The Syrian Churches/Introduction
THE SYRIAN CHURCHES.
In a former publication,[1] along with a translation of some parts of the Syriac New Testament, I submitted an account of the several versions of holy scripture extant in that language. This consisted of successive notices of the Old Testament in Aramean, that, namely, in the possession of the Syrians, and the various Targums of the Hebrew synagogue; the versions of the New Testament, the Philoxenian, Jerusalem, and Karkaphensian; and, more largely, the Peschito, or "old Syriac;"—in illustration of its great antiquity; its relation to the original Greek, and to certain oriental versions; the critical uses to which it may be applied, and the different editions of it which have been printed since its introduction into Europe.
Encouraged by the kind reception given to that work, I have ventured to present to the consideration of the biblical reader an entire translation of the holy Gospels from the same venerable text; a text which, among various ancient Christian communities dispersed through the vast regions of the East, from Palestine to China, for a long train of centuries, has been regarded with an unchangeable reverence as their common standard of the divine records, and which has commended itself to the highest esteem of the learned in our own day, as a faithful index of apostolic inspiration, an interesting and irrecusable witness of the uncorrupted integrity of the Christian scriptures, and a most useful aid to the profitable study of them. But in doing this it seemed desirable, for the convenience of any whose reading has not been directed to such subjects, to convey at the same time a general idea of the history and leading characteristics of those oriental churches themselves; and this, to the extent which our restricted limits will allow, will be attempted in the following pages.
- ↑ "Horæ Aramaicæ: comprising concise Notices of the Aramean Dialects in general, and of the Versions of holy Scripture extant in them," &c. &c. London, Simpkin and Marshall, 1843.