Peshitta

The Peshitta's two testaments have different histories. The Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, book by book and evidently by different hands, in a process scholars place mainly in the second and third centuries CE, centred by most reconstructions on Edessa; whether the earliest translators were Jews, Jewish Christians or Christians drawing on Jewish expertise remains debated, since the translation shows knowledge of Jewish exegesis and, in places, affinities with the Targum tradition, while other books hew closely and independently to the Hebrew.

Because it descends from Hebrew rather than Greek, the Peshitta Old Testament stands with the Septuagint and the Vulgate among the primary ancient witnesses to the biblical text, and its readings are cited in every serious apparatus. The New Testament followed another route. The earliest Syriac gospel tradition was dominated by Tatian's Diatessaron, the four gospels woven into one continuous narrative, alongside separated-gospel versions now called the Old Syriac; the Peshitta New Testament, emerging by the early fifth century, replaced both with a revision toward the Greek text then standard, and did its work so thoroughly that Diatessaron manuscripts were actively withdrawn. Its canon had twenty two books, without 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation, which entered later Syriac versions; the shorter canon remains the traditional count in the Church of the East.

When the Syriac churches divided in the fifth-century christological controversies, the Peshitta was already common property, and it remained so: the Church of the East beyond the Roman frontier, the Syriac Orthodox in the west, and later the Maronite, Chaldean and Syro-Indian churches all read the same version, which makes it a bond across one of Christianity's oldest divisions. Its manuscript tradition is correspondingly rich and remarkably stable, including some of the oldest dated biblical manuscripts in existence, fifth and sixth century codices from the Syrian monasteries among them, and the great seventh century Codex Ambrosianus of the Old Testament. The version travelled wherever Syriac Christianity travelled, eastward along the trade routes into Persia, Central Asia, India and Tang China, and its wording shaped Syriac liturgy, hymnody and the commentaries of teachers from Ephrem the Syrian onward.

Later scholars produced rival translations of scholarly bent, the Syro-Hexapla rendering Origen's Greek text and the Harklean New Testament pursuing word-for-word fidelity, but neither displaced the common version from church use. Critical study has served it well: the Leiden Peshitta edition of the Old Testament, in progress since the 1960s, and modern editions of the New Testament underpin its continuing citation in textual criticism, while the living churches of the Syriac rite, in the Middle East, Kerala and a wide diaspora, still proclaim their scriptures from it in the language the version has kept alive.