.<\/p>\n
The marginal readings repay close attention, and the newest study of them shows why. Piotr Jutkiewicz has examined four readings in the Harklean Gospel of John that are ancient, rare and unexpectedly transmitted by a relatively late translation. The first is at John 2:1, where the Harklean carries a note that the wine had run out because the wine of the wedding had been used up. The note stands in the margin in some manuscripts and in the text in others, and in the manuscripts where it stands in the text it has been transposed from John 2:3 to the middle of John 2:1, where it anticipates the moment of the miracle and makes less sense. A reading of the same kind appears in one Greek manuscript, in several Vetus Latina manuscripts, and in the Ethiopic tradition. The other three readings concern the wedding at Cana, the addition after John 3:36 and a variant of John 4:24. No direct dependence between these witnesses can be demonstrated, but the point is not dependence: the readings must have existed earlier in Greek manuscripts whose loss has left them visible only here. Jutkiewicz draws the larger lesson from this, that readings preserved in late witnesses may have ancient origins, and that text-critical humility requires the assumption that we know less than we would like to. The Harklean served for generations of Syriac Christians as the Greek text, sometimes different from the standard Peshitta, and commentators such as Dionysios bar Salibi and Bar Hebraeus commented on those differences, treating textual plurality as a richness to be appreciated.<\/p>\n
The Palestinian Syriac stands apart from this eastern sequence, and it has an older claim to the Jerusalem line of transmission. It is a distinct Western Aramaic dialect, not a variant of Edessan Syriac, and its Gospel text survives in lectionaries rather than in continuous codices. Agnes Smith Lewis re-edited the text from two manuscripts at Sinai together with Paul de Lagarde’s edition of the Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum, and her 1899 volume remains the standard edition. She called the three manuscripts Codex A, Codex B and Codex C in the order of their dates and of their discovery. Codex A is the Vatican manuscript, dated 1030, whose colophon, copied by the Maronite bibliographers Stephen Evodius and Joseph Simon Assemani, records that it was written by the presbyter Elias of Abbud in the monastery of Abbot Moses in the city of Antioch of the Arabs in the year 1341 of Alexander, and bequeathed by him with other manuscripts to a monastery he founded at Mar Elias in Kaukab, on the condition that it should never be bought nor sold. There is no record of how it reached the Vatican Library, though Adler examined it at Rome in 1781 and described it in a book published in 1789. It is a vellum codex of 196 leaves, written in the Palestinian Syriac character in two columns and arranged as a lectionary for the year, and it is unique in containing the story of the woman taken in adultery, at John 7:53 to 8:11, for the feast of St Pelagia, a passage absent from the continuous Peshitta and from the Old Syriac. Codex B, of 1104, was discovered at Sinai in 1892, and Codex C, of 1118, in 1893 by Rendel Harris. Lewis gave the text of Codex B with the variants of A and C in parallel columns, working at Sinai in the spring of 1897 with her twin sister Margaret Gibson, who revised the proofs of Codex B against the original while Lewis did the same for Codex C. The Acts and Epistles lectionary she published in 1897 as part of the Studia Sinaitica came from a manuscript acquired at Cairo in 1895, a volume she thought might have been used by the Syrian church, though the date of its pages is uncertain. The Cambridge edition of 2012 reissues the work with a glossary by Margaret Gibson and critical notes by Eberhard Nestle.<\/p>\n
Most of the important biblical manuscripts that survive today come from three ancient collections in the Near East: the monastery of Dayr al-Suryan, the Monastery of St Catherine at Mount Sinai, and Dayr al-Zafaran near Mardin. A small part of the Nitrian collection from Dayr al-Suryan was acquired by the Vatican Library in the eighteenth century, and its larger part came to the British Museum during the nineteenth; the Sinaitic collection was never moved, remaining in place from the sixth century, the time of the emperor Justinian, until the present day, while the manuscripts of Dayr al-Zafaran went to Mardin, to Homs and to Damascus. Almost every early Syriac witness to the New Testament therefore passed through one of these three doors, and the pattern of their dispersal is itself a document of the history of the communities that produced them.<\/p>\n
Dayr al-Suryan, the Monastery of the Syrians, stands in the Wadi al-Natrun, the ancient Scetis, halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. Its foundation as an Egyptian monastery probably goes back to the sixth century, but the earliest evidence of a Syrian presence there, at first mainly monks from Tagrit, dates from about AD 800, and a recently discovered inscription shows that Syrians took part in rebuilding the monastery in 818\/19 after it had suffered damage. The community became known as the Monastery of the Syrians within a few decades, and it flourished in the first half of the tenth century, when Mushe of Nisibis was abbot and added 250 volumes to the collection, brought back from Mesopotamia between 927 and 932. A revival followed around 1200 and in the thirteenth century, with new manuscripts acquired and new wall paintings produced, and in 1516 there were 43 monks in the monastery, 18 Syrians and 25 Egyptians. The manuscripts it preserved include the earliest dated Syriac manuscript, of 411, and the great majority of all surviving pre-tenth-century Syriac manuscripts, together with the principal witnesses to the writings of Aphrahat, Ephrem, Philoxenus of Mabbug and Severus of Antioch. No other site in the Middle East has yielded so rich a treasure, and the colophons of those manuscripts remain the main source for the history of the monastery itself.<\/p>\n
The dispersal of the Nitrian collection was the great bibliographic event of the nineteenth century. Henry Tattam brought manuscripts from the monastery to the British Museum from 1838 onwards, and the series he amassed there, Add MS 14425 to 14741, remains one of the great concentrations of Syriac manuscripts in the world. The British Library now holds about a hundred Syriac New Testament manuscripts, roughly sixty of them from the first millennium and around thirty dated to the fifth to seventh centuries. Among them are the Curetonianus, Add MS 14451, and early Peshitta whole-New-Testament codices such as Add MS 14470 of the fifth or sixth century and Add MS 14448 of 700\/01. The oldest dated Gospel manuscripts are of the sixth century: Dayr al-Suryan 10, dated 510; British Library Add MS 14,459, folios 67 to 169, which falls between 528 and 538 and whose colophon is damaged; Vatican Syriac 12 of 548; and the Rabbula Gospels, Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Plut. I,56, of 586, a codex whose illustrations are as famous as its text. One Gospel codex singled out for its archaic orthography is Cod. Phillipps 1388 in Berlin, which is a Peshitta codex but one that preserves a considerable Old Syriac textual heritage. The earliest Peshitta manuscripts of Acts and the Catholic Epistles date from the sixth and seventh centuries, and the earliest of the Pauline letters are likewise of the fifth and sixth centuries.<\/p>\n
Berlin’s collection, of roughly 390 Syriac manuscripts, was acquired and catalogued mainly by Eduard Sachau between 1845 and 1930, with the later acquisitions described by Julius Assfalg in 1963. Its strength lies in the older parchment Bibles, among them Phillipps 1388, which contains the canons of Eusebius and must, on that evidence, have been written before 677, and in the large collections of ecclesiastical poetry from Tur Abdin, such as Sachau 349 and 355, and the patristic codices such as Sachau 220. The magnificent manuscript Sachau 304, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century and from Tur Abdin in south-eastern Turkey, names its scribe Emmanuel and contains the Gospel text after the Peshitta arranged as a lectionary, while Sachau 322, written in 1241 by the monk Isaac and the priest Sahda, has a particularly fine Estrangela script. Sachau commissioned copies on his travels in the East, and those copies remain valuable witnesses to modern Neo-Aramaic dialects such as Fellihi and Torani. The Oxford and Cambridge collections of the same period, and the catalogue of William Wright published in 1870, which remains the standard description of the British Museum’s acquisitions, completed a picture of Syriac textual scholarship that is still being worked through.<\/p>\n
Modern custodianship has changed the shape of the evidence. The first printed edition of the Harklean Gospels, published between 1778 and 1803, rested on a single late manuscript and distorted the version for two centuries until George Anton Kiraz’s comparative edition of the Syriac Gospels in 1996 gave scholars the Sinaiticus, the Curetonianus, the Peshitta and the Harklean in parallel columns, with Vatican Syriac 268 supplying a text far older than the printed one. Digital work has widened the field further: the Digital Syriac Corpus and the catalogue work published through Syriaca.org have made manuscript sigla and descriptions available across the scholarly world, and the Cambridge edition of the Palestinian Syriac lectionary has put Lewis’s work into the hands of students who could not read the 1899 printing. What has changed least is the substance of the problem that made these manuscripts worth the trouble of rescue. The readings in the Harklean margin at John 2, the Palestinian lectionary’s inclusion of the woman taken in adultery for the feast of St Pelagia, the archaic readings of the Curetonianus in John 6, the 411 manuscript of Dayr al-Suryan and the Rabbula Gospels of 586: each of them is a piece of the Greek New Testament preserved in a form that the Latin West never received, and each is a reminder that the history of the text is not a single line but a long branching conversation between a Greek original and the languages into which it was carried.<\/p>\n
In the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a scholar lifted a palimpsest from a shelf and found beneath it the oldest surviving…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":649,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[232,685,689,341,684,683,687,682,688,686],"class_list":["post-648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text-transmission","tag-aramaic","tag-harklean","tag-manichaeism","tag-new-testament","tag-old-syriac","tag-peshitta","tag-st-catherines","tag-syriac","tag-text-criticism","tag-tur-abdin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/masoretes.online\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}