Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/122

gularly enough, the Apocalypse possesses the unique advantage of having been preserved in a Latin text at once continuous and purely African. The quotations of other late African Fathers from various books exhibit an African text much altered by degeneracy and mixture, but preserving many ancient readings.

118. The SYRIAC versions are, strictly speaking, three in number. The principal is the great popular version commonly called the Peshito or Simple. External evidence as to its date and history is entirely wanting: but there is no reason to doubt that it is at least as old as the Latin version. Till recently it has been known only in the form which it finally received by an evidently authoritative revision, a Syriac 'Vulgate' answering to the Latin 'Vulgate'. The impossibility of treating this present form of the version as a true representation of its original text, without neglecting the clearest internal evidence, was perceived by Griesbach and Hug about the beginning of this century: it must, they saw, have undergone subsequent revision in conformity with Greek MSS. In other words, an Old Syriac must have existed as well as an Old Latin. Within the last few years the surmise has been verified. An imperfect Old Syriac copy of the Gospels, assigned to the fifth century, was found by Cureton among MSS brought to the British Museum from Egypt in 1842, and was published by him in 1858. The character of the fundamental text confirms the great antiquity of the version in its original form; while many readings suggest that, like the Latin version, it degenerated by transcription and perhaps also by irregular revision. The rapid variation which we know the Greek and Latin texts to have undergone in the earliest centuries could hardly be absent in Syria; so that a single MS cannot be expected to tell us more of the Old Syriac generally than we should learn from any one average Old Latin MS respecting Old Latin texts generally. But even this partially corrupted text is not only itself a valuable authority but renders the comparatively late and 'revised' character of the Syriac Vulgate a matter of certainty. The authoritative revision seems to have taken place either in the latter part of the third or in the fourth century. Hardly any indigenous Syriac theology older than the fourth century has been preserved, and even from that age not much available for textual criticism. Old Syriac readings have been observed as used