15. Brit. Mus. Add. 14,480 [v-vi]. Paul.
16. Cod. Crawfordianus I [vi]. A very handsome Tetraevangelium, and in excellent preservation.
17. Codd. Dawkinsiani III, XXVII, in the Bodleian Library.
18. Partial collations of many other MSS. in the British Museum.
19. The editions published by the American Bible Society, which were, at least to some extent, revised on the authority of ancient Nestorian copies.
20. The evidence of the Syriac Massorah of both the Nestorian and the Jacobite (Karkaphensian) recensions.
It is necessary to mention briefly this remarkable wealth of evidence, probably to be largely increased by future investigations, in which the Peshitto presents no inconsiderable parallel to the vast amount of authorities on which the Greek Text of the New Testament depends, because people are apt to underrate the grand position of the Peshitto version, when comparing it with the Curetonian Syriac, of which the sole evidence consists only of two codices, if the newly-discovered one turns out to be what was anticipated.
It is not easy to determine why the name of Peshitto, “Simple,” “Common,” should have been given to the oldest Syriac version of Scripture, to distinguish it from others that were subsequently made[11]. In comparison with the Harkleian it is the very reverse of a close rendering of the original. Perhaps the title refers to its common and popular use[12]. We shall presently submit to the reader a few extracts from it, contrasted with the same passages in other Syriac versions; for the present we can but assent to the ripe judgement of Michaelis, who, after thirty [pg 014] years' study of its contents, declared that he could consult no translation with so much confidence in cases of difficulty and doubt[13].
2. The Curetonian Syriac.
The volume which contained the greater part of the Curetonian portions of the Gospels was brought by Archdeacon Tattam in 1842 from the Monastery of St. Mary Deipara in the Nitrian Desert (p. 140). Eighty leaves and a half were picked out by Dr. Cureton, then one of the officers in the Manuscript department of the British Museum, from a mass of other matter which had been bound up with them by unlearned possessors, and comprise the Additional MS. 14,451 of the Library they adorn, and two more reached England in 1847. They are in quarto, with two columns on a page, in a bold hand and the Estrangelo or old Syriac character, on vellum originally very white, the single points for stops, some titles, &c. being in red ink; there are no marks of Church Lessons by the first hand, which Cureton (a most competent judge) assigned to the middle of the fifth century. The fragments contain Matt. i. 1-viii. 22; x. 32-xxiii. 25; Mark xvi. 17-20; John i. 1-42; iii. 5-vii. 37; (but many words in iii. 6-iv. 6 are illegible); xiv. 10-12; 15-19; 21-23; 26-29; Luke ii. 48-iii. 16; vii. 33-xv. 21; xvii. 23-xxiv. 44, or 1786 verses, so arranged that St. Mark's Gospel is here immediately followed by St. John's. Three more leaves of this version (part, perhaps, of the same MS.) were found among the Syriac MSS. procured by Dr. Sachau, and now at Berlin (Royal Libr. Orient. quart. 528). They contain Luke xv. 22-xvi. 12; xvii. 1-23; John vii. 37-52; viii. 12-19. They were published by Roediger (Monatsbericht, Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences, July, 1872), and were privately printed by the late Professor Wright to range with Cureton's volume. Within the last year the discovery has been announced of another Curetonian MS., which was found in the Library of the Convent on Mount Sinai by Mrs. Lewis. An edition of it is now in progress, but will not be published soon enough for notice in this work. The Syriac text of the London MS. was printed in fine Estrangelo type in 1848, and freely imparted to such scholars [pg 015] as might need its help; but it was not till 1858 that the work was published[14], with a very literal translation into rather bald English, a beautiful and exact facsimile (Luke xv. 11-13; 16-19) by Mrs. Cureton, and a Preface (pp. xcv), full of interesting and indeed startling matter. Dr. Cureton went so far as to persuade himself that he had discovered in these Syriac fragments a text of St. Matthew's Gospel that “to a great extent, has retained the identical terms and expressions which the Apostle himself employed; and that we have here, in our Lord's discourses, to a great extent the very same words as the Divine Author of our holy religion Himself uttered in proclaiming the glad tidings of salvation in the Hebrew dialect ...” (p. xciii): that here in fact we have to a great extent the original of that Hebrew Gospel of St. Matthew of which the canonical Greek Gospel is but a translation. It is beside our present purpose to examine in detail the arguments of Dr. Cureton on this head[15], and it would be the less necessary in any case, since they seem to have convinced no one save himself: but the place his version occupies with reference to the Peshitto is a question upon which there has been and still prevails a controversy which largely concerns the issue between contending schools of textual critics[16].