After the success of the Antioch Bible, this publication is a new translation of the Peshitta English New Testament in a single volume. The English translations of the New Testament Syriac Peshitta were carried out by an international team of scholars. The volume is also available in a beautiful gilded vegan leather edition.
REVIEWS
Excerpts from Kristian S. Heal, RBL 09/24
“This is a beautifully produced New Testament. It is tastefully bound, and the translation is clearly typeset with headings set in red. The front matter invites the reader into the world of the Syriac New Testament both ancient and modern…
The Syriac Bible has most frequently been written about by those outside the Syriac liturgical tradition. The preface to this volume offers the subtly different perspective of a scholar talking about his own tradition…and that difference is valuable. Kiraz speaks objectively but not dispassionately (viii–ix). He writes as an advocate of the importance of the Syriac Peshitta version, not just for Christians of the Syriac liturgical tradition, but for anyone who “wants a snapshot of what the Scriptures may have looked like during the first few centuries of the Christian era” (ix).
The introduction successfully reaches the target audience, which is not just English-speaking Syriac Christians but also English readers of the New Testament who want access to the ancient Syriac tradition (lix).
This latter section begins with a fascinating description of the first printed Peshitta New Testament, published in 1555. This edition was a collaboration between Moses of Mardin and Albrecht Widmanstadt, and Kiraz does a great job of giving a fuller account of Moses/Mushe of Mardin’s involvement in this project, which was obscured in earlier European accounts. The story of the printing of the Syriac New Testament thus offers a useful slice of European and Middle Eastern intellectual history from sixteenth century humanism to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philology and text criticism, as well as the rise and role Bible societies and mission presses in the modern publication of the Peshitta New Testament. Kiraz offers a rich history, often augmented by insights from the Syriac churches absent from previous surveys.”
