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Did Tatian Use the Old Testament Peshitta? a Response to Jan Joosten

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Did Tatian Use the Old Testament Peshitta? a Response to Jan Joosten DID TATIAN USE THE OLD TESTAMENT PESHITTA? A RESPONSE TO JAN JOOSTEN by ROBERT F. SHEDINGER Elkins Park, PA Since1 the discovery of the Old Syriac Gospel texts in the nineteenth century, scholars have noted the many di Verences that exist between the Old Syriac and canonical Greek Gospel traditions. 2 One such diVerence is the form in which Old Testament quotations appear in the Old Syriac Gospels. While many of the Old Testament quotations in the Greek Gospels show Septuagintal in uence, many of these same Old Testament quotations appear in the Old Syriac Gospels in a form closer to the Masoretic Text (where the MT and LXX di Ver). This phenomenon was early explained as being the result of the scribes of the Old Syriac tradition assimilating the text of the Old Testament quotations to that of the Old Testament Peshitta (OTP), the Old Testament of the Syriac-speaking church. Since the text of the OTP generally stands closer to the MT than the LXX, use of the OTP by early Syriac Gospel scribes would certainly explain this phenomenon. As early as 1904, F.C. Burkitt wrote, “But now and again S (Sinaitic Syriac) and C (Curetonian Syriac) leave the Greek and agree with the Peshitta, even in places where it di Vers from the Hebrew and LXX.”3 1 An earlier form of this paper was read before the Mid-Atlantic regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature on March 13, 1998 in New Brunswick, NJ. 2 The Old Syriac text of the gospels exists in two late fourth or early fth-century MSS: Codex Curetonianus (a.k.a. the Curetonian Syriac) published by William Cureton in Remains of a Very Ancient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac, hitherto unknown in Europe (London: John Murray, 1858); and Codex Sinaiticus (a.k.a. the Sinaitic Syriac) pub- lished originally by R.L. Bensly, J. Rendel Harris & F.C. Burkitt in The Four Gospels in Syriac transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894). Later, Agnes Smith Lewis, who discovered the Sinaitic MS at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, published her own version in The Old Syriac Gospels, or Evangelion da- Mepharreshe; being the text of the Sinai or Syro-Antiochian Palimpsest, including the latest additions and emendations, with the variants of the Curetonian text (London: Williams & Norgate, 1910). 3 F.C. Burkitt, Evangelion da-Mepharreshe, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904) 203. A similar point is made by Anton Baumstark in writing, “Er selbst (the OTP) ist den christlichen Übersetzern der NTlichen Schriften bereits so geläu g ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Novum Testamentum XLI, 3 266 robert f. shedinger More recently, Sebastian Brock, in a brief discussion of Greek-into- Syriac translation technique, connects this phenomenon to the Diatessaron of Tatian.4 It is generally accepted that Tatian wrote his Diatessaron (a detailed harmonization of the four gospels) in Syriac c. 170 C.E. Further, it is widely acknowledged that the Diatessaron is the initial form in which the gospels rst appeared in Syriac, and that the Old Syriac tradition was in some way dependent upon the Diatessaron. 5 While the original Syriac text of the Diatessaron no longer exists, Brock makes use of Ephrem’s Syriac commentary on the Diatessaron to recon- struct the original text of the Diatessaron for comparison with the Old Syriac Gospel tradition. According to Brock, Tatian used the OTP in the creation of the Diatessaron, and the OTP form of each quotation was thereby taken into the Old Syriac Gospels where it was over time partially assimilated to the canonical Greek form of the text. Unfor- tunately, space limitations allow Brock to provide a detailed discussion of only a single example of the alleged tendency of the Diatessaron to assimilate Old Testament quotations to the text of the OTP (though he brie y refers to two other such examples in footnotes). Such is not the case, however, in the work of Jan Joosten. Building upon Brock’s thesis, Joosten has undertaken a detailed and systematic study of every Old Testament quotation in the Old Syriac Gospels in which he catalogues every place where they di Ver from the canonical Greek text but show signs of assimilation to the OTP. 6 As a result of this procedure he reaches a conclusion similar to that of Brock, that Tatian consistently used the OTP in the creation of his Diatessaron and that the Old Syriac and Peshitta Gospels independently adopted much of the Diatessaronic text which was later assimilated, at least partially, to the Greek text of the Gospels. 7 While Joosten’s investiga- gewesen, dass sie bei Wiedergabe der hier vorkommenden ATlichen Zitate sich vielfach an ihn anschlossen.” See A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: A. Marcus und E. Webers Verlag, 1922) 18. 4 S. Brock, “Limitations of Syriac in Representing Greek,” in Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission and Limitations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977) 96-98. 5 For a thorough discussion of Diatessaronic studies, see William L. Petersen, Tatian’s Diatessaron: Its Creation, Dissemination, Signi cance, and History in Scholarship (Vig. Chr. Suppl. 25; Leiden: Brill, 1994). 6 Jan Joosten, “The Old Testament Quotations in the Old Syriac and Peshitta Gospels: A Contribution to the Study of the Diatessaron,” Textus 15 (1990) 55-76. 7 Joosten, “The Old Testament Quotations,” 58. William L. Petersen (“New Evidence for the Question of the Original Language of the Diatessaron,” in Studien zum Text und zur Ethik des Neuen Testaments [W. Schrage, ed.; BZNW 47; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986] 325-43) has apparently also studied the OT quotations in the Diatessaron. He observes.
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