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Parent:: PeshittAEnglishTranslations
Church Of The East Peshitta
It's important to clearly distinguish (over simplified) between:
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Church of the East PeshittA (Nestorian) This is the original Aramaic, said to have been brought by the Apostle Thomas to India via Persia with a shipwreck on the island of socotra (Eastern).
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Old Syriac PeshittO, (Johnannite), affectionately/derisively referred to as Old Scratch, said to have been translated from the Greek after the Diatesseron, and westernized (Greeked) with added NT books (Western). The added books are Revelation, Jude, 2Peter, 2John, 3John. I don't know that these were rejected: the Canon may have been closed before these later books were in wide circulation, which may point to the age of the PeshittA.
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CodexSinaticusSyriac, which is an oddball similar to the Cureton, and considered to be an Old Syriac, although not a very good copy with lot's of copyist errors; it is is Palimpsest. It is currently dated at 698 AD.
The Church of the East Peshitta reads very differently, and much more beautifully, than say a Erasmus based English translation, and has different content. A lot of the minor differences makes on ask: WastheNewTestamentReallyWritteninGreek, especially the wordplays and some things like Philemon 7 KJV. There are at least 4 or 5 Codicies of it that have near perfect agreement regardless of the century they date from:
- The Yonan Codex,
- The Khabouris Codex,
- The Mingana Codex
- The 1199 Houghton Houghton (Ashael Grant)](http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/44443013?n=6)
- The Goodspeed MS
The differences to the TR are relatively small, and the Eastern PeshittAs should also be free from Constantinunist or Roman or KjvTampering, unlike the Westerns which were brought info alignment with the Greek.
Paul Younan, a ACoE deacon says this:
As I have compared hundreds of verses between the Eastern manuscripts I
can look at myself, I have not seen any variants of any note, from
Goodspeed of the 6th century, to the Khabouris of the 10th-12th
century, the 1199 Houghton Ms, the 1613 A.D. Mingana...they all read
the same, verbatim. I have found only 2 or three scribal errors as I
said so far in the Khabouris, which are not made in the others.
I don't think we will find a 100% perfect copy, but I think the Mingana
is as close as it gets in manuscript form.
The Western text manuscripts have been compromised to varying degrees,
as they were made by a few groups which wanted to bring the Peshitta
more inline with the Greek text in a few places, which supported their
Christology, but this is just a few verses, and by and large, but for
some spelling of names and places, and some dialectical differences,
they are much the same text as that of The Original Eastern Peshitta's text.
http://peshitta.org/for/showthread.php?tid=857&page=2 Also, consult Gwilliam and Pusey's critical edition of the Peshitta (which included 39 western Peshitto manuscripts and 3 eastern Peshitta manuscripts.)
https://www.atour.com/forums/peshitta/7.html When different books began to be circulated, like the Diatessaron of Tatian, the "Gospel" of Thomas, the "Acts" of this person or that, the Church would respond by summoning a council (in the Apostolic tradition of the first council of Jerusalem) to settle the dispute.
https://www.atour.com/forums/peshitta/7.html In the case of the Church of the East, they chose to strictly limit the Canon to the 22 accepted books which were received from the hands of the Apostles Addai and Mari themselves, in the Aramaic original.
Along this same line, once a Canon is "closed", there is no more room for debate on the issue. This means that even today, say, if a Gospel of Peter was found.....and by all indications is seemed to be in agreement with the rest of the authentic scriptures, and orthodox in it's theology.....even that would not be reason enough to "revise" the Canon.
... https://www.atour.com/forums/peshitta/7.html
Yes, we have the story of King Abgar, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles and a few others to which we can add some of the disputed books, BUT these were not used for doctrinal formation. This is easy to understand, given our strict adherance to Antiochene theology. Some aspects of these teachings did have implications on our practices; for instance the Teaching of the Twelve contains a rubric that the Bread of the Offering be used on the day of the Offering and we still do that today.
Fr Dimitri Grekoff 4. RE: peshitta canon Jul-21-2000 at 10:22 AM (UTC+3 Nineveh, Assyria) https://www.atour.com/forums/peshitta/7.html#3
It would be hard to say when and if we ever really set a difinitive canon. Our OT was largely a Jewish work, so it lack much of the Apocrypha, although we had it and used much of it. Our concept of the OT seems to have been along the lines as the same divisions as the Jews used. The five "disputed" books seem to be disputed in the West only; we have no history of disputing them, they simply weren't added to our earliest completed NTs. Please note as well, in our liturgical usage, only the Epistles of Paul (included is Hebrews) are ever used.
Now, as to whether or not these five disputed books were ever used by our Fathers, perhaps, but not by direct quotation. Revelation is a largely liturgical work and its imagery is repeated often in our liturgy. But that does not mean that our liturgy is dependent upon the book. Antiochenes, such as Theodore and Cyril of Jerusalem and even John Chrysostom, seldom, if ever, use these "disputed books."
I think the OT is considered to be from the Hebrew before 3 c., so neither Masoretic nor LXX.