ana translation

52
PREFATORY NOTE.
THE following Greek Text is offered for the use of Biblical students
who do not read Syriac.
It is a reconstruction of the text on which the Syriac translator
presumably worked. His translation is so exact that, for the most
part, where there is variation among the authorities for the Greek
text, the reading which he followed can be determined with certainty.
In nearly all
the (not very numerous) places where the evidence of
the Syriac is inconclusive as to the underlying Greek, the variation of
reading
is immaterial affecting the presence or absence of the article,
or of a superfluous preposition, or the choice between two nearly equivalent
words, or between moods or tenses of the verb which Syriac fails
to distinguish. All these, as well as the very rare instances where the
version has not decided clearly between two readings which differ
substantially, are pointed out in the Apparatus Criticus at foot of each
page, or (where the variation is very minute) indicated by square
brackets in the text.
Of the Apparatus Criticus, the object (apart from such exceptional
cases) is : (a) to note the evidence of the Syriac, on this or that side,
wherever the reading of the Greek is disputed ; (b) to record every
instance in which it appears to follow a text otherwise unattested ;
(c) to distinguish among
its textual deviations those which seem due
merely to inexactitude of rendering, or to the incapacity of the Syriac
idiom to represent the Greek with precision, rather than to variation
in the underlying Greek.
In the still rarer instances where the translator plainly indicates the
Greek he had before him, but has rendered it
wrongly or imperfectly,
his error or failure is not reproduced in this Text, but is noted in the
Apparatus. The Text gives the Greek as he presumably read it, not as
he has inadvertently misrepresented
it.
The above applies primarily to the Greek Text of the Epistles ;
but
the Greek Text of the Pericope (Paul-version) has been formed on like
lines. That of the two which follow it is of course conjecturally
reconstructed.