Disharmony

I was caught flatfooted last week not knowing the Syriac translation-tradition over the Gospels. Jan Joosten is curing my ignorance, with his 1996 dissertation (I don't know if this was THE dissertation, which PhD'ed him) on The Syriac Language of the Peshitta. I appreciate Joosten's other scholarship; although in this case, Google Books is what its publishers have allowed me. Mostly I appreciate this book too.

The first chapter handles Matthew. Here: Curetonian, Sinaitic, and Peshitta are separate text-families based upon a common Syriac base or bases. This, to account for much of their features being shared. The Curetonian and Sinaitic base-text was no native Hellenophone and made several mistakes, defined as "divergent from all Greek MSS, best-explained by misreading this particular Greek MS". Joosten flags 2:18, 5:32, 8:9, and 15:22 (read on). He then notes a few "minor variants" which may or may not count, especially 20:21,30; 23:5,8. Also instances of west-Aramaic which Syriac-speakers found confusing, or "overly free translations" such as Curetonian's "Eden-garden" for Luke 23's "paradise".

All three text-families then set out to correct the original, best they could. The reason Joosten believes the Curetonian and Sinaitic families, after their common base, parted their mutually-independent ways; is that a mistake fixed in one family - like that garden - will often fly free in the others. Joosten section 2.1 then handles P. Er. I'll get to that...

Some of these mistakes are due to harmony, with other Gospels. Joosten rates the harmonies as deliberate; not just easing over sporadic contradictions. And there's midrash: 18:29's debtor has foreknowledge in Syriac not in Greek (Joosten finds this "minor" - I'll dare more). Joosten opines that if we didn't own Ephrem's lore about Tatian's "Diatesseron", modern scholars, to explain the harmonies, would have to invent this text.

With the restoration of a four-gospel collection into Syriac canon, the editors were pushed and pulled. The Old Syriac, it seems, retained much Diatesseron in how it translated each Gospel; likely to mollify the local-parish diehards. As time passed, the daughter families interpreted such convergences as the errors they were, so set to correcting these. Such Curetonian did to 5:18, which deharmony Sinaiticus missed.

We might be missing other Old Syriac errors so egregious that all copyists agreed to fix them before our MSS. This might lead to some variants more "minor" today... or not so minor. Take 15:22 - independently rendered in C and S, but each such that the Canaani woman left Tyre/Sidon to come to Jesus. This is possible from the Greek; but, as Joosten notes, unintentional by Matthew and impossible in Matthew's source Mark 7:25f. I'll ask if we have here an intentional disharmony, by C and S, to divorce Matthew from Mark.

Joosten is aware that for Matthew, Peshitta is close to CS (for my part I've seen this at the end of Luke 23). Bruce Metzger assumed that Peshitta revised the Old Syriac, just like C and S did; I'd assumed similar. More: a case can be made from Joosten that the Scriptorium-Of-P had observed over the vast late-antique Syriana that CS had made corrections, concluding that a thorough and effective revising was in order. So P gathered the MSS, and used these as a bug-filter (if I may). One could compare the Alexandrine and Byzantine recensions across the Euphrates in Greek. This case, Joosten concedes possible 2.1.a.

Joosten 2.1.b is the counter-argument. Peshitta includes harmonies which C and S refuse, to a fault in their case. P is also better at Greek. Joosten concludes that Old Syriac and Peshitta were rival translation-projects from a Syriac Diatesseron base. Old Syriac needed the revisions, which (today) are C and S. Peshitta, I assume, got a few tweaks here and there; but P overall enjoyed the patronage of the Assyrian Church, so didn't suffer the magnitude of variation.