Peshitta

A Bible That Was Never Greek and Never Latin

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, and it became the literary and liturgical language of a Christianity that spread east rather than west, through Edessa and Mesopotamia and onward from there. That church had its own Bible, and the Peshitta is it. The name is the feminine passive participle of a verb meaning to stretch out or extend, and what it was meant to convey is genuinely unclear: the reference work published by Beth Mardutho records that the sense "is no longer clear", with candidates including "simple", "widespread" (on the analogy of the Latin vulgata), and "single" as against the six columns of Origen's Hexapla.

The Old Testament half is the older and the more remarkable. It was translated directly from Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint — not quite everywhere, since the Gorgias dictionary says that in the book of Ezekiel and in the Twelve Prophets "we have to assume some literary dependence of the Peshitta on the Septuagint" — and that puts it in a very small class — the Brill edition's own description dates it "on the basis of the Hebrew text during the second century CE", with books outside the Hebrew canon translated later from Greek, and the study the Gorgias dictionary calls the most thorough discussion of the version's origin, M. Weitzman's, puts the work at Edessa "from 150 onwards". That makes the Peshitta an independent early witness to the Hebrew text, made centuries before the Masoretes fixed the vowels and the accents, and standing outside the Greek tradition that everything else in the ancient world depends on. And it turns out to agree: the Gorgias dictionary reports that the edition has made clear that "the Hebrew model of the Peshitta must have been nearly identical with the so-called Masoretic Text", and even reflects a vocalisation very close to the one the Masoretes wrote down many centuries later. A second-century translator in Edessa and a tenth-century scribe in Tiberias were working from nearly the same Hebrew.

The oldest complete copy of it is a single book: Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, B 21 inf., which the library's own catalogue dates 501 to 600, describes as 174 parchment leaves at 370 by 270 millimetres, and records as having entered the collection in 1611. A. M. Ceriani published a photolithographic facsimile of it in 1876, which is out of copyright and free to read.

Twenty-Two Books

The New Testament Peshitta became the standard Syriac text around 400, and it is a revision that pulled the older Syriac gospels closer to the Greek. The striking thing about it is its table of contents. In the words of the Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: "The NT Peshitta contains twenty-two books; it lacks 2-3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation." Those five books are printed in modern Syriac Bibles, but they were supplied from later translations; the Peshitta itself never had them. It also omits the account of the woman caught in adultery at John 7:53 to 8:11, and a few isolated verses such as Luke 22:17 and 18.

It would be easy to read that as a church rejecting five books, and it is worth resisting. The four short Catholic Epistles and Revelation were the books whose reception took longest everywhere — the Muratorian Fragment, Eusebius and the great Greek codices all show the same edge of the canon being worked out — and the Syriac tradition simply settled with a standard version that predated the settlement. What it shows is not a rival canon so much as a photograph of the process at a particular moment, taken in a language most western readers never look at.

The other thing worth knowing is how far it travelled. The Peshitta had become the authoritative Syriac Bible before the christological quarrels of the mid-fifth century split the Syriac churches; F. C. Burkitt, working the same problem from the other end in 1904, pointed out that at the relevant date the parties were not yet separate bodies at all: "it was not till 449 AD, fifteen years after Rabbula's death, that Nestorian doctrines were formally condemned." That is Burkitt's reckoning; the condemnation of Nestorius himself is normally dated to the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the point survives either way. So both sides kept it. It is still the Bible of the Syriac Orthodox Church and of the Church of the East.

Who Made the New Testament Peshitta?

There is one confident answer in the literature and it is probably wrong. F. C. Burkitt set it out in his own conclusions in 1904, and the sentences are worth reading in full because they are the source of a claim still repeated as fact: "The Peshitta is a revision of the Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, undertaken mainly with the object of conforming the translation more closely to the Greek text as read at Antioch early in the 5th century. It was prepared by Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411-435 AD, and published by his authority as a substitute for the Diatessaron." His argument in one line: "Before Rabbula, no trace of the Peshitta: after Rabbula, hardly a trace of any other text."

The attribution did not hold. A. Vööbus, in studies published from 1951, showed that Rabbula's own writings quote the older Syriac gospels and the Diatessaron rather than the Peshitta — which is hard to explain if he had just produced it. The Gorgias dictionary's summary is that while Rabbula "may have enforced the dissemination of the Peshitta version, the theory that he was responsible for its creation was convincingly challenged by Vööbus". This article has not read Vööbus's volumes directly and cites the challenge at second hand, which is worth saying plainly.

What is left when the name goes is more honest and less satisfying. The New Testament Peshitta is a revision by nobody we can name, made somewhere in the Syriac-speaking world in the late fourth or early fifth century, which succeeded so completely that the version it replaced, the Old Syriac gospels, survives in exactly two manuscripts. Burkitt's evidence was real — the change of text at Edessa around Rabbula's episcopate is not in doubt — and what has gone is the inference from a change of text to a single man who made it. That is a common shape in this field, and it is worth recognising: an argument that a thing happened is much stronger than an argument about who did it, and the second is what gets repeated.

Scripture references

• John 7:53 — The start of the passage about the woman caught in adultery, which the Peshitta does not contain
• Luke 22:17-18 — Two verses at the Last Supper that the Peshitta omits
• 2 Peter 1:1 — One of the five books outside the Peshitta's twenty-two
• Revelation 1:1 — Absent from the Peshitta, and supplied in printed Syriac Bibles from a later version

Sources

• Holding institutionBiblioteca Ambrosiana: manuscript B 21 inf. — Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan · The holding library's own catalogue record, read in full. Source of the sixth-century date (the record reads 501-600), the collation of 174 parchment leaves, the 370 x 270 mm measurement, the identification of the contents as the Old Testament in the Peshitta version, and the acquisition date of 1611. It links a digital copy hosted by the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. The Ambrosiana's own public site has no page for this manuscript; the record exists only in the catalogueSupports: The oldest complete Peshitta Old Testament, its date, and where it is
• Primary textA. M. Ceriani, Translatio Syra Pescitto Veteris Testamenti ex codice Ambrosiano sec. fere VI — Antonio Maria Ceriani · Milan, 1876. A photolithographic facsimile of the Ambrosian manuscript itself, made by the Ambrosiana's own prefect; public domain and freely downloadable at the Internet ArchiveSupports: That the manuscript can be looked at rather than taken on description
• ScholarshipF. C. Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, volume 2: Introduction and Notes — Francis Crawford Burkitt · Cambridge University Press, 1904; public domain, read at the Internet Archive. Source of both quotations of the Rabbula thesis in his own words, and of his answer to the objection that the Church of the East accepted a version issued by a bishop it had reason to dislike. Cited so that the argument that was overturned is stated by the man who made it, not by the people who overturned itSupports: The Rabbula attribution and its reasoning
• ReferenceGorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage: Peshitta — B. ter Haar Romeny and C. E. Morrison, for Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute · Free to read online. Source of the twenty-two-book statement quoted verbatim, the disputed meaning of the name, the omitted passages, the date of the New Testament revision, M. Weitzman's dating of the Old Testament to Edessa from 150 onwards, the finding that the Peshitta's Hebrew model was nearly identical with the Masoretic Text, and the account of A. Vööbus's challenge to Burkitt. Published under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence, so it is linked and cited here, never reproduced. The site refuses scripted requests and returns 403 to an automated checker while loading normally in a browserSupports: The canon, the name, and the current state of the Rabbula question
• ScholarshipThe Old Testament in Syriac according to the Peshitta Version (the Leiden Peshitta edition) — The Peshitta Institute, for the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament; published by Brill · The publisher's series page, read for the editorial description quoted here — that the Old Testament Peshitta was "made on the basis of the Hebrew text during the second century CE, whilst some books outside the Hebrew canon may have been translated at a later stage on the basis of a Greek text". The volume credits on this page also show the Institute moving from Leiden to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which is why the article does not place it at Leiden in the present tense. The Leiden university page for the Institute is behind a bot wall and could not be openedSupports: The date and Hebrew source of the Old Testament Peshitta, and where the edition comes from
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Peshitta

Further reading

• Biblioteca Ambrosiana: B 21 inf., the oldest complete Peshitta Old Testament
• F. C. Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, volume 2 (1904)
• A. M. Ceriani's 1876 facsimile of the Ambrosian Peshitta

Reflect

A whole church read a New Testament without Revelation in it for centuries, and produced saints and martyrs anyway. Which parts of your Bible are you actually living on?