ana translation

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INTRODUCTION
SECTION I.
The Peshitta New Testament first printed.
1. The Syriac Version of the Four Minor Catholic Epistles, the
Second of St. Peter, the Second and Third of St. John, and that
of St. Jude
of which a revised text is here offered, has for more than
two centuries and a half been included in all printed
editions of the
Syriac New Testament. But from the earlier editions it is lacking.
When the Editio Princeps was published in 1555,* Widmanstad, the
editor, was obliged to call attention to the fact of
the absence from his
volume, not only of a few passages here and there, f but of five whole
Books, the Eevelation and these Four Epistles. For this omission
he apologizes in such terms as to imply that he believed it to be due to
the imperfection of the manuscript whence he derived his text, a
copy which the Jacobite Patriarch of AntiochJ had sent to Europe
from Mardin in Mesopotamia by the hands of a priest named Moses,
with the object of having it printed. Widmanstad must therefore
have been unaware that the Canon of the current Syriac New Testament
the Peshitta was, in respect of these Books, deficient according
to the standard of the Greek and Latin Churches.
* The history of this Edition is to be gathered from the Dedicatio prefixed to
it
by the editor, and from his subjoined Epistola. In these he gives some
account of his life and studies. He was born in 1506 or 1507, and died not long
after the issue of his work.
viii.
t Of these the most considerable is the Historia Adulterae (St. Joh. vii. 53
12), for which see pp. 39 et sqq., and pp. 85 et sqq., infr.
J Probably Ignatius XVII, or his successor. The dates of these Patriarchs in
the sixteenth century are not clearly ascertained. They all have for many
centuries assumed the name Ignatius.
"Reliquae Sanctorum Petri loannis et ludae epistolae, una cum Apocalypsi,
etsi extent apud Syros, tamen in exemplaribus quae sequuti sumus defuerunt."
Widmanstad, fo. BB, lr. The MS brought by Moses was written at Mosul, but
its date is not recorded. The seat of the Jacobite Patriarch was, and still is, Deir
Zaferan, a monastery near Mardin.
C