Old Syriac, on Mark

The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog has posted a collection of free papers on the end of Mark's evangel. This is going to be a content-farm of the most blessed order.

Some we've met already, like Anne Boud’hors and Sofía Torallas Tovar on the Sahidic Mark; a Markan conference could hardly keep those two away. Some we are not meeting, like those Palaestinian lectionary-palimpsests; a pity, that. For now we'll talk David G. K. Taylor, on Syriac; with some intersect with Nicholas J. Zola on the Diatessaron. Taylor and Zola are cautious about "Tatianic" readings: they allow mainly that a harmony did exist in Syriac (and in Armenian translation of Ephrem) and (especially Zola) that this harmony included the Longer Ending vv. 9-20.

One point here that I think we're all coming to appreciate is the vast improvement for reading palimpsest, since the days of Dunlop-Gibson, her twin, and Harris. Taylor has pointed out that the 1910 publication of Sinai "S" was just wrong in many places, to the degree he's promising a new edition. Exciting news!

One thing Taylor's not changing, relevant here, is that "S" Mark stops abruptly at v. 8, translating phobountai gar as "because they were afraid" [of the vision]; gar ending a sentence is so rare in Greek (or in Coptic) that most interpreters assume it's a truncation as in whatever Cain might have said to Abel before heading to the field. This implies "S" had a base text which ended with gar. Given Zola's findings, I find difficult to doubt that "S" knew the longer-ending. Maybe "S" had lost direct access to Tatian - per Joosten, "S" or its sources sometimes corrected the basis away from Tatian. If I may speculate: the base texts upon which "S" relied had posted - like many Coptic manuscripts - a warning that what follows isn't universally accepted. "S" duly dropped those verses, without comment.

Taylor observes that the other Old-Syriac, the Curetonian, has suffered adulteration. First its base-text was updated toward the Greek. (Somewhere around here is the Matthew palimpsest recently published. Taylor doesn't cite Joosten, but they're in agreement.) Then C itself lost many sheaves; in AD 1222 the missing pages got replaced by Peshitta. And finally, I guess, C got published, hopefully in a better state than S got.

Because Taylor avoids Joosten, Taylor expresses surprise that P maintains harmonies in the Longer Ending which agree with Ephrem and the Arabic, without correcting them toward Greek like S did. Joosten had an explanation: P was an independent project with more tolerance toward the old harmony than S did.

Personally I am now wondering if the Longer Ending came to Mark and to "the Diatesseron" from some other source entirely. I am thinking of Justin's harmony. He used one. He taught Tatian. This harmony would simply be adopted by Tatian; contemporaneously, it got into Mark which was the only gospel by-then capable of supporting a post-tomb appendix.