Syriac Sinaiticus
The Syriac Sinaitic (syrs), known also as the Sinaitic Palimpsest, of Saint Catherine's Monastery is a late 4th-century manuscript of 358 pages, containing a translation of the four canonical gospels of the New Testament into Syriac, which have been overwritten by a vita (biography) of female saints and martyrs with a date corresponding to AD 778. This palimpsest is the oldest copy of the gospels in Syriac, one of two surviving manuscripts (the other being the Curetonian Gospels) that are conventionally dated to before the Peshitta, the standard Syriac translation of the Bible.
Both the Syriac Sinaiticus (designated syrs) and the Curetonian Gospels (designated syrcur) contain similar renderings of the gospel text, exhibiting conformity with the Greek. Even so, syrs retains some readings from even earlier lost Syriac gospels and from the 2nd-century Septuagint manuscripts, which brought the four gospels into harmony with one another through selective readings and emendations.
The importance of such early, least conforming texts is emphasized by the revision of the Peshitta that was made about 508, ordered by bishop Philoxenus of Mabbog. His revision, it is said, skilfully moved the Peshitta nearer to the Greek text; "it is very remarkable that his own frequent gospel quotations preserved in his writings show that he used an Old Syriac set of the four gospels".
The palimpsest was identified in the library at Saint Catherine's Monastery in February 1892 by Agnes Smith Lewis and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who returned with a team of scholars that included J. Rendel Harris, to photograph and transcribe the work in its entirety.
The German theologian Adalbert Merx devoted much of his later research to the elucidation of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the results being embodied in Die vier kanonischen Evangelien nach dem ältesten bekannten Texte (1897-1905).
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