use of OS by ancient Aramaic-speaking Christians

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhi Yuri,

This Persian Diatessaron was translated from Aramaic into Persian, and it reads very differently from the Arabic Diatessaron just about in every passage.

A prerequisite for reliable and proper use of a Diatessaronic witness is a thorough understanding of its transmission-history. Although Shedinger used Giuseppe Messina's edition of the Persian Harmony, he apparently failed to notice Messina's analysis of the text, for in the "Introduction" to his edition Messina addresses the subject of Shedinger's book: the OT quotations in the (Persian) Diatessaron (pp. lxviii-lxxvi). Messina (* 1893-??? 1951) was the world's expert on this text. In the process of preparing his edition, Messina concluded that the Persian translator, as he translated from Syriac into Persian in the thirteenth century, frequently "improved" the OT quotations by referencing the Targumim and/or the Hebrew Bible in a Semitic language. Messina's textual examples (two of which parallel pericopes examined by Shedinger) are unambiguous and definitive. Therefore, Shedinger cannot use the Persian Harmony as he does, for Messina demonstrated half a century ago that its OT citations have frequently been revised to agree with texts much later than the Diatessaron. Even if these eight pages in Italian escaped our author's notice, it is odd that he also missed an English pr??cis of them in a book he frequently cites.

There's the source for the "different" readings than the Arabic Diatesseron.

You can keep the Persian - I'll trust the Arabic, thank you very much. <!-- s:biggrin: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/biggrin.gif" alt=":biggrin:" title="Big Grin" /><!-- s:biggrin: -->