ana translation

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xviii
INTRODUCTION
2. This deficiency, as regards the Four Epistles, had been noted as
early as the sixth century by the Greek traveller Cosmas (known as
Indicopleustes),* and has since been abundantly verified by the concurring
evidence of the earlier Peshitta manuscripts, all of which, like
the Mardin copy, give only three Catholic Epistles (James, 1 Peter,
1 John). Whatever may be the age of the Peshitta New Testament,
whether its
literary structure, and its Canon, were of gradual growth
or due to a definitive act at a more or less determinable date, it is
agreed by all that never, from the time when it first attained acceptance
as the Syriac Authorized Version, did it include the Books
which (after the Mardin manuscript) the Editio Princeps omits.
Moses,
however, assured Widmanstad that all the missing portions of the sacred
text were extant in Syriac, and undertook to bring back copies of them
from the East, whither he was about to return, f This undertaking
was not fulfilled ;
he appears to have proved untrustworthy, to have
left Europe under a cloud of suspicion,
communications w r ith the West.
and never to have resumed
3. Nor was it through any Jacobite agency, nor from Mesopotamia,
that the Syriac text of these Four Epistles first reached Europe, and
found its
way into our printed Syriac New Testaments :
the Lebanon, and is due to the Maronite Church.
it came from
This Church indeed had already, before the time of Widmanstad
and his edition, become the medium through which the Syriac Scriptures
were first introduced to European
scholars. It had submitted
itself to the Roman See as early as the time of the Fourth Lateran
Council (1211); and at the Fifth (1513) its Patriarch was represented
by three of his priests. From one of these, the learned Teseo Ambrogio
of Pavia acquired a knowledge of Syriac, being thus the first
European to study that tongue and he was also the first to
; possess a
Syriac manuscript a copy of the Gospels and the Psalter, obtained no
doubt from his teacher. This Teseo, though he never succeeded in
printing more than a few fragments of the Gospel text in Syriac, yet
was an important agent in bringing about its ultimate publication ;
for
in his latter years (in 1529) he instructed Widmanstad, the future
* Topographia Christ., lib. vii. 292.
f
" Moses noster Meredinaeus .... ex Mesopotamia favente Deo reversus
reliquas SSS. Petri loannis et ludae Epistolas cum Apocalypsi quae ad perfectionein
Novi Testament! nobis defuerunt .... adportabit." Widru., fo. KK. 3.