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Curetonian Gospels


The Curetonian Gospels, designated by the siglum syrcur, are contained in a manuscript of the four gospels of the New Testament in Old Syriac. Together with the Sinaiticus Palimpsest the Curetonian Gospels form the Old Syriac Version, and are known as the Evangelion Dampharshe ("Separated Gospels") in the Syriac Church.

The Gospels are commonly named after William Cureton who maintained that they represented an Aramaic Gospel and had not been translated from Greek (1858) and differed considerably from the canonical Greek texts, with which they had been collated and "corrected". Henry Harman (1885) concluded, however, that their originals had been Greek from the outset. The order of the gospels is Matthew, Mark, John, Luke. The text is one of only two Syriac manuscripts of the separate gospels that possibly predate the standard Syriac version, the Peshitta; the other is the Sinaitic Palimpsest. A fourth Syriac text is the harmonized Diatessaron. The Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest appear to have been translated from independent Greek originals.

The Syriac text of the codex is a representative of the Western text. Significant variant readings include:

The manuscript gets its curious name from being edited and published by William Cureton in 1858. The manuscript was among a mass of manuscripts brought in 1842 from a Syrian monastery in the Wadi Natroun, Lower Egypt, as the result of a series of negotiations that had been under way for some time; it is conserved in the British Library. Cureton recognized that the Old Syriac text of the gospels was significantly different from any known at the time. He dated the manuscript fragments to the fifth century; the text, which may be as early as the second century, is written in the oldest and classical form of the Syriac alphabet, called Esṭrangelā, without vowel points.


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