The early history of the Syriac versions of the Gospels is as important as it is tenuous. Theoretically the
Syriac version developed like this:
Syria
was evangelized in the first century, and for a while, the Christians there were
content to use the Greek text of the Gospels.
In the 170’s, Tatian, who had been a student of Justin Martyr in
Rome,
produced the
Diatessaron, a narrative
consisting of the contents of the four Gospels blended into one non-repeating
narrative.
The
Diatessaron was very popular in Syriac-speaking churches.
Tatian’s doctrine, however, was considered
by some church-leaders to be overly ascetic, to the point that he dogmatically opposed marriage and meat-eating.
As the scent of heresy from his teachings was
detected – rightly or wrongly – in his Gospel-harmony, a new Syriac translation
of the four Gospels was made.
This work
exists today primarily in two manuscripts (and also in a lectionary,
Syriac Gr.Pat. 1 at the Jerusalem Library of the Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark): the
Curetonian Syriac and the
Sinaitic Syriac.
 |
Luke 21:12b-26a in the
Curetonian Syriac manuscript. |
The texts
displayed in the Curetonian Syriac manuscript and in the
Sinaitic Syriac manuscript
are closely related, but they are far from uniform.
Both manuscripts are heavily damaged, and
therefore one cannot compare their contents throughout the Gospels (in the
Curetonian manuscript, for example, nothing remains of the Gospel of Mark except
Mark
16:17-20).
Where the same passage is extant in both
manuscripts, however, it is obvious that they share some readings which are almost
or entirely unique to these two witnesses.
The following 14 agreements are samples:
●
Mt. 1:22 – the prophet’s names is
supplied, so as to read, “by
the mouth
of Isaiah the prophet.”
●
Mt. 3:10 – “the axe has
arrived” rather than “the axe has been
laid.”
● Mt. 4:17 –
The words “Repent” and “for” are absent.
● Mt. 13:33
– Both manuscripts have simply “
Another
parable:” with no additional phrase (such as “He spoke to them” or “He
spoke” or “He gave, saying”).
●
Mt. 15:27 – The Canaanite woman’s
response ends with the words, “
and live.”
● Mt. 20:11
– The verse begins with “And when they
saw,”
instead of “And when they had received.”
● Mt. 20:17
– The text says that Jesus took “
his
twelve,” without the word “disciples.”
● Lk. 2:48
– In the Old Syriac text, Mary’s statement ends, “anxiously
and with much grief.”
● Lk. 8:24
– The words “and they ceased” are not in either manuscript.
● Lk. 20:46
– Instead of stating that the scribes desire to walk around
in long robes, both Old Syriac
manuscripts say that the scribes desire to walk around “
in porches.”
Apparently the
text of Luke in both the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts descends from an
ancestor-manuscript in which, due to a mistake by either the reader or the writer,
the Greek word for “robes” (στολαις) was misconstrued as the similar word for “porches”
(στοαις).
● Jn. 4:31
– This verse is thoroughly paraphrased:
“And
His disciples were insisting that He should eat bread with them.”
● Jn. 5:21
– At the end of the verse, instead of stating that the Son gives life
to whom He will, the Curetonian and
Sinaitic manuscripts say, “
to those who
believe in Him.”
● Jn. 6:47
– Both Old Syriac manuscripts say, “He who believes
in God” instead of “
in Me”
(and instead of “He who believes” with no specific object supplied – the Alexandrian
reading).
● Jn.
7:21 – Both manuscripts add the phrase, “in
your sight.”
(For many more unusual readings shared by these two manuscripts, see
Agnes Smith Lewis’
A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinai Palimpsest , published in
1894.)
 |
Matthew 1:1-17 is on this damaged
page of the Sinaitic Syriac palimpsest,
under the larger and clearer text. |
The distinct agreements between the Curetonian
and Sinaitic manuscripts practically compel the conclusion that was reached in
the early 1900s by researcher Frederick Burkitt:
“The Sinai palimpsest and Cureton’s
manuscript are clearly representatives of one and the same translation.”
This translation, however, seems to have
never been very popular among the Syriac-speaking churches; the Old Syriac
Gospels never caught up with the
Diatessaron’s
head start.
Even the
two copies that we possess have
barely
survived:
the Sinaitic Syriac is a
palimpsest; it has survived, not because anyone valued it as a copy of the
Gospels, but because a copyist in the year 778 erased its Gospels-text and recycled
the pages as material on which to write part of a later composition (
a collection of stories about female saints and martyrs).
Its faded Gospels-text was recovered, following
its discovery at St. Catherine’s monastery in the 1890’s, by the gentle application of ammonium
hydrosulfide to the parchment.
Part of
the Curetonian Syriac manuscript, likewise, was recycled as the fly-sheets, or
binding-pages, of another Syriac manuscript.
(
William Cureton published the main portion in 1858; the additional pages were
published by William Wright in 1872, and were described by Henry M. Harman in the
Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis in 1885.)
Meanwhile, a dozen Peshitta manuscripts exist that were made in the 400s-600s.
Although
the agreements of the
Sinaitic Syriac and Curetonian Syriac imply that
they share a common source, these manuscripts also disagree in important ways.
For example, in the Sinaitic Syriac
manuscript, the text of Mark ends at the end of 16:8; in the Curetonian Syriac,
the entire text of Mark has been lost due to damage except Mark 16:17-20 (with
“in their hands” in verse 18),
implying the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20.
And in the Gospel of Luke, the Sinaitic Syriac does not contain Luke
22:43-44 or Luke 23:34a, but the Curetonian Syriac includes both passages. (Again,
Agnes Smith Lewis helpfully identifies their disagreements, as well as their disagreements
with the
Textus Receptus.)
 |
Romans 7, in a Peshitta manuscript
which has some unusual readings,
Sinai Syriac MS 3 (Schoyen MS
2530), from the 500s. |
In the
early 400s, a different Syriac translation, known as the
Peshitta, (a designation first used for it in the Middle Ages, meaning
plain, as opposed to the later
Harklean Version, which featured many textual notes) rapidly replaced
both the
Diatessaron and the Old Syriac.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus (393-457; his bishopric began in 423, more or less)
recorded that in more than 200 churches, copies of the
Diatessaron – rather than manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John – were being used.
He arranged for
the removal of these copies of the
Diatessaron,
and replaced them with copies of the four Gospels.
The textual character of these freshly
introduced 200 copies is not known.
If
they were copies of the Old Syriac, resembling the Curetonian and Sinaitic
Syriac manuscripts, then they must have been like a wave that washed away the
Diatessaron only to be washed away itself by a rapid increase in the popularity
of the Peshitta.
The
production-date of the
Peshitta is not entirely resolved.
In the late 1700s, Johann David Michaelis
made a detailed case for the position that the Peshitta’s text of the Gospels
was translated directly from Greek manuscripts in the early 100s.
His main reasons for this view are as
follows:
●
Melito,
c. 170, refers to a Syriac version when commenting on Genesis 22:13.
●
Manichaeus (or, Mani), the founder of Manichaeism in the mid-200s in
Mesopotamia,
quoted from the New Testament, without knowledge of Greek.
● The
Peshitta is used by various Syriac denominations which adhered to diverse Christological
schools of thought that emerged in the early-mid 400s; it must have been
produced prior to these divisions, inasmuch as the members of one sect would
not embrace a version produced by another one.
● The text
of Hebrews in the Peshitta has some characteristics which indicate that it was translated separately from the other Pauline epistles, as if the other epistles were part of a collection that lacked Hebrews. This
suggests an old line of descent.
● The
Peshitta does not include the book of Revelation and five of the General
Epistles (Second Peter, Second John, Third John, and Jude); this indicates an
origin prior to the councils in the 300s which decreed their inclusion.
● The
Peshitta was quoted by Ephrem Syrus, who wrote in the mid-300s.
Inasmuch as
the Peshitta and the Byzantine text of the Gospels agree far more often than
they disagree, the premise that the Peshitta was made in the 100s was used as
a defense of the genuineness of the Byzantine Text in the late 1800s.
In the 1897
Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, one of the
advocates of the Westcott-Hort text referred to the Peshitta as the
“sheet-anchor” of the pro-Byzantine position, meaning that it was seldom used, and was only a last resort.
In
1904, Frederick Burkitt systematically deconstructed the case for such an early
origin for the Peshitta, arguing, first – with the benefit of the prior
discoveries of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Syriac manuscripts – that although an
early Syriac translation existed, it was not necessarily the Peshitta, and,
second, that when compositions which have been falsely
attributed to Ephrem Syrus are set aside, there are no clear utilizations of the Peshitta in
his genuine works.
Burkitt
proposed that the Peshitta was a revision undertaken by the Syriac bishop
Rabbula (d. 425) in the city of
Edessa.
(This individual should not be confused with the identically named copyist who made the Rabbula Gospels, an illustrated copy of the Peshitta Gospels made in 586.) As evidence of this, Burkitt emphasized a
statement found in the biography of Rabbula, which was written later in the
400s:
“He translated by the wisdom of
God that was in him the New Testament from Greek into Syriac, because of its
variations, exactly as it was.”
Burkitt’s theory became very popular
very quickly, and it accelerated the general acceptance of the Westcott-Hort
revision by removing what had previously been a major objection against
it.
However, Burkitt’s theory was not
the last word on the production-date of the Peshitta.
At least one other scenario is feasible:
that the Curetonian and Sinatic manuscripts
are the remains of the translation undertaken by Rabbula and that this revision
was popularized, temporarily, by Theodoret.
In support of
this theory, it may be observed that title of Matthew in the Curetonian Syriac appears to call it the
distinct (
“Mepharreshe”) Gospel of Matthew (as opposed to
the
blended Gospel, the Diatessaron).
Following the end of the Gospel of John, a colophon in the Sinaitic
Syriac begins, “Here ends the
Evangelion
da-Mepharreshe, four books.”
This is
the same term that was used by Rabbula in a decree:
“Let the elders and deacons diligently ensure
that ever church shall possess and use a copy of the
distinct Gospels.”
A Syriac
writer named
Bar-Bahlul, writing in the 900s, made the following pertinent
comment on the text of Matthew 27:16;17, referring to the name of the criminal
who was released at Jesus’ trial:
“His
name was Jesus, for so it is written in the
Evangelion
da-Mepharreshe.”
The Peshitta does
not have this reading, but the Sinaitic Syriac does.
(Matthew 27 is not extant in the Curetonian
Syriac.)
It is also
possible that Rabbula inherited not only the Syriac
Diatessaron and a form of
the Old Syriac Gospels represented by the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts,
but also the Peshitta Gospels, and he used whichever he preferred.
It would be strange for the creator and
advocate of the Peshitta to utilize the text of its rivals – but when one
examines Rabbula’s Syriac translation of
De
Recta Fide, a composition by his contemporary Cyril of Alexandria, that is
exactly what he does when rendering a quotation of John 3:34: Rabbula, instead
of reproducing Cyril’s quotation, or replacing it with the Peshitta’s
rendering, replaces it with the rendering that appears in the Curetonian Syriac,
verbatim.
The scholar Matthew Black has proposed
that this phenomenon is best accounted for by the theory that although Rabbula
was largely responsible for the Peshitta (in roughly the same way that William
Tyndale was responsible for the English New Testament), it continued to undergo
tweaking in the 400s, and John 3:34 was one passage in which such tweaking
occurred.
Against this theory, the
erudite Estonian researcher Arthur Vööbus argued that in addition to the
Curetonian/Sinaitic Syriac text, there was a third Syriac transmission-stream
which may be considered a “Pre-Peshitta” (in which case Rabbula’s work may be
more comparable to that of Coverdale, rather than Tyndale).
The evidence pertaining to the early Syriac text of the Gospels has complex implications. Mixture is everywhere. The textual character of the text of the Sinaitic Syriac is somewhat Western, resembling the text of Codex D, but it often disagrees with D and aligns with B – sometimes almost uniquely, as in Luke 9:2 (where both witnesses do not have the words
“the sick” at the end of the verse). Similarly, the text of the Peshitta is
mainly Byzantine, but far from fully Byzantine. (Among the most significant disagreements between the Peshitta and the Byzantine Text is the Peshitta’s non-inclusion of John 7:53-8:11; none of the early Syriac versions have this passage.)
Because of
the complexity of the evidence, it is difficult to conclusively posit a simple chain
of events in which the Peshitta is the offspring of the Old
Syriac.
For example:
in John 16:21, the Peshitta and the Sinaitic
Syriac (the Curetonian Syriac is not extant here) both refer to “the
day of her deliverance,” rather than
the
hour.
It would be easy to conclude that the
Peshitta inherited this reading from the Old Syriac, and that it is the result
of loose translation-work.
However, this
is also the reading found in John
16:21
in
Codex Bezae and in
Papyrus 66, the earliest Greek manuscript of this verse;
nothing precludes the idea that it entered the Peshitta from a Greek exemplar.
Likewise
consider the rival Syriac readings in Luke 4:29:
the Sinaitic Syriac says that the citizens of
Nazareth intended to
hang Jesus, but the Peshitta states that
they intended to throw Jesus over the cliff.
This reading in the Peshitta
could
be the result of a fresh consultation of Greek manuscripts in the early 400s
in which such errors were weeded out of the Syriac text, but it could just as
easily descend from a Syriac transmission-line that existed side-by-side with
that of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Syriac texts – a transmission-line in which
the Syriac text was not
improved, but
was simply
better than its
rivals.
There is some evidence that such
a text (alongside the
Diatessaron) was
used by
Aphrahat in the 330’s – about the same time when Codex Vaticanus was
made – but this idea awaits new research to be confirmed or dissolved.
The question of the origin of the
Peshitta is more complicated today than it was when Burkitt wrote.
Burkitt treated the Peshitta as one
monolithic revision, whereas subsequent studies of early Peshitta manuscripts,
as well as analyses of Syriac writers (such as Rabbula) have shown that its
development was more complex.
In 1897 at
the
Oxford Debate on the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, A. C. Headlam proposed
that the uniformity of the text of Peshitta-manuscripts from the 400s-600s “
shows almost conclusively that the texts must have been derived from one source, which could not have been very remote.” In 1904, Burkitt, likewise, submitted that “a
long and complicated history” of the Old Syriac version “is proved by the
extensive variation” between the Sinaitic and Curetonian manuscripts.
The study of manuscripts such as Codex Phillips 11388, Dawkins 3 (see the meticulous work of Andreas Juckel for
details), and Vatican Syriac MS 12 (made in 548) proves that extensive variations exist in some of the earliest copies of
the Peshitta – and thus, if disagreements validly indicate “a long and
complicated history” for the Syriac transmission-stream represented by the
Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts, then the same is true for the
Peshitta. If tight agreements among manuscripts
show that their source “could not have been very remote,” then disagreements in
Peshitta-manuscripts (such as Sinai Syriac MS #3, which contains part of the
Epistles of Paul) show the opposite.
All things considered, Burkitt’s theory that the Peshitta was produced by Rabbula in the early 400s – a
theory which was treated as fact for over 50 years, in the service of the mainly
Alexandrian compilations of Westcott-Hort, Nestle, et al – should be rejected.
Although the Gospels-text of the Peshitta was not altogether standardized until later, it was essentially extant in the mid-300s (and possibly even in the early 300s), the same period in which Codex Sinaiticus was made.
