Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Ever since the 2nd cent., when the first Syriac Bible translations were
produced, the Bible has played an important role in Syriac Christianity. It
is not just that many terms specific to the spirituality of the Syriac
Churches have their origin in these versions, they have also contributed to
the spread of the dialect of
The first Syriac version of the OT must have been made in the second half of the 2nd cent. At least since the 9th cent., it has been known under the name Peshitta. In contrast to other early Christian translations of the OT, it was based on the Hebrew Bible rather than the Greek Septuagint. This fact gives it a special place among the witnesses to the Hebrew Bible, the pronunciation of which was codified only from the 7th cent. onwards.
When Greek OT commentaries started to be translated into Syriac in the 4th
and 5th cent., their translators used the Peshitta for the biblical
quotations. Soon they found out that this text did not always agree with the
Greek text of the commentaries, which sometimes made it hard to understand
what the exegete in question was referring to. For this reason, E.-Syr.
translators started to add ad hoc translations of the
biblical text as quoted in the Greek commentary to the verse taken from the
Peshitta. They would mark these ad hoc renderings
specifically as ‘the Greek’. At least since
ad hoc renderings have often been
mistaken for quotations from a version made by the chorepiscopus
A century later, in 613–17, the status of Greek among the W. Syr. was such
that
At a time when the Greek language was losing its status,
Syriac exegetes of the OT (see Exegesis,
Old Testament) were well aware of the existence of alternative
readings. In his ‘Commentary on Genesis’
Even though the E. Syr. adopted Theodore of Mopsuestia, who was rather
negative about the authority of the Peshitta, as their exegete par excellence, and even though the W.-Syr. tradition
was influenced by the opinion of Philoxenos that favored the Greek text, the
Peshitta remained the standard version for all: ‘it is in the hands of the
Syrians everywhere’ as
Awṣar
roze. Only occasionally passages from the Syro-Hexapla found their
way into W.-Syr. lectionary mss. used in the liturgy.
Problems of orthography and pronunciation in the Syriac language were dealt
with in the mss. of the ‘Masora’, which
flourished in the two centuries after Yaʿqub of Edessa. The W.-Syr.
‘Masora’, which is associated with the
The Syriac versions of the NT are all based on Greek texts. Though they are
the oldest translations in a Semitic language, there is no reason to assume
any direct connection between these Syriac (
The oldest Syriac version of the Gospels is the Diatessaron
(also ewangeliyon da-mḥallṭe ‘Gospel of the mixed’),
written in the early 170s. This version, probably produced by
ewangeliyon da-mparrše ‘Gospel of the separated’).
Although it was suppressed by force to such an extent that we are left only
with quotations, there are reasons to believe that it influenced all later
versions. Quotations in Ephrem indicate that the Acts and Epistles had also
been translated by the 4th cent. It has been tentatively suggested that
these translations, or forerunners of them, might also go back to Tatian’s
efforts (Petersen).
The Vetus Syra or Old Syriac
Version is the oldest version of the four separate Gospels. The
two surviving mss., the Curetonianus and the Sinaiticus, both date back to
the 5th cent., but they may be seen as two representatives of a translation
probably made in the middle of the 3rd cent. The NT Peshitta is the result
of a thorough revision of Old Syriac material, using slightly different
Greek mss. The differences between the Old Syriac and the Peshitta can be
explained on the basis of the different Greek texts used and the development
in the ideas on translation technique: the Peshitta is more literal. In the
time of
As stated above, for theological reasons Philoxenos of Mabbug preferred a
more precise rendering of the Greek, which Polykarpos made for him in 507/8.
This Philoxenian Version was a revision of the Peshitta. There has been
considerable confusion between this version and the
Syriac biblical mss. usually contain no more than one book or a small group
of books, for instance the Pentateuch, the ‘Book of the Women’ (Ruth,
Susanna, Esther, and Judith), or the Beth Mawtbe ‘the
Book of Sessions’ (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, Qohelet, Ruth,
Song of Songs, Bar Sira, and Job; especially in the E.-Syr. tradition).
Differences between the very few early pandects
containing the whole OT show that neither the Syriac canon of the OT nor the
order of books had been defined in the first millenium. Though there are
reasons to believe that Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Job, and Song of
Songs did not form part of the canon in earlier centuries (Haelewyck), the
books of the Hebrew Bible are all present in these pandects. The situation with regard to the so-called Apocrypha or
Deuterocanonical works, on the other hand, still differs from pandect to pandect. The Milan
ms. (7a1) even contains part of Flavius
With regard to the NT, the Teaching of Addai states that members of the church are to read the Gospel, the Epistles of Paul, and the Book of Acts. During the first centuries, ‘the Gospel’ referred to the Diatessaron. As stated above, Ephrem already knew the four separate Gospels in the Old Syriac Version; he referred to them as ‘the Greek’. Only in the time of Rabbula the Peshitta with its four-Gospel canon replaced the Diatessaron. It contained a total of 22 books, as it did not include 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation (cf. also Apocalypses). This canon, also known from Antiochene authors, no longer included the additional (3rd) epistle to the Corinthians which is quoted in Ephrem’s Commentary on the Pauline Epistles (Armenian). It may also have ‘promoted’ 1 Peter and 1 John, which were known to Ephrem but probably not considered canonical by him. 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, and Revelation were translated for the first time in the 6th cent. (possibly as part of the version made by Polykarpos for Philoxenos) and are also present in the Ḥarqlean Version.
See the literature quoted in the articles on the various Syriac versions, as well as: