ana translation

INTRODUCTION
xix
editor of the first Syriac New Testament then a youthful student of
Biblical literature in the elements of that language, and entrusted to
him his Syriac Gospels, charging him to commit it in due time to the
Church of Christ.*
It was not, however, till after the lapse of more than five and twenty
years (Teseo having died in the interval), that Widmanstad was enabled
to fulfil the charge thus laid upon him. But his Syriac New Testament
of 1555 more than fulfilled it. That edition, though Teseo's
Maronite manuscript of the Gospels was used for reference by its
editor, presents (as above stated) a completer text not the Gospels
merely, but the entire Peshitta New Testament as exhibited in the
Mardin manuscript. And to the Patriarch who sent that manuscript
to Europe in order to have it printed for the use of his people, and to
Widmanstad who carried out its publication, belong the honour of
having enriched Biblical literature by the Editio Princeps of the New
Testament as read in all the Churches, Jacobite, Maronite, and Nestorian
alike, whose Vulgate Bible was the Peshitta.
SECTION II.
The extra-PesJiitta Epistles.
1. Thus, though it was from the Jacobite Church of Mesopotamia
that the New Testament in the Peshitta Version first came complete
into the hands of Western scholars in the middle of the sixteenth
century, the way had been prepared for its publication by a series of
causes, ultimately due to the action some forty years earlier (in the time
of the Fifth Lateran Council) of the Maronite Church of the Lebanon.
And it is
noteworthy that from the same Maronite Church apparently
at or soon after the close of the same century came the first copy that
is known to have reached Europe of the supplement to the Peshitta
text with which this Introduction deals the Four Epistles which the
Peshitta omits.
2. Nicolas Serarius, a learned Jesuit of Mainz, in his Prolegomena
* " Obtestatus ut quo me beneficio turn complecteretur, id olim apud Ecclesiam
lesu Christ! collocarem." Widmanstad, ut supr. Some account of this Teseo
Ambrogio is to be found in Tiraboschi, Letteratura Italiana, vol. viii, pt. iii;
and in his own Introductio in Chaldaicam Linguam, &c., a rare book, published
in 1539, which contains the short passages from the Gospel text above mentioned.
He was born in 1469, and died in 1540.