Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - Introduction and Appendix (1882).pdf/174

136 early period of modern textual criticism it was perceived that the Vulgate Syriac version differed from early versions generally, and from other important early documentary authorities, in the support which it frequently gave to the common late Greek text: and as the version enjoyed a great traditional reputation of venerable antiquity, the coincidence attracted much interest. Eventually, as has been already noticed (§ 118), it was pointed out that the only way of explaining the whole body of facts was to suppose that the Syriac version, like the Latin version, underwent revision long after its origin, and that our ordinary Syriac MSS represented not the primitive but the altered Syriac text: and this explanation has been signally confirmed in our own day by the discovery of part of a copy of the Gospels in which the national version is preserved approximately in its Old or unrevised state. Two facts render it highly probable that the Syriac revision was instituted or sanctioned by high authority, personal or ecclesiastical; the almost total extinction of Old Syriac MSS, contrasted with the great number of extant Vulgate Syriac MSS; and the narrow range of variation found in Vulgate Syriac MSS, so far as they have yet been examined. Historical antecedents render it tolerably certain that the locality of such an authoritative revision, accepted by Syriac Christendom, would be either Edessa or Nisibis, great centres of life and culture to the churches whose language was Syriac, but intimately connected with Antioch, or else Antioch itself, which, though properly Greek, was the acknowledged capital of the whole Syrian population of both tongues. When therefore we find large and peculiar coincidences between the revised Syriac text and the text of the Antiochian Fathers of the