Most Western Christians know the story of the Bible in Greek and Latin. Fewer know that a third great tradition grew up at the same time, east of the Roman world, in a language close to the one Jesus spoke. That language is Syriac, and its Bible, the Peshitta, is still read in churches from the Middle East to southern India.

The Syriac Bible is not one translation but a family of them, made over several centuries. Its story includes a lost gospel harmony, two Victorian sisters in a desert monastery, and a stone monument in China.

Edessa and the Syriac language

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, the language family that also produced the Jewish Targums. It was the local language of Edessa, a city in upper Mesopotamia that is now Şanlıurfa in south-eastern Turkey. From the first centuries CE it was written in its own alphabet, and it became the literary language of Christians across a wide region, from Syria to Persia.

How Christianity reached Edessa is uncertain. A famous legend, told by Eusebius in the fourth century (Ecclesiastical History 1.13), says that King Abgar of Edessa wrote to Jesus asking to be healed, and that after the resurrection the apostle Thaddaeus (in Syriac tradition, Addai) came and converted the city. Historians regard the correspondence as legendary. What is clear is that there was a Christian community in Edessa by the late second century, and that Syriac-speaking Christianity was well established by the third.

Tatian’s Diatessaron

The first gospel book many Syriac Christians knew was not four Gospels but one. Around 170 CE a Christian teacher from the East named Tatian, a former pupil of Justin Martyr in Rome, wove the four Gospels into a single continuous narrative. It came to be called the Diatessaron, from a Greek phrase meaning “through the four.” Whether Tatian first wrote it in Greek or in Syriac is still debated.

In the Syriac-speaking churches the Diatessaron was the standard gospel text for two centuries or more. The poet and theologian Ephrem the Syrian (died 373) wrote a commentary on it, which survives. But later church leaders wanted the four separate Gospels. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in the fifth century, wrote that he had found more than two hundred copies of the Diatessaron in his churches and replaced them with the four Gospels. No complete copy of the Diatessaron survives in Syriac. It has to be reconstructed from quotations, Ephrem’s commentary, and later translations into Arabic, Persian and medieval European languages.

The Old Syriac Gospels

The four separate Gospels were translated into Syriac from Greek, probably by the third century. This Old Syriac version survives in only two manuscripts.

The first was found among manuscripts brought to the British Museum from a monastery in the Egyptian desert and published by William Cureton in 1858. It is known as the Curetonian Gospels and dates from the fifth century.

The second has a more remarkable story. In 1892 two Scottish twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, travelled to St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai. They had no formal university training, at a time when universities largely excluded women, but both were accomplished linguists. In a dark room of the monastery Agnes photographed a palimpsest: a manuscript whose original writing had been scraped off so that the parchment could be reused, in this case for lives of women saints. Beneath that later text she recognised an early copy of the Gospels in Syriac. The Sinaitic palimpsest, as it is called, was probably written in the late fourth or early fifth century and is one of the oldest Gospel manuscripts in any language other than Greek. Like some of the oldest Greek manuscripts, it ends Mark’s Gospel at 16:8.

The Old Syriac Gospels are often quite free, and they share some readings with the Diatessaron and with early Western witnesses. Textual critics value them as evidence of the Gospels as they were read in the second and third centuries.

The Peshitta

By the early fifth century a new standard version had replaced both the Diatessaron and the Old Syriac. It came to be known as the Peshitta, a name usually understood to mean “simple” or “common.” The name itself is not found before the ninth century, probably to distinguish it from later, more literal versions.

The Old Testament of the Peshitta was translated directly from Hebrew, probably in the second century CE, though some books may be earlier or later. Who made it is debated. It shows knowledge of Jewish interpretation, and some scholars, notably Michael Weitzman, have argued that it was begun by a Jewish community, perhaps one that later became Christian. Others think it was Christian from the start. In places it also shows the influence of the Septuagint. Because it was translated from Hebrew manuscripts older than the surviving Masoretic ones, it is one of the witnesses textual critics consult for the Hebrew text (see How textual criticism recovers the text).

The New Testament of the Peshitta is a revision of the Old Syriac Gospels towards the Greek, together with Acts and the Letters. Scholars once credited it to Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, who is known to have promoted the separate Gospels. Later research showed that the Peshitta was already in use before his time, so it is now generally dated to the late fourth or early fifth century, without a named translator.

The Peshitta New Testament contains twenty-two books. It lacks 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation, which were not accepted in the Syriac churches when it was made. Some Syriac churches still read only these twenty-two books in worship.

Later Syriac versions

Syriac scholars kept translating. In 507–508, Philoxenus, bishop of Mabbug, sponsored a new version made by his assistant Polycarp, intended to follow the Greek more closely. This Philoxenian version has largely been lost. A century later, in 615–616, Thomas of Harqel, working in a monastery near Alexandria, produced the Harklean version, a revision so literal that it tries to mirror Greek word order and grammar in Syriac. At about the same time, Paul of Tella translated the Greek Old Testament from Origen’s edition into Syriac, a version known as the Syro-Hexapla. The Harklean and Syro-Hexapla are important to textual critics because their literalness makes it easy to see the Greek behind them.

The five books missing from the Peshitta New Testament circulated in these later versions and were eventually printed with it.

East to India and China

The Syriac-speaking church divided after the theological controversies of the fifth century. The Church of the East, centred in the Persian Empire, and the Syriac Orthodox Church, centred in Roman Syria, went separate ways, and later the Maronites formed a third community in Lebanon. All of them kept the Peshitta as their Bible.

The Church of the East became one of the great missionary churches of the first millennium. Its merchants, monks and bishops travelled along trade routes across Central Asia. In southern India, the St Thomas Christians of Kerala, who trace their origin to the apostle Thomas, had links with the Church of the East from at least the early medieval period and used the Syriac liturgy and the Peshitta. Whether Thomas himself reached India is a matter of tradition rather than secure history, but the community’s antiquity is not in doubt.

In the 1620s a stone monument was dug up near Xi’an, the old Chinese capital of Chang’an. Erected in 781, the Xi’an stele records in Chinese, with names and a short passage in Syriac, that a missionary called Alopen arrived from the West in 635 bringing scriptures, and that the emperor had them translated and allowed the faith to be taught. The inscription speaks of the faith’s scriptures in terms borrowed partly from Buddhist and Daoist vocabulary. It is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for any Bible translation work in Chinese, although none of those early Chinese scriptures survives in full.

Aramaic and the original New Testament

The Peshitta is sometimes said to preserve the original words of the New Testament, on the grounds that Jesus spoke Aramaic and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Some members of the Church of the East hold this view, and it has popular advocates.

Most scholars, including scholars of Syriac, disagree. The New Testament books were written in Greek, the Peshitta’s text agrees with the Greek manuscript tradition and shows signs of translation from it, and the Peshitta grew out of earlier Syriac versions that can be traced. Syriac is also a later and different dialect from the Galilean Aramaic Jesus spoke. Even so, the Syriac versions are a precious resource. They let readers hear the Gospels in a language close to that of Jesus, and they sometimes illuminate Aramaic words and idioms behind the Greek.

The Syriac Bible today

The first printed Syriac New Testament appeared in Vienna in 1555. A critical edition of the Peshitta Old Testament has been in progress at Leiden since the 1960s. The Peshitta is still read in the liturgy of the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chaldean and Syro-Malabar Catholic churches, the Maronites and others.

For Open Word Bible, the Syriac versions are part of the evidence behind the texts it translates. Its New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament and its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. Where a reasoning record discusses a textual question, the ancient versions, Syriac among them, are among the witnesses scholars weigh. And the Syriac story is a reminder that the Bible has belonged to many languages and peoples from the beginning.

Sources

  • Brock, Sebastian P. The Bible in the Syriac Tradition. 2nd rev. ed. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006.
  • Baum, Wilhelm, and Dietmar W. Winkler. The Church of the East: A Concise History. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.
  • Kiraz, George Anton. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshîttâ and Harklean Versions. 4 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
  • Lewis, Agnes Smith. A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinaitic Palimpsest. London: Macmillan, 1894.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • Petersen, William L. Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Significance, and History in Scholarship. Leiden: Brill, 1994.
  • Soskice, Janet. The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
  • Weitzman, M. P. The Syriac Version of the Old Testament: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History 1.13.