ana translation

xxii
INTRODUCTION
manner and linguistic usage of the Peshitta, of which he must have
been a diligent student.
SECTION III.
Date and Authorship of our Version of the extra-
Peshitta Epistles.
We are thus led to enter on the inquiry, In what age, and by whom,
was this translation made ?
1. The major limit of its age may be unhesitatingly fixed. It is a
production of the Monophysite Church. Of the manuscripts which
exhibit it not one is Nestorian. It cannot, therefore, claim to be
coeval with the Peshitta, the " Authorized Version " of all Syriacspeaking
Christendom, of Nestorian and Jacobite alike, presumably
prior
to the earlier of the schisms in which those names arose. It
belongs, therefore, to a period later than that of the Council o
Ephesus
(431), later probably than that of Chalcedon (451).
The evidence of Cosmas (above referred to) may be supposed to
bring the limit yet lower down, into the sixth century, to which his
work belongs. Yet his statement is not to be pressed so far. It
testifies to the general and public Syriac use in receiving but three
Catholic Epistles ;
it
merely tells us what we know on other testimony,
that none but those three were contained in the Syriac Vulgate, and it
does not exclude the possible existence in his time (though unknown to
him, and perhaps not widely known nor ever generally accepted) of a
Syriac translation of the other four.
2. Later, thus, than the Peshitta, where does it stand in order of time
relative to the other extant Syriac New Testament, the Harklensian 1
Here we are on firm ground, for concerning the Harklensian our
information is at first hand, full and precise. The official colophon
subscribed by the translator to most copies of it, including the oldest,
states that it was made at Alexandria, A.Gr. 925 (A.D. 614), by one
Thomas, otherwise known as "of Harkel," Jacobite Bishop of Mabug
(Hierapolis). It includes all the Books of the New Testament (with
the doubtful exception of the Apocalypse), our Four Epistles with the
rest, each in its place among the Seven, as in the Greek. Two complete
copies of it,* and many portions of it (especially of the Gospels) have
* See infr., p. 146. The copies above noted as complete are the o and there
described. The former has, however, lost by mutilation a few leaves at the end.