The "O" argument

[judge]

Actually, mine is not an argument from silence.

An argument that the peshitta is the result of a unification process (if this is what you are arguing), without any evidence would seem to be an argument from silence.

The idea that the Peshitta has no significant variants at present, on the other hand, is an argument from silence. "There are no extant variants, therefore there have never been any variants" is very much an argument from silence.

This may be a strawman though. As I understand it the argument is we have no textual variants, there fore we have no evidence for textual variants.
We can't know there were none, but we just dont have any evidence of any.

All I've done here is to point out that that proves nothing. There is another simple, logical explanation.
Of course there is no evidence of it. Just like there is no evidence of the destruction of the variants of the Qur'an besides the story (and I'm suggesting a much more gradual process for the Peshitta than any kind of purge like the Qur'an).
I'm not saying that they created a critical edition. I'm saying that a particular version became the standard, the others fell out of use, and were burned or buried as they fell out of use. Thus the text could easily have become standardized. No variants where there had once been variants

.

But isn't this still an argument from silence?
The peshitta is the text used by the COE. All our earliest COE sources use the peshitta, including Aphrahat and the COE liturgy. We dont have any evidence of that tradition using anything else.
By saying that these other versions existed, but not providing any evidence they did, one cannot argue from evidence but must argue from silence.