Syriac versions of the Bible

Syria was the country in which the Greek language intersected with the Syriac, which was closely related to the Aramaic dialect used by Jesus and the Apostles.

Other than Syria, the manuscripts also originate in countries like Egypt (specifically the Sinai), Iraq, Assyria, Armenia, Georgia, India, and even from China.

[citation needed] This is good evidence for the great historical activity of the Syriac Church of the East.

Although no original text of the Diatessaron survives, its foremost witness is a prose commentary on it by Ephrem the Syrian.

[3] The Old Syriac version translation of the four gospels or Vetus Syra[4] is preserved today in only four manuscripts, both with a large number of gaps.

The text was brought in 1842 from the Nitrian Desert in Egypt, and is now held in the British Library.

[5] The second manuscript is a palimpsest discovered by Agnes Smith Lewis at Saint Catherine's Monastery in 1892 at Mount Sinai called the Syriac Sinaiticus, and designated by Syrs.

[6] Two additional manuscripts of the Old Syriac version of the gospels were published in 2016 by Sebastian Brock[7] and in 2023 by Grigory Kessel,[8] respectively.

[9] The term Peshitta was used by Moses bar Kepha in 903 and means "simple" (in analogy to the Latin Vulgate).

The Syro-Hexaplar version is the Syriac translation of the Septuagint based on the fifth column of Origen's Hexapla.

The translation was made by Bishop Paul of Tella, around 617, from the Hexaplaric text of the Septuagint.