Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels

[SteveCaruso]

Steve, just curious, do you have some samples of the superiority of the Greek text?

I would like to know that too, Steve.

This thread isn't the place to debate this and I presently do not have the time. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s --> I'm not an Peshitta Primacist nor a Greek Primacist.

Also, by variants, do you mean the early Manuscripts of the Eastern Peshitta tradition, I've been finding a number of them between the Eastern and Western versions, as I go through them line by line, word by word...but not in the Eastern text itself, not a true variant anyway, just one word split into two words, like everything/every thing, something/ a thing, or someone/man...stuff like that.

In the earliest Peshitta manuscripts (c. 5th century; holdovers from before the East/West split in the Syrian Church) there are some examples of transitional texts between the Old Syriac and Peshitta forms where the overall form is distinctly Peshitta but contains a large number of Old Syriac-like and unique readings. Such examples are Codex Phillipps, MS Dawkins 3, MS Vat. Syr. 12, etc.. Sadly, none of these to my knowledge are digitized in searchable format, so I can't do a quick side-by-side glance to come up with examples (I'd have to get my hands on some scans). What the literature says is that we see texts like this quoted in the homilies of the early Syriac Church Fathers all over the place, and these kinds of variants are quite in character with what we see between Greek manuscript traditions. The Peshitta, however, was standardized and then popularized during the life of Rabbula, where it came to supplant all other versions for a while (that is, before a new translation from the Greek was "needed" which resulted in subsequent translations such as the Philoxenian, Harklean, and several others whose names are lost to time).

If you were told that you could choose and only have one copy of a Greek and one copy of an Aramaic Manuscript, and were denied any access to any others, which ones would you chose? Which is best overall?

Well I would choose the Peshitta for the selfish reason that my Syriac is better than my Koine Greek. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

Further still, I'd prefer a compiled version of the Christian Palestinian Aramaic New Testament fragments as that language is much closer to what Jesus and his early Disciples spoke than Syriac was (and closer to what I speak with my kids <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s --> ).

However, for accuracy's sake, regardless of the language, I'd prefer a critical edition with a good apparatus if at all possible.