third. In their isolation the Christians retained their own language, which was a branch of the Aramaic that had once been picvaloiit over all the region between the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, but which had subsequently given place to Greek in the parts subject to the Roman Empire. This will account for the difference between the Aramaic of the Targums and some parts of the Old Testament and the Christian Syriac represented by versions of the Bible and those patristic writings that arose in Mesopotamia. The Palestinian Aramaic probably used by our Lord and His disciples, and in which perhaps St. Matthew wrote his Logia—unless he employed the classic Hebrew—was very soon superseded in the Church by Greek, the lingua franca of all the civilised races round the Mediterranean. It may have been the dialect of the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" and of the Ebionite Gospel; but it was not the language of the churches of Antioch and Western Syria. When, therefore, Christianity appeared in the distant region of the Euphrates, where a slightly different dialect was used, it came in a Greek form, and in the first instance its promoters had to provide translations of the Gospels and other Christian writings, since the people of the land did not understand Greek. These translations and the original Christian writings which sprang up in the same district in the local dialect came to be designated Syriac. In other words, Syriac is now the name of the language employed in the Christian literature of Eastern Syria, as distinguished from Aramaic, which was the slightly different and older language of Palestine, afterwards superseded by Greek. A church using the Syriac language and producing its own literature in that language inevitably tended to a certain individuality.
But these three influences—the geographical, the political, and the linguistic—were far outweighed in importance by the fourth, the doctrinal. This counted for much more than all the others put together. Deserts can be crossed, governments defied, languages translated; but heresy remains separated from orthodoxy by an impassable
