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Old Syriac Manuscripts
#2
ScorpioSniper2 Wrote:Are there any other fragments of the Curetonian and Sinaitic Palimpsest besides the ones found by William Cureton and Agnes Smith Lewis?

Presently no.

ScorpioSniper2 Wrote:I don't see how they can be so certain that the Old Syriac is older than the Peshitta when we have only two manuscripts that are from the 4th century.

The close-to-certainty comes from many thousands of hours of vetted research and a number of generations of linguistic analysis and shared features with the Peshitta and subsequent Syriac translations from the Greek. They're written in an earlier dialect of Syriac than the Peshitta (however, "Old Syriac" is a misnomer as the Old Syriac *NT* is not written in Old Syriac, the *dialect*) with a number of westernisms (Aramaic dialect-wise, not Syriac-wise or text-type-wise) which are arguably earlier.

ScorpioSniper2 Wrote:Our full Peshitta manuscripts also comes from around the same time as the earliest full New Testament manuscripts in Greek.

The earliest more-or-less complete Peshitta manuscript dates to the mid-to-late 5th century and the earliest more-or-less-complete Greek manuscript is from the mid 4th century, with various complete books of the NT as early as the mid 3rd century and fragments even earlier. Nothing Peshitta-wise can be dated to that period.

(The Khabouris' prior copy "attestation" does not count, unless someone can *actually* produce a critical text of the colophon-- which is a heavily-damaged rorschach. :-) )

ScorpioSniper2 Wrote:We don't have any fragments because the Eastern Christians and Jews did not keep fragmentary writings. Also, if the Old Syriac was so important, why was the Sinaitic found in a trash bin?

When manuscripts wear out to the point they cannot be used, they're retired (usually stored -- at least in Jewish tradition -- in a genizah before they are ceremonially buried or burned). If the parchment can be re-used, the ink is scratched off to make a palimpsest. Where it *seems* careless to modern sensibilities, there are even a number of Peshitta palimpsests that attest to this which have the Peshitta as the underwriting and another text on top. We also have Peshitta fragments and bits of old retired Peshitta manuscripts used as bookbindings.

Parchment was simply *that* expensive. :-)

Peace,
-Steve
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Messages In This Thread
Old Syriac Manuscripts - by ScorpioSniper2 - 03-15-2014, 05:50 PM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by SteveCaruso - 03-16-2014, 10:26 PM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by Aramaic - 03-17-2014, 01:27 AM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by ScorpioSniper2 - 03-17-2014, 04:44 AM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by Paul Younan - 03-17-2014, 08:56 PM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by Bram - 03-24-2014, 02:43 AM
Re: Old Syriac Manuscripts - by Aramaic - 03-24-2014, 03:57 PM

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