The Peshitta
The Syriac standard Bible, the first complete Bible translation of the Christian era, still read across the Syriac churches.
The Peshitta — the 'simple' or common version — is the standard Bible of the Syriac churches, translated from Hebrew and Greek in the early centuries of the church. Its Old Testament, rendered directly from the Hebrew, is among the earliest complete Bible translations of the Christian era.
Its New Testament canon long lacked the shorter Catholic epistles and Revelation in the Eastern tradition, a reminder that translation traditions carry canons with them, not texts alone.
References
- Peshitta resources at CCEL Free / open access
Other Translation Traditions
- The Septuagint (LXX) — The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made in Alexandria — the Old Testament of the early church and of Orthodoxy.
- The Targums — The Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible that accompanied synagogue reading and preserve ancient interpretation.
- The Vulgate — Jerome's Latin Bible, the text of Western theology for a millennium and the Catholic Church's declared rule of faith at Trent.
- Vetus Latina (Old Latin) — The Old Latin versions that preceded the Vulgate: the first Latin Bibles, and early witnesses to the Greek text.
- The Ancient Church Translations: Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic — The early versions of the daughter churches, which preserved texts lost elsewhere and made the Bible a literature in five more tongues.
- Arabic Bible Translations — A thousand years of Arabic versions, differing by community and confession, down to the Van Dyck Bible of 1865.
- Modern Missionary and Vernacular Translation — The worldwide vernacular translation movement and the translation theory it produced, with its contested history.