The work of the remarkable sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, this lectionary of what is now known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, was re-edited in the light of two manuscripts from the Sinai, which they recovered, and from Paul de Lagarde’s Evangeliarium Hierosolymitanum. An important document for the textual criticism of the New Testament as well as for the early practice of the church, Lewis and Dunlap added to its value by composing this light “critical edition.” Presented in Syriac with English annotations to the Greek text of the Gospels, this useful study will be welcome by New Testament scholars and Syriac scholars alike.

Agnes Lewis was the discoverer of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest Syriac manuscript of the New Testament. Here she publishes her English translation of that text to make it available to Bible students who do not read Syriac. Included are the four canonical Gospels and a list of omitted words and phrases as well as interpolations into the Textus Receptus.

Commenting on an invaluable document that she personally found, Agnes Smith Lewis expresses her professional insights on this earliest extant version of the Syriac Gospels. This fourth century document, erased and written over, was discovered in the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1892. In addition to discussing New Testament variants Lewis also addresses the issue of how science and biblical teaching might coexist.

This work was meant to supply a new edition of the Sinai Palimpsest text of the Old Syriac Gospels. Lewis's edition of the Syriac text, accompanied by an Introduction and extensive scholarly apparatus, is again made widely available in this Gorgias Press reprint.

From the Ben Ezra Synagogue Genizah came thirty-two of the thirty-four palimpsest fragments that make up the material of this book. Originally published in 1900, Gorgias Press is pleased to present this reprint edition of Lewis and Gibson’s work.