'Of All the Available Printed Editions of the Peshitta, This Is the Most Complete, Beautiful and Handy. It Is Thoroughly Vocaliz
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INTRODUCTION TO THE GORGIAS EDITION BY SEBASTIAN P. BROCK 'Of all the available printed editions of the Peshitta, this is the most complete, beautiful and handy. It is thoroughly vocalized, its print is very clear, owing to the use of beautiful Syriac type, and the paper is good and lasting'. These were the words of Joshua Bloch,1 writing ninety years ago, and they remain just as true today. The Mosul Peshitta was published in three volumes by the Dominican Press (vols. 1—2, Old Testa- ment, 1887, 1888; vol. 3, New Testament, 1891) and paid for by the Dominican Mission.2 It was the only fifth printed edition that covered the entire Syriac Bible. Although the Peshitta New Testament had been printed in 1555, it was not until the Paris Polyglot Bible of 1645 that the whole Syriac Bible was pub- lished, with both Testaments together; the text was republished just over a decade later in Brian Walton's Polyglot Bible (1657). Walton's text was very largely derived from the Paris Polyglot, which itself was based on late manuscripts, in particular Paris Syr. 6 of the 17th century (17a5 in the Leiden Peshitta). Al- though drawing largely from these earlier editions, Samuel Lee's edition of the Peshitta, published over a century and a half later (OT, 1823; NT 1826), also made use of some earlier manuscripts for the Old Tes- tament, including the famous Buchanan Bible, an illustrated twelfth-century manuscript which had found its way to the Syrian Orthodox community in South India, and had then been presented by Mar Diony- sius VI to Claudius Buchanan in 1806.3 Lee's text was a considerable improvement on that of the Poly- glot Bibles, and its Old Testament text is still reproduced today in the United Bible Societies' edition of the Syriac Bible (1979 and reprints). These three European printed editions of the Syriac Bible were all based on manuscripts belonging to the West Syriac tradition (and for the most part on very late ones). This fact lent a special interest to the next edition of the whole Syriac Bible, for it was produced in Urmia, in NW Iran, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. This was published in 1852, side by side with a Modern Syriac translation made directly from the Hebrew text. The Peshitta text was evidently based primarily on East Syriac manuscripts that were locally available, but for Chronicles, which is very poorly transmitted in the East Syriac tradition, resort was made to using Lee's edition, and it seems likely that elsewhere too, occasional use of Lee's text may have been made. Since the East Syriac text was gen- erally a more conservative one, the Urmia edition was for the most part welcomed by scholars, as offer- ing a more reliable text.4 As will be seen below ('Text'), the Mosul edition likewise provides a good East Syriac text of the Peshitta, close to, but by no means identical with, that of the Urmia edition's text. 1 J. Bloch, 'The printed texts of the Peshitta Old Testament', American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 37 (1920/21), pp. 136—44, here p. 141. 2 For the history of this important Press see J.-M. Fiey,' L'imprimerie des Dominicains de Mossoul 1860—1914', -Aram 5 (1993), pp. 163—74; and for its publications, J.F. Coakley and D. Taylor, Syriac Books Printed, at the Dominican Press, Mosul (Piscataway NJ, 2009). That the Dominican Mission covered the 'considerable expenses' is explicitly stated in the Syriac Preface (but surprisingly not in the Latin). 3 Today in Cambridge University Library, ms. Oo.l.l,2 (12al in the Leiden edition of the Peshitta). 4 Its superiority (along with that of the Mosul edition) can readily be seen from the collations for Isaiah in G. Diettrich's Ein Apparatus criticus %ur Pesitto %um Propheten Jesaia (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche v VI SEBASTIAN BROCK The making of the Mosul Peshitta The origins of the Mosul edition were not without a considerable amount of controversy, and a well- documented account of this is provided by J.-M. Voste.5 Here only the bare outlines are given. Roman Catholic missionaries working among the Chaldeans had for some time wanted printed Syriac Bibles, or at least the Psalter and New Testament, in order to counterbalance the editions in both Classical and Modern Syriac produced by the American Mission in Urmia.6 A 'corrected' copy of the Urmia edition of the New Testament had been sent in 1862 to the Sacred Congregation for the Propaga- tion of the Faith (the 'Propaganda') in Rome, along with a local manuscript copy of the Peshitta New Testament made by a Chaldean priest. The manuscript was passed on to the Syriac scholar Pius Zingerle to be examined; when he found that it had been corrected according to the Vulgate, and thus did not represent the genuine Peshitta, the Propaganda sensibly declined to print it. Nevertheless, mindful of the need for a printed edition, a few years later, in 1865, the Propaganda instructed their former student, the Chorepiscopus Joseph David, to search for good manuscripts of biblical and liturgical books with a view to providing editions 'exempt from all error'. Subsequently, in 1872, the Congregation of the Propaganda proposed to the Dominican Mission in Mosul to undertake the printing of the Syriac Bible. The head of the Mission, however, was hesitant, as he felt that this suggestion, coming from Rome, might cause diffi- culties with the aged Chaldean Patriarch, Joseph VI Audo (1790—1878), in view of the latter's decidedly difficult relationship with Pope Pius IX and the authorities in Rome. In the end, however, it turned out that, when he met the Patriarch in 1877 and put the Propaganda's proposal to him, the Patriarch proved to be favourable to the idea. Since the Syriac characters used by the Dominican Mission's Press were not considered beautiful enough for such a prestigious undertaking, a new font was designed, based on the calligraphy of the priest Abaham Shekwana of Alqosh. Abraham happens to be a well-known scribe, and several of his manuscripts are to be found in the Mingana Collection, Birmingham, including a Gospel Lectionary 'in a very bold and handsome Estrangelo hand';7 more importantly, however, he was identified by J-M. Fiey as the scribe who copied out for Alphonse Mingana the famous manuscript, now in Berlin, of the Chronicle of Arbela, employing a hand imitating an early style of Estrangelo.8 Though the hand that Abraham Shekwana used for the Chronicle of Arbela is considerably different from the font designed for the Mo- sul Bible, it will be interesting to discover if the font turns out to resemble the same scribe's hand in Wissenschaft, 8; Giessen, 1905); wherever the Urmia and Mosul editions go against the reading of the European editions, they normally turn out to have the support of the oldest manuscripts. 5 J.-M. Vosté, 'La Peshitta de Mossoul et la revision catholique des anciennes versions orientales', in M-iscellanea Giovanni Mercati, I (Studi et Testi 121; 1946), pp. 59-94. 6 Besides the 1852 edition of the whole Bible, with the Peshitta and a Modern Syriac translation made from He- brew and Greek, there were editions of the New Testament into Modern Syriac (1846, made from the Peshitta, which accompanied it), 1854 (without Peshitta), and 1864 (in this the text was heavily revised on the basis of the Greek); for the issues behind this, see my 'Translating the New Testament into Syriac (Classical and Modern'), in J. Krasovec (ed.), Interpreting the Bible (Ljubljana/Sheffield, 1998), pp. 371-85, esp. 379-83. The Lazarists in Urmia eventually managed to produce an edition of the Gospels and Acts in 1877, in both Classical and Modern Syriac. 7 Mingana Syr. 537 (A. Mingana, Catalogue, cols. 983—4. cat ; Abraham copied this in 1911 from a manuscript of 1571/2 which itself have been copied by 'Abdisho' of Soba in 1284/5. Other mss. in Birmingham copied by Abra- ham are Mingana 47, 50, 52 (he was also the former owner of Mingana syr. 98). 8 J.-M. Fiey, 'Auteur et date de la Chronique d'Arbèles', L'Orient Syrien 12 (1967), pp. 265-302, here 281-2. For his handwriting for the Chronicle, see the illustration inj. Assfalg, Syrische Handschriften (Verzeichnis der orientalis- chen Handschriften in Deutschland V; 1963), Plate 3; also the photographic edition of the text by P. Kawerau, in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 467, 1985. PREFACE VII Mingana Syr. 537. (It is intriguing that Mingana once claimed that he had himself had a hand in revising and correcting the Mosul New Testament; since he had only just entered the Seminary school, aged 13, at the time when the New Testament was being printed, the very most that this could have amounted to would have been being shown some of the proofs!).9 The scholar who had been approached by the Propaganda and who was primarily responsible for editing the text, Joseph David (1829-1890), is better known under his episcopal name of Mar Klimis (Clemens) David, taken after his appointment as Syrian Catholic Archbishop of Damascus in 1879.10 Mar Klimis was a very accomplished scholar, who had a good knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, as well as Syriac and Arabic. Earlier in his career he had been closely involved in the preparation of an edition of the Arabic text of the Bible (published in 4 volumes, Mosul 1875-1878), and in 1877 he had published an interesting revision of the Peshitta Psalter that had made use of his knowledge of Hebrew.11 For the Mo- sul Peshitta, however, his aim was not to revise the Peshitta text, but to reproduce the traditional text in a carefully edited form.