The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

STONE Jewish Tradition and the Christian West 433
From his study of the complex Western transmission of this document,
Heist concluded that its oldest Western form was that preserved
in the Saltair na Rann, the 'Psalter of the Quatrains', with a secondary
source existing in another Irish work, The Evernew Tongue. He
argued that the origin of The Signs of the Judgment should probably
be sought in Ireland, prior to the twelfth century.
As for the versions I myself had encountered: the comparison of the
text of the Armenian documents with a variety of the Western witnesses
showed them to be affiliated with the form of the text known
from the spuriosa of Bede, the Historia Scholastica by Peter Comestor
and in the writings of Peter Damien. These three sources, we might
comment, constitute the chief witnesses to one line of European
transmission of the Fifteen Signs of the Judgment. Furthermore, the
two Armenian versions are not identical with any single one of these
witnesses. Some of the differences between the two Armenian versions
and the most closely related Latin texts include the attribution of the
Latin texts to St Jerome (though, in the West, any work claiming to be
translated from a Hebrew source ran that danger), some displacements
and other textual corruptions. As for the Hebrew version in the
Bodleian manuscript, it is clearly a translation from Latin (it includes
some cases of transliteration of Latin words), but its exact affiliation
within the textual traditions of the Latin texts of the Signs of the
Doomsday could not be established. The Hebrew version contains an
extensive introduction and a long conclusion not known elsewhere and
it incorporates a tradition relating to Mount Olympus, the closest
parallel to which is to be found in Isidore of Seville. 6
The question of the Jewish origin of this text remains somewhat
open. If Heist is correct, that it derives from the Irish tradition via a
version of Apocalypse of Thomas which has not survived, then the
attribution to Jerome, to the Annales Hebraeorum, or to 'the Jews', as
the Armenian would have it, is odd. Yet, it is not demonstrable that
the Armenian version actually goes back to a Latin text; nothing in it
indicates this (nor, however, does anything in it indicate the contrary).
There were, of course, ample opportunities for Armenians to become
familiar with Latin texts, the most obvious being during the existence
6. These texts were discussed in detail in M.E. Stone, Signs of the Judgment,
Onomastica Sacra and The Generations from Adam (University of Pennsylvania
Armenian Texts and Studies, 3; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981). The Spanish
connection is, of course, intriguing, but inconclusive.