MORE SYRIAC MANUSCRIPTS DISCOVERED

Until the 19th century, almost all the known Greek copies of the Christian Greek Scriptures were from the fifth century or much later.  For  this reason, Bible scholars were especially interested in such early versions as the Latin Vulgate  and the Syriac Peshitta. At the time, some believed that the Peshitta was the result of  a revision of an older Syriac version.  But no such text was known.  Since the roots of the Syriac Bible go back to the second century, such a version would provide a window on the Bible text at an early stage, and it would surely  be invaluable to Bible scholars!  Was there really an old Syrian version?  Would it be found?

Yes, indeed! In fact, two such previous Syriac manuscripts  were found.  The first is a manuscript   dating from the fifth century. It was among a large number of Syriac manuscripts  acquired by the British Museum in 1842 from a monastery in the Nitrian Desert in Egypt.  It was called the Curetonian Syriac because it was discovered  and published by William Cureton, the museum's assistant keeper of manuscripts.  This precious document contains the four Gospels  in the order of Matthew, Mark, John and Luke.  

The second manuscript that has survived to our day is the Sinaitic Syriac.  Its discovery is linked with the adventurous twin sisters mentioned at the start of this articles. Although Agnes did not have a university degree, she learned eight foreign languages, one of them Syriac.  In 1892, Agnes made a remarkable discovery in the monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt.  There in a dark closet, she found a  Syriac manuscript. According to her own account,  "it had a forbidding look, for it was very dirty, and its leaves were nearly all stuck together through their having remained unturned" for centuries.  It was a palimpsest manuscript of which the original text had been erased and the pages rewritten with a Syriac text about female saints. However, Agnes spotted some of the writing underneath and the words "of Matthew,"  "of Mark," or "of Luke" at the top.  What she had in her hands was an almost complete Syriac code of the four Gospels!  Scholars now believe that this codex was written in the late fourth century.

The Sinaitic Syriac is considered one of the most important Bible manuscripts discovered, right along with such Greek manuscripts as the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus. It is now generally believed that  both the Curetonian and Sinaitic manuscripts are extant copies of the old Syriac Gospels dating from the late second or early third century.  

Next time: "THE WORD OF OUR GOD ENDURES FOREVER" 

From the Watchtower magazine, 2014