hatsoff

Hey, all. Someone on another forum made a curious statement:

This sounds dubious. Matthew exists complete in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, dated early fourth century. The earliest Greek fragment (to my knowledge) is P104, dated to the second century.

Does Matthew have an earlier complete copy in old Syriac, or an earlier fragment? If so, where can I find more info?

Is there some place I can find a list of all NT mss. in all languages, and not just Greek?

Thanks!

judge

Not correct. I have pointed this out many times to DominusDei in that forum.

He bases this on the work of Burkitt, who though rabbula made the peshitta . This was later shown to be wrong by Voorbus.
Burkitt wanted the OS to be the oldest gospel and argued that the useage of certain words placed it in the 2nd century.
The only existing copies of this (OS) are otherwise dated to the 5th cent IIRC.

So Dominus Dei is using arguments make by Burkitt whose other ideas were shown to be not just wrong but foolish.

I cant remember the precise argumenst DD relies on offhand.

The only two existing OS are the sinaitic pampliset and the Cureton. Each is an incomplete copy of slighty different texts of the NT.

Ben C Smith

Sounds dubious to me, too. The apparatus in my UBS text gives the following Syriac manuscripts (in rough chronological order):

Sinaitic Syriac, century IV.
Curetonian Syriac, century IV.
Peshitta, century V.
Philoxenian Syriac, 507 or 508. (But I think this one lacks the gospels.)
Palestinian Syriac, century VI.
Harklensian Syriac, century VII.

(I think only the first two count as Old Syriac.)

Several Greek fragments cleanly predate the earliest of these, and, as you noted, the earliest of the great Greek codices are about as old as the first complete gospel translations into Syriac (those being the Sinaitic and the Curetonian).

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Greek gospel papyri.

P104, also known as papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4404.

P77, also known as papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4405.

Ben.

hatsoff

Thanks very much, guys!

Another question: What's the deal with the Syriac Sinaiticus? What if any relationship does it have to Codex Sinaiticus (AKA aleph AKA 01)?

Ben C Smith

IIUC, both of these manuscripts hail from a monastery located on the Sinai peninsula.

Ben.

hatsoff

Ah. I have tried to look up the differences via Google, but there's so much confusion between the names of the two that my search terms don't produce the desired results.

Do you perhaps know of a page where I could get started reading about the Syriac/Aramaic mss. traditions? Or, heck, about any other ancient non-Greek translations of NT and apocryphal mss.?

EDIT: Please note that I have a university account where I can look up copyrighted journals, so feel free to recommend something like that, if it is appropriate.

Ben C Smith

You could try the introduction to The Old Syriac Gospels.

I am no expert on the Old Syriac, mind you, but I know the Curetonian is named after its discoverer, while the Sinaitic is named after its place of discovery.

Ben.

Toto

The hobbyhorse digression has been split off here.

Roger Pearse

Cureton was in charge of the manuscripts in the British Museum (now the British Library). Henry Tattam was able to buy a large number of Syriac manuscripts from the monastery of St. Mary Deipara (=Deir al-Suryani=Monastery of the Syrians) in the Nitrian desert in Egypt, in 1842. The Quarterly Review published a brief account of this. Cureton himself gave more information here.

As I understand it, Cureton used his position to deny other scholars access to the Nitrian mss, so that he could publish the most interesting ones himself. The "Curetonian" mss. are therefore Nitrian mss. Cureton was eventually killed in a railway accident, and thereafter access was freer.

In 1892 Agnes Lewis and her sister Margaret Dunlop travelled to St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai. There they found the manuscript of the Old Syriac gospels, which they photographed. (They published an account of their travels which I have, but not here). There is an account with quotations here here.

All the best,

Roger Pearse