Page:Commentaries of Ishodad of Merv, volume 1.djvu/23

Rh Another eminent Syrian writer, Moses bar Kepha, is said to have had as his natural parent Simeon Kepha, who was from the village of Mashhad al-Koḥail, which is situated on the Tigris opposite al-Ḥadithah. This reference may perhaps help us to identify the exact position of Newtown.

It has already been pointed out that Ishoʿdad interpreted both the Old and New Testaments. With the former we are not concerned here; indeed I have never come across any copy of his comments on the Pentateuch. But with regard to the New Testament, there is no doubt that besides the volumes which illustrated the Gospel and are here reproduced, he wrote a series of annotations upon the Acts and the Pauline Epistles. A copy of these latter commentaries was, until recently, in my possession (Cod. Syr. Harris 60), having been transcribed for me in the East in the year 1893. It is now in the Library of the Semitic Museum at Harvard University. It was copied, I believe, in Ooroomiah.

Another copy, perhaps from the same archetype, is found at the end of the MS. in my possession which Mrs Gibson has used for her text (Cod. Syr. Harris 130). This MS. is also now transferred to the Harvard Library. Besides Prof. Margoliouth's copy and the one in the Sachau collection, I have come across traces of a copy amongst the Syrians of Southern India, but have not succeeded in obtaining a copy of it.

In view of the loans which Ishoʿdad makes from earlier writers, especially Ephrem and Theodore, it would be well to have the commentaries upon the Acts and Pauline epistles published. They would not be as interesting or important as Ephrem's commentaries on the Pauline Epistles (preserved in Armenian), but they would be sure to furnish valuable matter to the student of the Syriac literary tradition.

We come now to the authors quoted by Ishoʿdad in the Gospel commentaries; for it is in this direction that his great value lies. It was the observation made by Prof. Gottheil and Dr Isaac H. Hall, of New York, as to the existence of quotations from the Diatessaron of Tatian in the pages of Ishoʿdad, which first brought this commentary into public notice; and this observation of one of the oldest forms of Syriac Gospel as an outcrop in the pages of Ishoʿdad led to the further observation that