Curetonian Gospels
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The Curetonian Gospels are contained in a manuscript of the four gospels of the New Testament in Old Syriac, a translation from the Greek. The order of the gospels is Matthew, Mark, John, Luke. The text is one of only two Syriac manuscripts of the separate gospels that predate the standard Syriac version, the Peshitta; the other is the Sinaitic Palimpsest. A fourth Syriac text is the harmonized Diatesseron. The Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest appear to have been translated from independent Greek originals.
The manuscript gets its curious name from being edited and published by William Cureton in 1858.[1] The manuscript was among a mass of manuscripts brought in 1842 from a Syrian monastery in the Wadi Natroun, Lower Egypt, as the result of a series of negotiations that had been under way for some time; it is conserved in the British Library. Cureton recognized that the Old Syriac text of the gospels was significantly different from any known at the time. He dated the manuscript fragments to the fifth century; the text, which may be as early as the second century, is written in the oldest and classical form of the Syriac alphabet, called Esṭrangelā.[2]
In 1872 Willliam Wright, of the University of Cambridge, privately printed about a hundred copies of further fragments, Fragments of the Curetonian Gospels, (London, 1872), without translation or critical apparatus.
The publication of the Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest enabled scholars for the first time to examine how the gospel text in Syriac changed between the earliest period (represented by the text of the Sinai and Curetonian manuscripts) and the later period. The Syriac versions of the New Testament remain less thoroughly studied than the Greek.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Cureton, Remains of a Very Ancient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syrica, Hitherto Unknown in Europe, London, I858.
- ^ Illustration of a page.
[edit] External links
- Thomas Nicol, "Syriac Versions of the Bible" A simplified on-line introduction.
- Curetonian Syriac
[edit] References
- Harman, Henry M. "Cureton's Fragments of Syriac Gospels" Journal of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis 5.1/2 (June-December 1885), pp. 28-48.
- Burkitt, F.C. Evangelion Da-Mepharreshe: The Curetonian Version of the Four Gospels, with the readings of the Sinai Palimpsest and the early Syriac Patristic evidence (Gorgias Press 2003) ISBN 9781593330613 . This is the standard edition of the Curetonian manuscript, with the Sinai text in the footnotes. Volume I contains the Syriac text with facing English translation; volume II discusses the Old Syriac version.
- Kiraz, George Anton. Comparative Edition of the Syriac Gospels: Aligning the Sinaiticus, Curetonianus, Peshitta and Harklean Versions. Vol. 1: Matthew; vol. 2: Mark; vol.3: Luke; vol. 4: John. (Leiden: Brill), 1996. ISBN 90-04-10419-4 .
