Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/157

Rh the paging of old Greek MSS. is sometimes in Iberian letters. This is the case with the early eighth century paging of the new Sinaitic palimpsest of the Gospels lately found at Sinai by Mrs. Lewis, and in the Bodleian there is a ninth century codex of the Gospels, also paged with Iberian letters. This much only is certain, that the Georgian text gives us a very primitive form of the legend; but, though a Christianised form, it cannot be a very direct ancestor of the Greek.

Now let us turn to the Armenian text. At first sight this appears to be nothing more than an abridgement of Boissonade's Greek text; especially as the Armenian translator asserts that he abridged his original. It has been accordingly set down by Kuhn and Zotenberg, who, however, had both of them a very slender knowledge of its contents, as a mere translation from the Greek. But I have now to point out many objections to this view.

Firstly, there occur in it purely Syriac words, like kasliath, in the sense of deficientia. And the constant use of the participle for the finite verb is another indication that it was made from Syriac. Thus the existence of a Syriac form of the text, which Zotenberg denies to have been likely or possible, seems to be proved.

Was then the Syriac, of which the Armenian is an abridged translation, itself a version from the Greek as we have it to-day? This is at the first glance improbable. The compilation of the Greek cannot be much earlier than 750. It is possible, but unlikely, that it would have been turned into Syriac and translated again into Armenian at so early a date as 950, much later than which date the Armenian cannot be.

Such reasoning is of course insecure. When, however, we observe that the Armenian, abridged though it be from a longer text, has yet many additions and peculiarities not