The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition 9781463223915

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The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition

The Syriac Bible According to the Mosul Edition

Volume 1 (OT I)

Edited by

Clemens Joseph David

A

1 aortas press 2010

Gorgias Press LLC, 180 Centennial Ave., Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright €> 2010 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC.

2010

-V.

ISBN 978-1-60724-891-0

Printed in the United States of America

1

INTRODUCTION TO THE GORGIAS EDITION

BY SEBASTIAN P . BROCK

'Of all the available printed editions of the Peshitta, this is the most complete, beautiful and handy. It is thoroughly vocalized, its print is very clear, owing to the use of beautiful Syriac type, and the paper is good and lasting'. These were the words of Joshua Bloch, 1 writing ninety years ago, and they remain just as true today. The Mosul Peshitta was published in three volumes by the Dominican Press (vols. 1—2, Old Testament, 1887, 1888; vol. 3, New Testament, 1891) and paid for by the Dominican Mission. 2 It was the only fifth printed edition that covered the entire Syriac Bible. Although the Peshitta New Testament had been printed in 1555, it was not until the Paris Polyglot Bible of 1645 that the whole Syriac Bible was published, with both Testaments together; the text was republished just over a decade later in Brian Walton's Polyglot Bible (1657). Walton's text was very largely derived from the Paris Polyglot, which itself was based on late manuscripts, in particular Paris Syr. 6 of the 17th century (17a5 in the Leiden Peshitta). Although drawing largely from these earlier editions, Samuel Lee's edition of the Peshitta, published over a century and a half later (OT, 1823; NT 1826), also made use of some earlier manuscripts for the Old Testament, including the famous Buchanan Bible, an illustrated twelfth-century manuscript which had found its way to the Syrian Orthodox community in South India, and had then been presented by Mar Dionysius VI to Claudius Buchanan in 1806.3 Lee's text was a considerable improvement on that of the Polyglot Bibles, and its Old Testament text is still reproduced today in the United Bible Societies' edition of the Syriac Bible (1979 and reprints). These three European printed editions of the Syriac Bible were all based on manuscripts belonging to the West Syriac tradition (and for the most part on very late ones). This fact lent a special interest to the next edition of the whole Syriac Bible, for it was produced in Urmia, in NW Iran, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This was published in 1852, side by side with a Modern Syriac translation made directly from the Hebrew text. The Peshitta text was evidently based primarily on East Syriac manuscripts that were locally available, but for Chronicles, which is very poorly transmitted in the East Syriac tradition, resort was made to using Lee's edition, and it seems likely that elsewhere too, occasional use of Lee's text may have been made. Since the East Syriac text was generally a more conservative one, the Urmia edition was for the most part welcomed by scholars, as offering a more reliable text.4 As will be seen below ('Text'), the Mosul edition likewise provides a good East Syriac text of the Peshitta, close to, but by no means identical with, that of the Urmia edition's text.

J. Bloch, 'The printed texts of the Peshitta Old Testament', American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 37 (1920/21), pp. 136—44, here p. 141. 2 For the history of this important Press see J.-M. Fiey,' L'imprimerie des Dominicains de Mossoul 1860—1914', -Aram 5 (1993), pp. 163—74; and for its publications, J.F. Coakley and D. Taylor, Syriac Books Printed, at the Dominican Press, Mosul (Piscataway NJ, 2009). That the Dominican Mission covered the 'considerable expenses' is explicitly stated in the Syriac Preface (but surprisingly not in the Latin). 3 Today in Cambridge University Library, ms. Oo.l.l,2 (12al in the Leiden edition of the Peshitta). 4 Its superiority (along with that of the Mosul edition) can readily be seen from the collations for Isaiah in G. Diettrich's Ein Apparatus criticus %ur Pesitto %um Propheten Jesaia (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche 1

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The making of the Mosul Peshitta The origins of the Mosul edition were not without a considerable amount of controversy, and a welldocumented account of this is provided by J.-M. Voste.5 Here only the bare outlines are given. Roman Catholic missionaries working among the Chaldeans had for some time wanted printed Syriac Bibles, or at least the Psalter and New Testament, in order to counterbalance the editions in both Classical and Modern Syriac produced by the American Mission in Urmia.6 A 'corrected' copy of the Urmia edition of the New Testament had been sent in 1862 to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (the 'Propaganda') in Rome, along with a local manuscript copy of the Peshitta New Testament made by a Chaldean priest. The manuscript was passed on to the Syriac scholar Pius Zingerle to be examined; when he found that it had been corrected according to the Vulgate, and thus did not represent the genuine Peshitta, the Propaganda sensibly declined to print it. Nevertheless, mindful of the need for a printed edition, a few years later, in 1865, the Propaganda instructed their former student, the Chorepiscopus Joseph David, to search for good manuscripts of biblical and liturgical books with a view to providing editions 'exempt from all error'. Subsequently, in 1872, the Congregation of the Propaganda proposed to the Dominican Mission in Mosul to undertake the printing of the Syriac Bible. The head of the Mission, however, was hesitant, as he felt that this suggestion, coming from Rome, might cause difficulties with the aged Chaldean Patriarch, Joseph VI Audo (1790—1878), in view of the latter's decidedly difficult relationship with Pope Pius IX and the authorities in Rome. In the end, however, it turned out that, when he met the Patriarch in 1877 and put the Propaganda's proposal to him, the Patriarch proved to be favourable to the idea. Since the Syriac characters used by the Dominican Mission's Press were not considered beautiful enough for such a prestigious undertaking, a new font was designed, based on the calligraphy of the priest Abaham Shekwana of Alqosh. Abraham happens to be a well-known scribe, and several of his manuscripts are to be found in the Mingana Collection, Birmingham, including a Gospel Lectionary 'in a very bold and handsome Estrangelo hand';7 more importantly, however, he was identified by J-M. Fiey as the scribe who copied out for Alphonse Mingana the famous manuscript, now in Berlin, of the Chronicle of Arbela, employing a hand imitating an early style of Estrangelo.8 Though the hand that Abraham Shekwana used for the Chronicle of Arbela is considerably different from the font designed for the Mosul Bible, it will be interesting to discover if the font turns out to resemble the same scribe's hand in

Wissenschaft, 8; Giessen, 1905); wherever the Urmia and Mosul editions go against the reading of the European editions, they normally turn out to have the support of the oldest manuscripts. 5 J.-M. Vosté, 'La Peshitta de Mossoul et la revision catholique des anciennes versions orientales', in M-iscellanea Giovanni Mercati, I (Studi et Testi 121; 1946), pp. 59-94. 6 Besides the 1852 edition of the whole Bible, with the Peshitta and a Modern Syriac translation made from Hebrew and Greek, there were editions of the New Testament into Modern Syriac (1846, made from the Peshitta, which accompanied it), 1854 (without Peshitta), and 1864 (in this the text was heavily revised on the basis of the Greek); for the issues behind this, see my 'Translating the New Testament into Syriac (Classical and Modern'), in J. Krasovec (ed.), Interpreting the Bible (Ljubljana/Sheffield, 1998), pp. 371-85, esp. 379-83. The Lazarists in Urmia eventually managed to produce an edition of the Gospels and Acts in 1877, in both Classical and Modern Syriac. 7 Mingana Syr. 537 (A. Mingana, Catalogue, cols. 983—4. cat ; Abraham copied this in 1911 from a manuscript of 1571/2 which itself have been copied by 'Abdisho' of Soba in 1284/5. Other mss. in Birmingham copied by Abraham are Mingana 47, 50, 52 (he was also the former owner of Mingana syr. 98). 8 J.-M. Fiey, 'Auteur et date de la Chronique d'Arbèles', L'Orient Syrien 12 (1967), pp. 265-302, here 281-2. For his handwriting for the Chronicle, see the illustration i n j . Assfalg, Syrische Handschriften (Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland V; 1963), Plate 3; also the photographic edition of the text by P. Kawerau, in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 467, 1985.

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Mingana Syr. 537. (It is intriguing that Mingana once claimed that he had himself had a hand in revising and correcting the Mosul New Testament; since he had only just entered the Seminary school, aged 13, at the time when the New Testament was being printed, the very most that this could have amounted to would have been being shown some of the proofs!). 9 The scholar who had been approached by the Propaganda and who was primarily responsible for editing the text, Joseph David (1829-1890), is better known under his episcopal name of Mar Klimis (Clemens) David, taken after his appointment as Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Damascus in 1879.10 Mar Klimis was a very accomplished scholar, who had a good knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, as well as Syriac and Arabic. Earlier in his career he had been closely involved in the preparation of an edition of the Arabic text of the Bible (published in 4 volumes, Mosul 1875-1878), and in 1877 he had published an interesting revision of the Peshitta Psalter that had made use of his knowledge of Hebrew. 11 For the Mosul Peshitta, however, his aim was not to revise the Peshitta text, but to reproduce the traditional text in a carefully edited form. Not surprisingly, he evidently took as his starting point the text of the Urmia edition of 1852, which provided a better text of the Peshitta than that of any of the European editions of the time, including that of Lee (1823). As will be seen below, a careful comparison of the two editions indicates that Mar Klimis by no means took over the text of the Urmia edition uncritically. Also closely involved in the publication of the Mosul Peshitta was the Chaldean archbishop of Amid, Mar 'Abdisho' Khayyat (1828-1899), who was later (in 1895) to become Patriarch. It was he who (besides the Patriarch of the time, Mar Elia XII) wrote the prefaces to the volumes. By 1881/2 the printing of the text had already begun. At that point, however, further progress was halted, since a major disagreement on a matter of editorial policy had arisen between Mar Klimis and the Apostolic Delegate, Mgr H. Altmayer: the latter, mindful of the special authority accorded to the Latin Vulgate by the Council of Trent (decree of 1546), was insisting that passages absent from the Peshitta but present in the Vulgate should be included, marked by brackets. This was something to which Mar Klimis very strongly objected, and he refused to translate the requisite passages. Altmayer nevertheless went ahead and had them translated from Latin by someone else. The printing was held up and the whole matter was referred to the Propaganda in Rome. A sample, translated into Latin, was prepared of how the beginning of Bar Sira might appear, following Altmayer's proposed format; this in fact showed up how extremely awkward such a composite text would be: in chapter 1 of Bar Sira the Peshitta, translated directly from Hebrew, lacked altogether the verses 3, 5 and 7 in the Vulgate, translated from Greek; accordingly, the intention was to translate the Latin of these verses into Syriac and to incorporate them, bracketed, into the Peshitta's text. The result, if Altmayer's principles had been followed, would have been an extraordinary hybrid. Fortunately Propaganda in 1884 sought the opinion of one of the finest Catholic biblical scholars of the day, Fr. Augustine Ciasca; very sensibly, he pronounced in favour of Mar Klimis' position, that the Peshitta, like the Greek Septuagint, should be respected as an authoritative text in its own right. The other scholar consulted, Fr. Rudolf Comely, came to the same conclusion, but, pre-

A Mingana, 'The remaining Syriac versions of the Gospels', Expository Times 26 (1914/5), pp. 379—81, here 379, where he speaks of 'the four editions [sic!] published at Mosul that I myself revised and corrected'. The 'four' is evidently due to a confusion with the Arabic edition, published before he was born! 10 On him see J.-M. Voste, Clement Joseph David. Archeveque syrien de Damas. Notes bio-bibliographiques' Orientalia Christiana Periodica 14 (1948), pp. 219—75; and B.F. Affas, Iqlimis YusufDa'ud (Baghdad, 1985). 11 For this, see my 'A neglected revision of the Peshitta Psalter', in C. McCarthy and J.F. Healey (eds), Biblical and Near Eastern Essays. Studies in Honour of Kevin J. Cathcart (London, 2004), pp. 131—42. Two years after the publication of his Psalter he produced a valuable grammar of Syriac (subsequently translated into Latin by the future patriarch, Ephrem Rahmani (published in Mosul, 1896); towards the end of his life he was much involved in the editing of the Mosul Fenqitho, published in 7 volumes over the years 1886—96. 9

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ferring a longer term and wider benefit, suggested that it would be better first to provide a scientific edition of the Peshitta, whose text would then be respected by Protestant as well as Catholic scholars and communities. As Voste commented, 'the better is often the enemy of the good': 12 if Cornely's suggestion had been accepted, the Mosul edition would have never seen the light of day, since his proposed scientific edition never even got off the ground. Fortunately the Congregation of the Propaganda had the wisdom to realise that scholars are often wildly over-optimistic about how long large scale projects are likely to take, and their final decision, made on 30th March 1885, was that the printing of the Mosul Bible should go ahead without further delay, along the lines of Ciasca's recommendation; at the same time they gave a nod of approval to the general idea of a critical edition.13 The decision was conveyed to Mosul on April 19th 1885, indicating that 'this ancient and venerable version should remain with its original integrity', although those New Testament books absent from the Peshitta should be supplied from existing Syriac versions (and not retranslated from Latin). A copy of the Old Testament was in due course presented to Pope Leo XIII in Rome on 4th December, 1888. Contents One of the main deficiencies of the Urmia edition in the eyes of the Mosul edition's editors was the absence of a number of books which were read liturgically, notably Wisdom and Bar Sira (Ecclesiasticus), and which are considered as 'Deutero-canonical' books, rather than as 'Apocrypha'. Mar Klimis had also wanted to include (besides 1 - 2 Maccabees, which are present) 3 Maccabees, extant in Syriac14 and present in the influential Sixtine edition of the Greek Septuagint (1587), but this was in the end turned down by the Propaganda. In Daniel chapter 3 the Prayer of Ananias and his companions (verses 24—90), found in the Peshitta and Septuagint, but absent from the Aramaic original and hence excluded also from the Urmia edition15 as well as from Jerome's Vulgate, are duly to be found present. The uncertainty of what to do in the case of Esther had played a considerable role in the discussions in Rome: while the Peshitta text of this book corresponds closely with the Hebrew, the Greek is considerably longer, with additional material at certain points; Jerome included these in his Latin translation, but gathered them all together and placed them at the end of the book, with notes concerning them (these are reproduced in brackets in editions of the Vulgate). Should the Vulgate position be kept, or should the additional sections be inserted in their proper place (as in the Septuagint)? Although the Propaganda eventually decided upon the latter option, what we find in the Mosul edition is Jerome's arrangement, for after Peshitta text (1:1—10:3) there follow all the extra material found in the Greek, at the same time incorporating Jerome's notes. For the text of the additional sections the Propaganda had urged a search for another Syriac version that had the extra material; this would have been the Syrohexapla, but unfortunately no manuscript of Esther in this version has survived, and so 10:4—16:24 will be a retroversion from Latin, one of the very rare cases where Altmayer must have had his way. 16 The disadvantage, of course, is that these passages (designated below

J.-M. Vosté, 'Projet d'une édition critico-ecclésiastique de la Pesitta sous Léon XIII', Biblica 28 (1947), pp. 281—6, here 283 ('le mieux est souvent l'ennemi du bien'). 13 It was not until 1953 that the idea of preparing a critical edition of the Peshitta Old Testament was taken up again, resulting in the establishment in 1959 of the Peshitta Institute in Leiden. Two years later the invaluable List of Old Testament Peshitta Manuscripts was published. To date thirteen volumes of the edition have appeared. 14 It features in three of the four early complete Syriac Old Testaments (7al, 8al and 12al of the Leiden editions). 15 And earlier excluded from Lee's edition; this defect is sadly never made good in the UBS edition. 16 In the United Bible Societies' edition the text of the 'Apocrypha' has been provided, reproduced from the handwriting of Yuhanon Seven; that Yuhanon Seven took the texts from the Mosul edition is made absolutely clear 12

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IX

as A-F)17, which have been removed from their original context, do not any longer make very good sense. For the benefit of those who would like to read the narrative as it originally stood in its longer form, the sequence in which the constituent elements should be read is as follows: A + 1:1 — 3:13 + B + 3:14 — 4:17 + C + D + 5:3 — 8:12 + E + 8:13 — 10:3 + F For the New Testament, it is not surprising that the non-Peshitta books (2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, and Revelation) were included, seeing that these, although not found in the East Syriac tradition, were part of the wider Syriac tradition; accordingly for these, use was made of translations found in the Syrian Orthodox tradition (see below, under Text). The same policy had also been adopted in the Urmia edition. More controversial, and subject to much difference of opinion, was the case of two famous passages absent from the Peshitta, John 7:53—8:11, concerning the Woman caught in adultery, and the verse in I John 5:7 concerning the addition of the three witnesses in heaven alongside the three on earth. The former passage is widely attested in Greek manuscripts, and exists in a Syriac translation probably made by Paul, Syrian Orthodox bishop of Edessa in the early seventh century; by contrast, the latter is only found in the printed Vulgate text where it goes back to small number of Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts, the earliest of which belong to about the ninth century. The Propaganda finally decided that the passage in John should be included, taken form the existing Syriac translation. On the question of whether the addition should be indicated by brackets or not, they considered that this was not necessary. As for I John 5:7, they considered that 'it is not appropriate for it to be omitted', without specifying whether or not it should be indicated by brackets. Perhaps on the basis of the Propaganda's specific guidance concerning the Gospel passage, the Mosul edition prints the addition in I John 5:7 likewise without putting it in brackets. Order of Books The order of the books follows the one which is regularly found in editions of the Latin Vulgate, with Tobit, Judith and Esther following immediately after Ezra and Nehemiah, and with Wisdom and Bar Sira (Ecclesiasticus) coming between the Song of Songs and Isaiah. That the Vulgate order was followed is hardly surprising, given that there was no single traditional order of Old Testament books in the Syriac tradition,18 and that one of the aims of the Mosul edition was to provide a Catholic Bible, in order to provide the Chaldean Church with a counterpart to the Urmia edition which printed the books in the order found in Protestant Bibles. For the New Testament the traditional Peshitta sequence of having the Letters of James, 1 Peter and 1 John following Acts19 was discarded in favour of the standard order of books found in European editions; this was no doubt due to the incorporation of the non-Peshitta books, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude and Revelation.

by his inclusion (at the end of Judith, without any warning!) of this extra material belonging to the end of Esther (pp. 121-4). i? A = 11:2-12:6 of the Mosul edition (followed by the UBS); B = 13:1-7; C = 13:8-14:9; D = 15:4-19; E = 16:1-24; F = 10:4-11:1. 18 For a table giving the order of books in the only four early complete Peshitta Old Testaments (now in Milan, Paris, Florence, and Cambridge; 7al, 8al, 9al and 12al in the Leiden edition), see my The Bible in the Syriac Tradition (Piscataway, 2006), p. 116. For further details concerning sequence of books, see J.-C. Haelewyck, 'Le canon de l'Ancien Testament dans la tradition syriaque', in F. Briquel Chatonnet and F. Le Moigne (eds), T'Ancien Testament en Syriaque (Etudes syriaques 5; 2008), pp. 141—71. 19 Preserved in the standard British and Foreign Bible Society's edition of 1920 (and reprints).

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Text Having praised the Mosul edition on aesthetic grounds in the passage quoted at the outset, Joshua Bloch then went on to disparage its value for academic purposes, seeing it as a product of Roman Catholic polemic while at the same time, being based on the Urmia edition published by the American Protestant mission there in 1852, it was of no independent textual value. Although there is some truth in both these statements, at the same time they are unfair. As the Syriac Preface to Volume I indicates (rather more strongly than in the Latin Preface) the edition was intended to provide Chaldeans with a Catholic substitute for the Protestant Urmia edition; given the hostile character of inter-Church relations at the time, this was only to be expected, but there was a much more practical point at issue: since the Urmia edition followed the standard Protestant canon for the Old Testament, it excluded a number of important books which had always been read in the Syriac Churches. That it was not of particular value for strictly academic purposes is hardly surprising, given its intended readership. Some time after the edition had appeared, the Syriac scholar Sebastian Euringer enquired of the Dominicans in Mosul about how Mar Klimis had gone about his work. The answer that was conveyed back to him (in 1899) derived from Ephrem Rahmani, the future Syrian Catholic Patriarch (1898-1929), who, reasonably enough, pointed out that the edition had not been undertaken for scholarly purposes, for the benefit of western orientalists, but for the faithful of the Syriac Churches, and so the text was based on the Urmia edition and a manuscript of the seventeenth century, while keeping an eye on the Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The text of the Urmia edition was in fact a good choice on Mar Klimis' part to serve as a starting point for the Mosul edition, seeing that its East Syriac text was in several ways superior to the West Syriac texts of the European editions. In Isaiah, to judge from Diettrich's collations20 the text of the Urmia and Mosul editions is better than that of the European editions in well over fifty places. But Mar Klimis did not just take over the text of the Urmia edition uncritically, in many small details he improved on it. In a careful study of the text of the printed editions of the Peshitta Song of Songs, J.A. Emerton was able tentatively to identify the manuscript mentioned by Rahmani as 17cl (Chaldean Patriarchate, ms 112);21 he furthermore found that where the Mosul edition departed from the text of the Urmia edition, it sometimes did so supported by early manuscripts, suggesting that Mar Klimis made use of other manuscript sources as well. Several examples of a similar situation can be found in Isaiah, the only book for which a detailed collation that includes the printed editions exists.22 For the Psalter a number of scholars have stated that Mar Klimis had re-used the text of his revised Peshitta of 1877. This is definitely not the case, and the misconception goes back to W.E. Barnes, who guessed that this might have been the case, without actually having seen the Mosul Bible; unfortunately, some subsequent scholars turned what had just been a guess into a definite statement! Barnes' remarks may also have given rise to the occasional suspicion expressed that the text of the Mosul edition was influenced by that of the Vulgate; thus, in his influential article on the Peshitta in the Supplément of the Dictionnaire de la Bible, C. van Puyvelde comments, after quoting Rahmani's statement mentioned above, as follows:23 'furthermore, the missing passages were translated from Latin by 'Abdisho' Khayyat. Doubtless it is from these that the old readings [in the Mosul edition] discovered by Diettrich derive'. This state-

Diettrich, Ein Apparatus criticus (see note 4). J.A. Emerton, 'The printed editions of the Song of Songs in the Peshitta version', Vetus Testamentum 17 (1967), pp. 416-29. 22 See Diettrich, Ein Apparatus criticus, pp. xvi—xvii. 23 Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplément VI (1960), col. 852; for the passages to which he is referring, see note 20, above. 20

21

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XI

ment is completely without justification, and is evidently based on a very superficial reading of Voste's article. Given the arguments between Mar Klimis (supported by Khayyat) and Altmayer, this is highly unlikely to have been the case, and indeed it would have gone against the official policy of the Propaganda that the integrity of the Peshitta as a venerable ancient version should be preserved. The only two cases where the Vulgate did play a definite role are both exceptional: the inclusion at the end of Esther of the passages not found the Hebrew (or Peshitta) that Jerome transferred to the end of his Latin translation, and the famous passage in 1 John, mentioned earlier and discussed further below. In the New Testament, the passage concerning the Woman taken in Adultery has been taken from the early seventh-century version by Paul, bishop of Edessa, and for the Minor Epistles, missing from the Peshitta, use was made of the anonymous sixth-century translation, often known as the 'Pococke Epistles' after their first editor, Edward Pococke (1604-1691). For Revelation, the Harklean version was employed, this being the only Syriac text of this book known at the time; subsequently a sixth-century translation was discovered but this was not published until 1897.24 The absence of Luke 22:17-18 ('And he took the cup...') from the Peshitta (perhaps because it was seen as duplicating verse 23), but present in the Greek and Latin, is remedied with a translation first found in printed editions of the Peshitta in that of Carl Schaaf (1708); this in fact turns out to be very close to the wording of the Old Syriac Curetonian manuscript which was not discovered until the mid nineteenth century.25 The one place in the New Testament where the influence of the Vulgate is clear is the addition to be found at 1 John 5:7: while the Peshitta, in common with the Greek, has 'the Spirit, the water and the blood' as the three witnesses, the Mosul edition, following the standard printed text of the Vulgate (going back to the Clementine edition of 1592/3), adds that these are 'on earth', and prefaces the verse by saying that there are also 'three witnesses in heaven, Father, the Word, and the Spirit'. The insertion of this famous passage into the Mosul Peshitta was due to the specific directive of the Propaganda; this was perhaps not too surprising, given the prominent role the passage had played in polemical literature concerning printed editions of the New Testament.26 While the Mosul edition can never take the place of a critical edition, for general purposes it offers a good text, and one that in some details is actually a better one than any of its predecessors. The scholar who is interested in the earliest form of the Peshitta text will, of course, need to turn to the Leiden editions of individual books of the Peshitta Old Testament. Since, however, the text of the Peshitta Bible is remarkably stable (unlike that of the Greek Septuagint), this means that, as far as the ordinary reader is concerned, the differences between the Mosul and Leiden editions are never very great;27 this also suggests that for the scholar too, for those books not yet covered by the Leiden Peshitta, the Mosul edition can still provide a serviceable substitute. Orthography Although Mar Klimis, as a Syrian Catholic, must have been accustomed to West Syriac norms of orthography, since the text was printed in East Syriac characters the East Syriac orthography (which is usually

J. Gwynn, The Apocalypse of St. John in a Syriac Version hitherto unknown (Dublin, 1897). This was first published in 1858 by W. Cureton; it would be interesting to know whether Mar Klimis was aware of this text. 26 It is absent from all early Greek manuscripts, and likewise from the first edition of Erasmus' Greek New Testament (1516); in the face of criticism he agreed to include it in his third edition (1522), once he had found it in a (late!) Greek manuscript. The passage subsequently played a considerable role in Catholic—Protestant polemic. 27 A sample collation of the text of the Mosul edition with that of the critical Leiden for I Samuel chapter 2, chosen at random, brought to light only a small number of very minor differences. 24

25

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the older) is followed throughout. Thus 'Israel' is always spelled . L v ^ (rather than •LVJO^K' or and 3rd fem. plurals of the perfect have a zero suffix (against the West Syriac -J); 3rd fem. singulars of the imperfect likewise are without the final -j that is quite often found in West Syriac texts. The attentive reader will notice a certain number of other such differences in orthography, as, for example, forms like r^-A^ 'report, news' (West Syriac r ^ r W w i t h o u t an added internal alaph. It is interesting that, in his words of praise for the Mosul edition, the great editor of Syriac texts, Paul Bedjan (1838-1920), singled out the correctness of its orthography. ***

At the end of his article on the production of the Mosul edition Voste expressed the hope that it might one day be reproduced, and indeed a few years later he was the person responsible for the reprint, with some corrections, published in Beirut (1951), but it is only with the present Gorgias reprint that the elegance of the original Mosul edition can be once again properly appreciated and enjoyed.

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