Sinaitic Palimpsest

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The Sinaitic Palimpsest of Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai is a late 4th century manuscript of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. It is a Syriac palimpsest of 358 pages that has been erased and overwritten by a vita of female saints and martyrs with a date corresponding to 778 AD. It is the oldest copy of the gospels in Syriac, one of two surviving manuscripts that predate the Peshitta version, an updated Syriac translation that has been further revised to conform to a Greek text. The Peshitta very slowly superseded the Old Syriac gospels. The other Syriac manuscript, found in Egypt in 1842, is called the Cureton Manuscript after the orientalist William Cureton, who first identified and edited it in 1858. These manuscripts contain similar version of the Syriac gospels, which have been "conformed" to the four Greek gospels. In this sense of the word, the text has been corrected and re-edited to be made to conform to the Greek New Testament, though it is the older text. Even so, the Sinaitic Palimpsest retains some readings from even earlier lost Syriac gospels and from the 2nd century Diatessaron, which brought the four gospels into harmony with one another through selective readings and emendations.

The importance of such early, least conforming texts is emphasized by the revision of the Peshitta that was made about 508 AD, ordered by Philoxenus, bishop of Mabbog. His revision, it is said, skilfully moved the Peshitta nearer to the Greek text; "it is very remarkable that his own frequent gospel quotations preserved in his writings show that he used an Old Syriac set of the four gospels" [1].

The palimpsest was identified in the library at St. Catherine's in February 1892 by the intrepid Dr. Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who returned with a team of scholars that included J. Rendel Harris, to photograph and transcribe the work in its entirety [2].

The German theologian Adalbert Merx devoted much of his later research to the elucidation of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the results being embodied in Die vier kanonischen Evangelien nach dem ältesten bekannten Texte (1897-1905).

The Sinaitic Palimpsest immediately became a central document in tracing the history of the New Testament. The palimpsest's importance lies especially in its testimony to lost Aramaic gospel narratives, such as the alleged Aramaic Matthew (see Aramaic primacy).