Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels:
Final Report and Announcement of Publication
George Anton Kiraz
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
George Anton Kiraz, Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the
Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshitta and Harklean Versions. 4 volumes. New
Testament Tools and Studies, vol. 21/1-4. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. ISBN:
90-04-10419-4. Pp. xci+454+257+514+369, 7 plates.
Rationale for the Project
1. "No branch of the Early Church has done more for the translation of the
Bible into their vernacular than the Syriac-speaking" (Nestle 1902:645). In
fact, within the first six centuries of the Christian era, the Syriac
Fathers managed to produce no less than six different versions of the New
Testament; viz., the Diatessaron, the Old Syriac Gospels, the Peshitta, the
Philoxenian, the Harklean, and the Syro-Palestinian (the latter being in
Christian Palestinian Aramaic), not to mention the long series of lost
revisions which brought the Old Syriac into closer line with the Greek
Gospels in the final form of the Peshitta version.(1) The immensity of their
scholarship succeeded in keeping modern New Testament scholars very well
occupied with discerning the numerous issues related to the
interrelationship of these various translations and revisions; in the words
of Metzger,
Of all the early versions of the New Testament, those in Syriac have
raised more problems and provoked more controversies among modern
scholars than any of the others. The reasons lie partly in the
multiplicity of translations and revisions of the Syriac Scriptures,
and partly in the ambiguity of evidence concerning their mutual
relationship [italics mine] (Metzger 1977:3).
2. The purpose of this project is firstly to provide a tool which may be of
help in resolving some of the problems and controversies raised by the
multiplicity of translations and revisions of the Syriac Gospels. Secondly,
it aims to facilitate the study of their mutual relationship. The necessity
of such a tool is due to the practical difficulties currently facing the
scholar in accessing the desired texts simultaneously and at a glance. This
is best exemplified in the case of the Old Syriac texts: although excellent
editions of the Sinaiticus palimpsest and the Curetonianus manuscript have
been produced by Lewis and Burkitt, respectively (Lewis 1910; Burkitt
1904), both editions pose practical difficulties for the scholar whose main
concern is to compare the two texts. Lewis had collated Sinaiticus to the
text of the Curetonianus, whereas Burkitt had done the reverse by taking
Curetonianus as collational base.(2) It has already been suggested by Kahle
that the two texts ought to have been edited along the lines of Jülicher's
Itala in order that the differences between them be made clear (Kahle 1959:
302; cf. Jülicher et al. 1970-). Even before Lewis and Burkitt had produced
their editions, Bonus had taken one step in this direction and compiled the
variants of both texts, in addition to those of the Peshitta, in three
adjacent columns.
3. An additional difficulty facing the scholar arises because of the poor
quality of the standard Harklean text. Whilst a good critical edition of
the Peshitta Gospels exists based on forty-two manuscripts edited by Pusey
and Gwilliam (Pusey and Gwilliam 1901),(3) the poor quality of White's
edition of the Harklean leaves much to be desired (White 1778; for the text
of John, see Bernstein 1853).
4. The current edition brings together the texts of the Sinaiticus (S),
Curetonianus (C), Peshitta(P) and Harklean (H), aligned under each other in
such a manner which allows the scholar to access all the versions in one
glance. The texts provided in the CESG are based on the aforementioned
standard texts of S, C and P. As a reliable standard edition of H is
lacking, the CESG provides a new text based primarily on one of the
earliest witnesses to the text, Vatican Ms. Syr. 268, thought by Mai to
have been written by Thomas of Harkel himself, although Hatch dates it to
858-859 C.E. (Mai 1831:4-5; Hatch 1946). This latter text was kindly
prepared for the purposes of this edition by Dr. Andreas Juckel.
5. The lost texts of the Diatessaron and the Philoxenian have no place in
the CESG. In the case of the former, this is caused by the absence of an
acceptable standard construction of the text. Although there have been
attempts to construct the Diatessaron, most notably in the Spanish Polyglot
(Ortiz de Urbina 1967),(4) New Testament scholarship is far from having
produced an acceptable construction, even if that be at all possible. In
the case of the Philoxenian, no trace of the Gospels has come down to us,
except in the form of a handful of citations in the works of Philoxenos
himself.
6. The Syro-Palestinian version (Lewis and Gibson 1899) is also not
included, primarily because it represents an independent translation from
the Greek and does not seem to have played a role in the history of the
development of the Syriac texts,(5) and secondly because it is composed in an
idiom which differs from Syriac, viz. Christian Palestinian Aramaic. It
must be stated that the purpose of this work is but to provide the scholar
with a tool; hence, neither investigating the Greek behind the Syriac
(apart from few places where it seemed crucial for the alignment), nor
providing citations from patristic literature, though crucial for the study
of the development of the texts, fall within the scope of this project.
Implementation of the Project
7. The idea of producing this edition sprang out in the academic year
1990-91 while I was reading for the degree of Master of Philosophy in
Syriac Studies under Dr. Sebastian P. Brock at the University of Oxford
(Wolfson College). During study sessions on the textual relationship of the
various Syriac versions of the Bible, Dr. Brock suggested the compilation
of a comparative edition of the Gospels based on the standard editions of
the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus and Peshitta. The Harklean was initially
excluded for the lack of a reliable edition of its text.
8. A preliminary proposal was submitted to E. J. Brill in 1991. Later that
year, Prof. Bruce Metzger, editor of New Testament Tools and Studies,
responded encouragingly and kindly accepted the CESG into his series. The
original proposal aimed at editing the texts of S, C and P in three
adjacent columns with special marks to indicate the differences between
them. Later, however, inspired by the work of Aland and Juckel, a decision
was made to align the texts under each other (Aland and Juckel 1986-).
After discussions with Dr. Andreas Juckel, it was also decided to
incorporate H into the CESG. Work began in the summer of 1992 by entering
the texts on the computer. The texts were proof-read later that year
against the original standard editions and were imported into the Syriac
Electronic Data Retrieval Archive (see Kiraz 1994:461-475).
9. During 1993, a prototype of CE-EDIT (comparative edition editor) was
designed, developed and tested. The program reads a particular verse from
multiple textual databases (input), displays the texts on the screen and
allows the user to align them interactively. The alignment information
(output) is maintained in another database as illustrated below.(6)
[Image illustrating relationship between version databases and alignment database]
10. The alignment process took place in 1994. The following year, the
prototype program, CESG-TEX, was written. The program reads the alignment
database and the various textual databases and outputs a file suitable to
be processed by the LATEX typesetting system using the sabrâ package, a set
of Syriac fonts and macros (Lamport 1994; Haralambous 1995). The process of
producing the output is illustrated in the following diagram.
[Image of flowchart of process used to produce CESG from information in databases]
11. The same year, an announcement was placed on the Internet requesting
participants to proof-read the texts for the second time. About twenty
replies were received.
Presentation of the Results
12. The four texts are aligned under each other as in the following
examples. The verse reference (e.g., 7.33) is given in the right margin
(abbreviations for the books are included below for clarity, though they
are not in the CESG itself). The texts appear in blocks, each block
consisting of four lines at most: the top line being the text of S and the
bottom line representing H. (Sigla are also given in the Serto script for
the benefit of the Syriac reader.) Two signs are used in the alignment: "X"
indicates "no correspondence" and"..." indicates lost text (only
in S and C).
[Image of Lk 7:33]
13. If the whole verse is wanting in S or C, it is omitted in the blocks as
illustrated in the following example, where S is partially wanting and C is
not extant.
[Image of Mk 5:26]
14. However, if a verse is omitted in the text, it is represented by
X's throughout (e.g., S in Mk 9.44).
Alignment Methodology
15. The alignment is controlled by two general rules having the following
precedence:
1. Maximising correspondences: in each verse, the texts are moved
horizontally (left or right) until the maximum number of
correspondences is found;
2. Having P as the driving force behind word order.
These principles are illustrated in the following example.
[Image of Lk 14:21]
16. The next example illustrates the precedence of the two rules. Here rule
2 is abandoned for the sake of rule 1, for if lmdbr) in H is
aligned with its sisters in the other versions, two alignments (viz.
mn and rwx)) would be sacrificed.
[Image of Mt 4:1]
17. There are, however, a number of categories which nullify rule 2. These
are (in the following examples, "center" refers to the aligned word[s]) in
question):
* 18. P does not control word order if the words to the right and left
of the center are semantically related, but not identical; in the
following example, y$w( is the center, surrounded by
)mr and mll.
[Image of Mt 23:1]
* 19. P does not control word order if the words to the right and left
of the center are particles, prepositions, enclitics, etc. For
example, dyn in Lk 4:40.
[Image of Lk 4:40]
* 20. When word order differs among the versions, an outer expansion
from the center is sought, if possible, where the nth (i.e. 1st, 2nd,
etc.) word to the right and left of the center correspond. For
example, ms^kn) forms the center of the following
alignment, and the first set of words to its right and left,
gyr, correspond; so is the case in the second set,
)ytyhwn / )yt, and the third set,
bklzbn.
[Image of Mt 26:11]
* 21. The center is semantically related, but not identical, and no
alignment can be found immediately to its right and/or left, for
example xbyc^yn, nplyn, and dnplwn in
Mk 3:10.
[Image of Mk 3:10]
22. In addition, the following rules have been adopted:
* 23. If a transposition of two or more words occurs (usually in a
conjunction or disjunction form), the transposition in most cases is
ignored in the alignment, e.g. )b) and )m) in Mk
10:29.
[Image of Mk 10:29]
* 24. Compounds which occur as one word in some versions while as two
words in others are aligned in one column, for example, )kl
qrc) and )klqrc) in Mt 25:41.
[Image of Mt 25:41]
25. The same applies to enclitics such as )mr )n) and
)mrn), and to compounds which are semantically related,
like qn+rwn) and ry$ m)).
* 26. Where two phrases do not match, but occur between aligned text,
both are aligned under each other, for example, dl) )t)mr
(lyh and lbr mn mlt) in Mk 5:32.
[Image of Mt 5:32]
* 27. In the case of H, consideration was given to the Greek behind the
Syriac; thus, l)n$ in H is not aligned with its sisters in
C and P.
[Image of Mt 18:12]
28. The project was completed in November 1995, and the CESG was published
in January 1996. The system described above can be used for the alignment
of other texts, though that may require minor changes.
© TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, 1996.
Endnotes
1 For a review of the Syriac translations and revisions of the New
Testament, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament:
Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (Metzger 1977:3-98). The issue
of the Philoxenian/Harklean problem is discussed by S. P. Brock (Brock
1981).
2 In Burkitt's case, this was due to an accident of editorial history: he
"took over a commission originally given to R. L. Bensly who had been asked
to produce an edition of Curetonianus before the Sinaitic palimpsest was
discovered (Black 1972:123-124).
3 The base text of this edition was republished by the British and Foreign
Bible Society in 1905, 1920 and in subsequent editions. The same text was
adopted by the United Bible Society's edition of the Syriac Bible in the
1988 and subsequent editions reformatted in two columns; alas, the Syriac
chapter divisions,cx^x),were omitted.
4 For a critical study of the limitations of this work, see Murray
1967:43-49.
5 Black, however, concludes that the Palestinian Syriac has some
Diatessaronic influence (Black 1941:101-111).
6 The original plan was to design a program which automatically aligns the
texts to a relatively good degree of accuracy, then have the alignments
manually tuned using CE-EDIT. After experimenting with manual alignment,
however, it was found that it takes 30-60 minutes to align the texts of one
chapter interactively (depending on its complexity and length using CE-EDIT
directly.
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