the Evangeliôn da-Mĕpharrĕshê, the more primitive seems to have been its original form.
What concerns us now is not so much the literary history of the Gospel in Syriac as the light thrown by these early versions on the knowledge accessible to the translators. The earliest retranslation of our Lord's words into a Semitic tongue cannot fail to contain much that is of interest for us. And we find, as might have been anticipated, a mixture of happy intuition and of helplessness. At every turn we are reminded that we are dealing with mere translations and adaptations of the Greek Gospels, yet with translations which have often the rare opportunity of being more exact and more happy than the original work. Happily also the translator was unhampered by pedantic methods, such as some four centuries later disfigured the effort of Justinian's clergy to give the people of Palestine the Scriptures in their own tongue: no version is more idiomatic than the Old Syriac or less affected. The Proper Names are given in the original forms or an approximation thereto: Ḥalpai,
