THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
scripts this book together with Judith, Ruth, Susanna, and Thecla forms the '' Book of Women " (cf. A. Baumstark, in Oriens Christianus, iii, Leipsic, 1901, 353). After the Law there follows as the second part the " Book of Sessions," i.e., Job, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, Song of Solomon. Among the prophets, Isaiah (sometimes divided at xxv, 2) is followed by the minor prophets, then Jeremiah (with a division at xxxii, 6) with Baruch i-ii and the Epistle of Jeremiah, then Ezekiel and Daniel.
Manuscripts with the Apocrypha are called "catholic" or "pandects"; they do not contain 1 Esdras, Tobit, or the Prayer of Manasses, but have an Apocalypse of Baruch, IV Esdras, and even the story of Shamuna and Josephus, War, V, as IV and V Maccabees. Tobit, as far as chap, vii, 11, is preserved only in the translation of Paul of Telia, but from that point on there is a still later text. Accurate manuscripts give stichometrical lists (cf. Martin, Introduction, 677; J. R. Harris, On the Origin of the Ferrar Group, London, 1893. 10, 26; DB, iv, 650).
The character of the translation is different in various books; it is very literal in the Law, influenced by the Septuagint in Isaiah and the minor prophets, probably also in the Psalms. Ruth is paraphrastic. Chronicles resembles a Jewish targum, while the Syriac Proverbs has been used in the Targum. Ecclesiasticus is taken from the Hebrew.
Up to 1858 only one old version of the New Testament in Syriac was known in Europe; viz., that published for the first time by J. A. Widmanstadt (Vienna, 1555). Textual critics considered it "the queen of the Bible translations." In 1858 \V. Cureton published in . e ew Lon(jon> frorn manuscripts which had come into the British Museum in 1S42, Remains of a very Antient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac hitherto Unknown in Europe. The great value of this recension was soon recognized, and was greatly enhanced when, in 1892, a second manuscript of it was discovered in a palimpsest on Mount Sinai by Mrs. A. S. Lewis and her sister, Mrs. M. D. Gibson, which was published under the title, The Four Gospels in Syriac Transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest by the Late R. L. Bensly J R.
Harris and F C. Burkitt. With an Intro-
duction by Agnes Smith Lewis (Cambridge, 1894). Mrs. Lewis published Some Pages of the Four Gospels Retranscribed from the Syriac Palimpsest with a Translation of the Whole Text (London, 1894). F C. Burkitt published Evangelion da-Mepharreshe : The Curetonian Version of the Four Gospels, with the Readings of the Sinai Palimpsest and the Early Syriac Patristic Evidence Edited, Collected, and Arranged (vol. i, text and translation, vol. ii, introduction and notes, Cambridge, 1904). Burkitt's title is taken from the heading or subscription of the two manuscripts and means " the Gospel of the Separated " (i.e., "the Separated Gospels"), used in contradistinction to the Diatessaron of Tatian, which was called
among the Syrians " the Gospel of the Combined " ("the Combined Gospels"). Herein is indicated the first problem in the history of the Syriac New Testament. It is well known that a harmony of the Gospels was used in the Syriac Church till the beginning of the fifth century, when Theodoret removed the copies in his diocese, and Rabbulas of Edessa ordered that the " Gospel of the Separated " should be read in church. The great question concerns the relationship of the Peshito, the Mepharreshe, and Tatian. It seems certain that the three are interrelated. It seems further to have been proved by Burkitt that the Peshito is the latest, and is in all probability the revision which Rabbulas of Edessa (d. 435) is said to have undertaken. The decision of the other question, whether the Mepharreshe or Tatian is the earlier, is made difficult by the fact that Tatian's work is not preserved in its original form, and further by the fact that the two representatives of the Mepharreshe, the manuscripts of Cureton and Lewis, differ greatly. But on the whole it seems most probable that Tatian was the first to bring the Gospel to the Syrians in the form of his Diatessaron, and that then on the basis of his harmony the version of the separate Gospels originated. Burkitt is inclined to believe that this was toward the end of the second century, perhaps under the influence of the Church of Antioch, through Paul of Edessa. The opposite view, that the Mepharreshe is earlier than Tatian, is taken by Hjelt, who believed he was able to show that the Gospels in the Mepharreshe were translated by different hands, and that the first Gospel especially betrays a Jewish character. Without the discovery of new evidence the question will be very difficult to decide.
No manuscript of an early Syriac version of the Acts and the Pauline Epistles is known. But that there was an older version can be proved from the quotations of such early writers as Aphraates and Ephraem, and perhaps also from readings in the Armenian version. In early times the apocryphal correspondence with the Corinthians was placed with the Epistles of Paul. The Catholic Epistles were at first totally unknown, as is expressly stated by Theodore of Mopsuestia and Theodore bar Koni (cf. A. Baumstark, in Oriens Christianus, i, 17G, iii, 555). In the Peshito as we have it the three greater of t hem are found, in accordance with the use of the Church of Antioch. Still later the four others were added. It is strange that the Nestorian inscription of Singan-fu (see Nestorians) speaks of twenty-seven books of the New Testament. Revelation never formed part of the canon among the Syrians (cf. on the Syriac canon, T. Zahn, Grundrisi, der Geschichte dcs neutestamentlichen Kanons, Leipsic, 1904, § 6; J. A. Bewer, The History of the New Testament Canon in the Syrian Church, Chicago, 19C0; W Bauer, Der Apostolos der Syrer, Giessen, 1903), and whether the Pauline collection included Philemon can not be decided. 2. Later Versions : The Nestorian patriarch