ana translation

INTRODUCTION
xxiii
been preserved. Its character (as a translation which has attained a
And we shall have advanced a step towards fixing the age of
singular degree of accuracy by sacrificing propriety of idiom as well as
literary quality) is such that it lends itself readily to critical comparison.
our Version, if we can satisfy ourselves whether it, or the text of the
same Four as given in the Harklensian, is the earlier.
The question thus raised
has been confidently answered by White,
the editor of the Harklensian.* He lays it down as certain that our
Version is later not only than the Harklensian, but also than the
time of Bar-Salibi, who (writing in the middle of the twelfth century)
in his Commentaries on the Acts and Epistles follows the Harklensian
text of these Four Epistles, and states that they were not found in Syriac
except in that Version.! This statement, however, is
demonstrably
erroneous; for we have tangible evidence that these Epistles in our
Version, though Bar-Salibi had not met with them, were known and
transcribed in and before his time. Our oldest copy of them, dated
A.Gr. 1134 (A.D. 823), was in fact three hundred years old before he
wrote. And an Arabic Version of them, undoubtedly based on it, is
also believed to belong to the ninth century. J Thus the evidence of
Bar-Salibi, and White's inference from it, fall together to the ground.
Putting aside, accordingly, as inadmissible, the low date assigned
by White, we return to the question above stated, Is our Version
prior or posterior to the Harklensian 1 It cannot well be dated (as we
have seen) so early as the fifth century, nor so late as the ninth.
Does it
belong to the eighth, or to the seventh, or to the sixth ?
3. And here a fact presents itself, of cardinal importance towards
the solution of our problem. Thomas of Harkel, who in his colophon
* Dr. Joseph White was Laudian Professor of Arabic (1775), afterwards Regius
Professor of Hebrew (1802), in the University of Oxford. His edition (under the
title Versio Syriaca Philoxeniana) was published at Oxford (1778 1803), in
successive volumes.
t This statement White cites (in his opening note on 2 Peter, p. 43) from
Pococke's Pr&fatio to the Editio Princeps. Pococke found it in a (still inedited)
Commentary by Dionysius (better known as Bar-Salibi, Bishop of Amid (Diarbekr),
1166 1171, the most learned of the Jacobite divines of the twelfth century)
contained in the Bodleian MS Or. 560, on the Apocalypse, Acts, and Epistles.
This MS has lost many leaves ;
a more complete one is in the British Museum
(Rich 7185).
J See below, Sect, xii, "Manuscripts" Cod. 1, p. xlii, Sect, xiv, " Versions" ;
also pp. 1, 4.
On this mistake, see further in Sect, vn, p. xxxii infr.