JSP 26.2 (2016)

A NEW ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA (Volume 26, Issue 2, December 2016):

2 Baruch and the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus (7a1): Studying Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in Their Manuscript Context
Liv Ingeborg Lied
First Published January 10, 2017; pp. 67–107

Abstract
This article presents three hypotheses that may shed light on the place of 2 Baruch in the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus, the sixth-/seventh-century Old Testament codex that contains the only known complete copy of 2 Baruch. Whereas scholars of 2 Baruch have generally treated this copy in isolation from the rest of the manuscript, using it primarily as a witness to the (hypothetical) early Jewish text, this essay approaches 2 Baruch as an integral part of the codex, exploring codicological elements, the order and organization of books, as well as paratextual features. Inspired by the perspective of New Philology, this article contributes to the ongoing discussions about the origins, transmission and transformation of the so-called Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, claiming the importance of studying them in the manuscript contexts in which they are copied. The article will also be a contribution to the further study of the Codex Ambrosianus and the engagement with 2 Baruch among Syriac Christians.

Reception of the Greek Story of Melchizedek in Syriac Christian Tradition
Sergey Minov
First Published January 10, 2017; pp. 108–143

Abstract
This article focuses on the history of reception of the Story of Melchizedek, an original Greek composition from Late Antiquity, among Syriac-speaking Christians during the Middle Ages. For the first time the original Syriac text, English translation and discussion of three different witnesses to this apocryphal work in Syriac is provided, namely (1) the abbreviated translation of the Story incorporated into Catena Severi (ninth century), (2) the Pseudo-Athanasian excerpt found in ms. Vatican Syr. 159, and (3) the brief discourse entitled Melchizedek the Priest.

The Lion, the Honey, and the New Timnite Woman: Joseph and Aseneth and the Samson Cycle
Christopher Brenna
First Published January 10, 2017; pp. 144–163

Abstract
This study presents a solution for the symbol of the honeycomb employed in Joseph and Aseneth, an ancient Hellenistic Jewish novel, by recognizing signals throughout the rest of the narrative that point to an allegorical reading of Samson's encounter with the lion in Judg. 14.5–9. The thesis is that the author of Joseph and Aseneth is providing an allegorical reading of Judg. 14.5–9, where Samson is a type of wayward Israel and the Timnite woman represents foreign domination. The lion and the honey are interpreted as symbols of Samson's subsequent victory over his Philistine foes, and this symbolical movement is applied to Aseneth's transformed identity. Aseneth is a new Timnite woman and Joseph is a new Samson, reconfigured to triumph over her seductive influence. Parallels are drawn between a constructed allegorical reading of the Samson cycle and the encounter of Aseneth with Joseph and later with the heavenly man. The theological themes upon which such a reading relies are discussed.

A personal or institutional subscription is required to access the full articles. CORRECTION: A correspondent in Paris indicates that he is able to access the full articles without either kind of subscription. So perhaps they are free online, at least for some period of time. If you're interested, give it a try and find out.

Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

Lied on Codex Ambrosianus B.21 marginalia

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Details in the margin – not marginal details: A liturgical annotation in the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus.

A small annotation such as this one may seem (literally) a marginal detail. However, it may turn out to be an interesting detail, since it sheds some additional light on a hypothesis that has been repeated in scholarship ever since Ceriani published the facsimile edition of the codex in 1876/1883. In the Praefatio of this edition, Ceriani suggestes that the codex was probably not produced for ecclesiastical use, since it includes neither liturgical notes, nor an index of lessons. He notes, though, that the occasional liturgical note occurs in the columns of some texts, but suggests that this is due to the fact that the scribe copied the texts in question from an exemplar that contained such notes (p. 8).

Details matter.

More on manuscript Codex Ambrosianus B.21 here and here (cf. here). Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

At the Biblioteca Ambrosiana

AT THE BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA, MILAN

Click on the images to see a larger version.

Codex Ambrosianus B.21, the earliest complete Syriac Bible (background here, with images from a photolithographic facsimile), open to 2 Baruch. This is the actual manuscript, on display for the Enoch Seminar yesterday.


Liv Ingeborg Lied

L->R: Gianantonio Borgonovo (Ambrosian Library), Liv Ingeborg Lied, Ted Erho, Bob Kraft, Jim Davila


Codex Ambrosianus B. 21, open to the beginning of the biblical book of Ezra (red ink)


Codex Ambrosianus B. 21, colophons page (notes of its transmission history at the end of the codex)

UPDATE (30 June): One more:

The beginning of 4 Ezra (red ink, middle of page, below the blank spot)
UPDATE (1 July): More on the Sixth Enoch Seminar here.

UPDATE (2 July): Another photo:


2 Baruch 21:1, the prayer of Baruch (red ink)
Note (4 July): I have corrected two text attributions above after having a chance to look more closely at the texts.

Ceriani’s facsimile of Codex Ambrosianus B.21

LIV INGEBORG LIED: What facsimiles may do for you: the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus (7a1) reimagined.

However, what I want to run with you in the current blog post is the ways in which facsimile editions may also shape our imagination, both of a manuscript and its texts, using Ceriani’s facsimile edition as a test case. The effects of a facsimile may be more subtle and therefore sometimes harder to pin down, since a facsimile edition is supposed to be a reproduction of the manuscript page and because it is sometimes used by scholars as a manuscript replacement. “Facsimile” – the very word promises an exact copy, right?

More on Codex Ambrosianus B.21 is here and links. Cross-file under Syriac Watch.

Mysterious ancient smears

LIV INGEBORG LIED: Consider the most trivial mystery of all the mysteries of the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus solved.

In March, I spent a week in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana working on this codex, focusing in particular on codicological features, text layout and unit organisation, as well as signs of later use and reader engagement with the codex. One recurring feature caught my eye: it looked like someone had had “an accident” involving a pink highlighter while working on the codex. At least this was what I thought at the time. Something pink was smeared on the margins of a handful of the parchment folios. It made me shake my head, wondering who on earth would bring a pink highlighter to their desk when working on the codex. A special kind of “later reader engagement”, indeed. My imagination was certainly put to the test.

Cross-file under Syriac Watch. More on Codex Ambrosianus B.21 is here and links (including more from Professor Lied and photos of her and yours truly with the manuscript).

The Codex Sinaiticus is going on display at the BM

THIS WILL BE WORTH SEEING: British Library will lend world's oldest bible to British Museum. British Museum exhibition, Egypt after the pharaohs, will feature the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important books in the world (Mark Brown, The Guardian).

The British Library is to lend one of its greatest treasures, the world’s oldest bible, to the British Museum for an ambitious and groundbreaking exhibition exploring 1,200 years of Christian, Islamic and Jewish faith in Egypt after the pharaohs.

The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world and has only been lent once, in 1990 – also to the British Museum – when both collections shared the same building.

“It is quite phenomenal they they are able to lend it to us,” said Elisabeth O’Connell, assistant keeper in the British Museum’s department of ancient Egypt and Sudan. “We are absolutely thrilled.”

The codex dates back to the 4th century AD. Handwritten in Greek, not long after the reign of the Emperor Constantine the Great, it contains the earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament.

[...]

Not to take away from the importance of this marvelous manuscript or of the exhibition, but I want to nuance the headline of this article a little. The Codex Sinaiticus once contained the entire Bible and a few other things, but a considerable portion of the Old Testament is now missing. The oldest surviving complete Bible is Codex Ambrosianus B.21, from the late sixth or early seventh century CE.

Some past posts on the Codex Sinaiticus are here and here and links.

AJR on Lied, Invisible Manuscripts (of 2 Baruch)

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Lied's Invisible Manuscripts: a Review Forum.

The book that serves as the point of departure for our discussion today is my recently published book, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (2021), which is available open access via the publisher, Mohr Siebeck.

In Invisible Manuscripts, I explore an omission in scholarship on early Jewish writings in Christian transmission: the general inattention paid to the manuscripts that preserve these writings as cultural artefacts. ...

AJR has also posted the first essay responding to the book:

What Can Manuscripts Tell Us about the Texts They Preserve? A Response to Liv Ingeborg Lied’s Invisible Manuscripts (Matthias Henze).

I consider the scholarly turn to the reception histories of the ancient texts, and especially the new interest in the lives of the manuscripts, the single most significant development in recent decades in the study of the texts that are traditionally called the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. I have learned a great deal from you, Liv, and from many of our colleagues. Thank you. But I also appreciate where my own thinking and vocabulary have yet to change and evolve further (here I think in particular of New Philology).

My work receives favorable mention in the second essay.

For more on the Syriac manuscript Codex Ambrosianus B.21, which contains the only complete manuscript of 2 Baruch, see here (with photos of a facsimile of the first page of 2 Baruch) and here (with photos of the original manuscript in Milan and of Professor Lied and others, including me), and here.

For some other PaleoJudaica posts on 2 Baruch, notably links to Phil Long's blog series on the book at Reading Acts, see here and here and links, plus here.

I have linked to Liv's blog posts on 2 Baruch here and here, and on Codex Ambrosianus B.21 here, here, and here.

I have presented the case for the Jewish provenance of 2 Baruch in my book, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2005), pp. 126-131. I argue that 2 Baruch promotes Torah observance, a Jewish ethnic identity, and a Jewish (and distinctly not Christian) concept of the Messiah. I have not yet seen Liv's book, so I don't know if she has replied to my arguments.

Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

LOOTERS have been caught with what seems to be an ancient Syriac Bible. The report is muddled:

Nine arrested over 2,000 year-old Syrian bible
By Simon Bahceli (Cyprus Mail)

A TWO THOUSAND year-old Syrian Orthodox bible, believed to have been smuggled into the island from southeastern Turkey, has become the subject of major police operation in the north that has so far led to the arrest of nine suspects.

The bible, estimated to be worth around €2 million, was seized during a raid at the Famagusta bus terminal last Friday where smugglers were seeking to sell it to buyers in the north. It is thought Turkish Cypriot police had been tipped off about the impending sale.

Although the north’s ‘antiquities department’ refused yesterday to comment on the bible, because it was “the subject of an ongoing inquiry”, a statement from police said it was bound in deerskin, written in gold letters in the Syriac language, and believed to be around 2000 years old. The bible may have come from the heartland of the Syrian Orthodox community in southeastern Turkey, where a small community remains, despite often being caught in the crossfire between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish military.

“It is very likely to come from the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, where there is still a Syriac speaking community,” Dr Chalotte Roueche, professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King College, London told Reuters yesterday.

In 1994, the British historian William Dalrymple wrote that the community “could die out within one generation”. However, conditions are reported to have improved in recent years with the Turkish government making efforts to protect religious minorities in the country.

Roueche added, however, that it was impossible to say for sure whether the bible was either from that area, or whether it was as old as the Turkish Cypriot police thought.

“The problem about this description is that a Syriac gospel-book could be from the 4th century, but it could date from several centuries after that, well into the middle ages. Indeed, I think that gospel books may still have been being written in Syriac then. Obviously the smugglers will have wanted to date it as ancient as possible,” Dr Roueche added.

[...]

Dr. Roueche has it right. I think the chances of this being a two thousand year old complete biblical codex in Aramaic are minimal. The Syriac language is the Aramaic dialect of Edessa and is first recorded, I believe, in the second century C.E. The codex (bound book) rather than the scroll, is also characteristic of the period well after the second century C.E. Still, if this is an ancient or even Medieval Syriac Bible codex or codex of the Gospels or some such, it is still of great interest and it's very fortunate that the authorities recovered it.

The oldest surviving complete Syriac Bible (Old and New Testament plus some Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) is Codex Ambrosianus B.21, Milan, from the sixth or seventh century C.E. I have commented on it here. Unfortunately, the photographs seem to have been purged in our recent website upgrade. I'll try to get them back up soon.

UPDATE (7 February): More here.

Search engine referrals

IT'S BEEN A COUPLE OF YEARS and my search-engine-referral collection has grown back to a respectable size, so it's time to share it again. The text in parentheses is my own editorial commentary. I have deleted a few interesting search terms in order to uphold PaleoJudaica family values, but if you buy me a beer at a conference sometime I might tell you about them. Also, the list below could give you the impression that certain subjects are treated in this blog far more frequently and in far more detail than is actually the case.

All of the following are actual search terms that led people, often unaccountably, to PaleoJudaica.

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On the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and its manuscripts

A LANDMARK OF SCHOLARSHIP: WKND Travel: Inside The Ambrosiana, Milan's historic library (Mariella Radaelli, The Khaleej Times via MSN.com).

The Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana is the third-oldest public library in Europe, after the Bodleian Library (1603) at Oxford and the Angelica Library (1604) in Rome.

Within a five-minute-walk from the Milan Cathedral, it remains an important site for scholars and students, providing a model of intercultural dialogue and education.

It sits timelessly in the heart of the city. Its spacious rooms are filled with 35,000 manuscripts of great artistic and codicological value, 2,500 incunabula, and one million books. These precious library materials allow the researchers' minds to expand infinitely. Here, they can see the whole universe within themselves.

A fascinating account of the founding and early history of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The focus is on its collection of Arabic manuscripts, but it also has manuscripts important for biblical and ancient Jewish studies.

Codex Ambrosianus B.21 is a manuscript a Syriac translation of the whole Bible – construed broadly to include the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Apocrypha, and some books that didn't make it into any of the official biblical canons. I have blogged on the manuscript here, based on a photolithographic reproduction in the special collections of the University of St. Andrews Library. In 2011 I visited the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, where I saw and photographed the actual manuscript. For more on it see here, here, and here. And for posts on another manuscript from this library, see here and here.

Visit PaleoJudaica daily for the latest news on ancient Judaism and the biblical world.

Sixth Enoch Seminar

I'M OFF TO MILAN for the Sixth Enoch Seminar. I'm not giving a paper myself, but I am responding to one by Hindy Najman. But since her paper is not yet published, I'm not going to post my response here. I should note, though, for James McGrath's attention in particular, that my response makes considerable use of the series Lost.

I am looking forward very much not only to the many excellent papers, but also to the opportunity to get a direct look at manuscript Codex Ambrosianus B.21. And to the weather in Milan.

I will probably have some Internet access and will do some blogging if I can. I have also pre-posted some items. There will be something new each day, so do keep coming by this week. I expect to be back in St. Andrews on Thursday evening.

A real ancient Aramaic Bible manuscript

TIMOTHY MICHAEL LAW has noted and posted (The Apostle Paul in Cairo!) a photo of a palimpsest manuscript from the Cairo Geniza whose upper layer is Mishnah Berakhot, but whose lower layer is, of all things, the New Testament Pastoral Epistles in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.

He put up the post several days ago and I have been meaning to get to it. But now go and have a look to clear your palate of yesterday's ridiculously over-hyped, at best early-modern, and possibly very recent Syriac manuscript supposedly containing The Gospel of Barnabas. (To be fair, as I said on Facebook, if it really is an apocryphal gospel, at least it still gets to count as an apocryphon whatever its date. That's the nice thing about apocrypha.)

If you need more, go look again at Codex Ambrosianus B.21, another genuine Aramaic Bible manuscript. It too even has some cool colored ink.

UPDATE: Okay, the Cairo Geniza manuscript is presumably medieval rather than ancient, but it contains two genuinely ancient texts and no one is trying to kid us about its date or content.

Also, if you can bear it, the Daily Mail has more—presumably priceless—photos of the Turkish manuscript, along with some new article content and even a passing note of skepticism: Secret £14million Bible in which 'Jesus predicts coming of Prophet Muhammad' unearthed in Turkey.

That catalogue of Syriac manuscripts again

LIV INGEBORG LIED: The Epistle of Baruch, Josephus' Jewish War 6, the Book of Thecla and Psalm 151: some observations on Brock/van Rompay's catalogue of Syriac manuscripts in the Dayr al-Suryan. More on this manuscript catalogue and on the Monastery at Deir al-Surian is here and links.

If memory serves, that Syriac copy of Josephus' Jewish War, book 6, in Codex Ambrosianus B.21 is rather unhelpfully titled 5 Maccabees. (My list of books of the Maccabees is now up to 8 Maccabees and counting.) And there is apparently another book of 5 Maccabees preserved in Garshuni and Arabic which has overlapping content with that 5 Maccabees as well as an unclear relationship to the medieval compendium Josippon. I don't blame that scribe of Ms. Deir al-Surian, Syr 9 for being confused about the identities of those books of the Maccabees.

ANOTHER MOTP ARTICLE: Totally Jewish.com has just published a brief piece entitled "Ancient Texts To Be Translated." It's reasonably accurate and it includes a photo of a leaf from Codex Ambrosianus. We actually have a few Israelis on the team and Richard Bauckham and I are jointly heading the project. (UPDATE: Just to be clear, Richard was listed as the principal applicant for the Leverhulme grant.)

THE MORE OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA PROJECT, developed by my colleague Professor Richard Bauckham and myself, has brought the University of St. Andrews a major research grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The University's press release is here:

Light Shed on Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts

This post was originally published on 28 July at 9:55 am. But I'll keep it at the top of the page for a while and will keep adding updates below. There are also plenty of new posts under this one, so do scroll down and check.

[UPDATE (6:00 pm): Welcome to visitors who find their way here through one of the articles coming out about the project. You may be interested also in this post about a book I've just completed on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (the page proofs are sitting on my desk right now) and in the St. Andrews Old Testament Pseudepigrapha website, which contains lots of material from a course I have been teaching on the subject. And if you look at the bottom of the links panel to the right, there is a link to some relevant papers and book reviews available online. Also, you may want to look at this post on lost books, some of which will figure in the comprehensive list of Old Testament pseudepigrapha which we're compiling for the project.]

This is the good news I promised you a few days ago. The grant has allowed us to hire a full-time research fellow to administer the project. The research fellow is Dr. Alexander Panayotov, who has appeared on PaleoJudaica from time to time (for example, here and here). The photo in the latter link seems to have rotted, but here's one of him and me at his graduation in June of 2004.

He is to join us here in January, when the project will really begin to move full-speed ahead. But we've already been spending a fair amount of time on it and we continue to add texts to our list (see the first link above, which has just been updated) and to invite new contributors.

UPDATE: The Herald has called to arrange a photo shoot of me with some manuscripts later today.

UPDATE (5:40 pm): Just had the photo shoot with the Herald, using the wonderful photolithographic facsimile volume of Codex Ambrosianus as our manuscript prop. The article should be out tomorrow. I was interviewed by the Jewish News earlier today and the press office has had inquiries from the Daily Mail and the Times of London. And there's already an article in the Scotsman and a brief notice in icScotland.

Watch this space.

UPDATE (29 July). There was a brief blurb last night in the Edinburgh Evening News and there's a piece this morning in the Telegraph. The Herald article will probably be out over the weekend.

By the way, I should also take this opportunity to welcome another pseudepigrapha researcher coming to St. Andrews. Grant Macaskill has been awarded a three-year British Academy Fellowship. Grant is in the final stages of the Ph.D. here and when he starts the Fellowship he will be producing a critical edition of 2 Enoch, an extremely important pseudepigraphon preserved only in Old Church Slavonic. St. Andrews is rapidly becoming a major international center for Old Testament Pseudepigrapha studies.

UPDATE: The Times has an article too: "Translators turning to magic texts for a spell." Everybody seems to like my little quote about divine-human miscegenation, pagan prophetesses, and incantations. The story is also in the Courier, the local Fife newspaper, but it doesn't seem to have made it to its online edition.

(12:28 pm): Just got off the phone with Radio Scotland. They're interviewing me at 4:50 this afternoon (GMT).

UPDATE (evening): You can hear the Radio Scotland Newsdrive interview by following the link and clicking on "LISTEN AGAIN." They seem to keep only the most recent show archived, so this one should be available until Monday afternoon GMT. The access facility is very primitive, but my segment, which is only a few minutes long, starts somewhere between 50 and 55 minutes into the program. The jump-forward (in 15- or 5-minute intervals only) works on some systems but not all. Good luck.

UPDATE (1 August): Another article. Info here.

UPDATE (11 August): An article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE REVIEW OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE:

(A little late, but I've been busy)

Calduch-Benages, Nuria, Joan Ferrer, and Jan Liesen
La sabidur�a del escriba [Wisdom of the Scribe]: Edici�n diplom�tica de la
versi�n sir�aca del libro de Ben Sira seg�n el C�dice Ambrosiano, con
traducci�n espa�ola e inglesa [Diplomat�c Edition of the Syriac Verson of
the Book of Ben Sira according to Codex Ambrosianus ...]
Reviewed by Gonzalo Aranda Perez

Cook, Stephen L.
The Apocalyptic Literature
Reviewed by Eibert Tigchelaar

Gr�neberg, Keith N.
Abraham, Blessing and the Nations: A Philological and Exegetical Study of Genesis 12:3 in its Narrative Context
Reviewed by David Mclain Carr

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III
A Biblical History of Israel
Reviewed by David Firth

Provan, Iain, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III
A Biblical History of Israel
Reviewed by Lester Grabbe

Walker-Jones, Arthur
Hebrew For Biblical Interpretation
Reviewed by Daryl Jefferies

Lieu, Judith M.
Neither Jew Nor Greek?: Constructing Early Christianity
Reviewed by Sabrina Inowlocki

Reeves, John C., eds.
Bible and Qur'an: Essays in Scriptural Intertextuality
Reviewed by John Kaltner

MORE ON CODEX AMBROSIANUS B.21, MILAN. As promised, I'm posting a few images below. The source is Antonio Maria Ceriani, Translatio syra pescitto Veteris Testamenti: ex codice Ambrosiano sec. fere VI, photolithographice edita, curante et adnotante (Milan, 1876). The manuscript is in western (sorry, should be Estrangela) Syriac script and was written in the sixth or seventh century C.E. It contains the Old Testament books, the Apocrypha, and other works such as 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, 3-4 Maccabees and a section from Josephus on the Maccabees. The main thing I needed was the Latin preface, but I also took images of a number of the manuscript pages in the facsimile. The resolution could be better, but this was just a quick first try. Click on each image for a larger version.



This is the first page of 2 Baruch.



This is a closeup of the same page. 2 Baruch begins at the top of the middle column. It opens "The Book of the Revelation of Baruch son of Neriah, which is taken from Greek into Syriac."



This is the opening page of the Book of Judith, which begins at the top of the middle column.

ARAMAIC WATCH: BYU is publishing a CD of 14,000 pages of Syriac manuscripts from the Vatican museum.

Vatican lets BYU publish old texts

By Tad Walch
Deseret Morning News

PROVO � When their boat capsized in the Nile River, the Vatican monks feverishly dived for the priceless manuscripts they had just obtained from an Egyptian monastery.
Image
Most of the Syriac Christian documents copied by BYU are from a collection the Vatican purchased nearly 300 years ago.

Brigham Young University
One monk died in the accident, but the treasured writings of Ephrem the poet � copied by Assyrian monks in A.D. 522 and 523 � were saved and laid on the shore to dry in the early 18th century sun.
From there, the manuscripts traveled to the bowels of the Vatican Library and nearly 300 years of exile, out of reach of members of the Eastern Christian churches who revere Ephrem � until the Vatican agreed to let teams from Brigham Young University scan 14,000 pages of Syriac Christian writings and publish the color images next month on a DVD.
The texts provide a new window for study of Mesopotamian Christianity, which began when missionaries from Jerusalem or Antioch visited what is now Iraq and converted large numbers of people who spoke Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic.

[...]

There's also a press release published on the Hugoye list. Excerpts:

A collection of rare Christian manuscripts�some dating to the sixth century�will soon be accessible to scholars worldwide, thanks to a first-time collaboration between Brigham Young University, the Vatican Library and the Assyrian Church of the East.

Working alongside their Vatican colleagues for three years, BYU scholars imaged more than 14,000 pages of text to produce a digital library of 33 important Syriac Christian manuscripts, which will be available on DVD. For Bishop Mar Bawai Soro of the Assyrian Church of the East, access to these texts�which for centuries were out of reach�will help his church members to reconnect with their heritage.

[...]

The newly digitized collection includes unpublished works by early Eastern Christian writers such as Jacob of Serugh, Ephrem the poet and Isaac the Syrian. The Chronicle of Edessa, for example, describes life in the city of Edessa beginning in the second century. One oversized 1,000-page manuscript contained 230 separate homilies by different authors.

[...]

It's not clear to me whether these are hitherto unpublished works or just unplublished manuscripts of works already known. I'll try to find out.

Here's another note in Deseret News on a Syriac hymn in the corpus.

Coincidentally, I am off to our library later this morning to photograph some pages from a nineteenth century facsimile edition of a major Syriac biblical manuscript (Codex Ambrosianus B.21, Milan). Not as exciting as the BYU project, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

LATER: I'm back from my first little photographic expedition. The downloading software is on my other computer at home, so I won't be able to get at the images until tonight. If they came out well, I'll post one or two, probably tomorrow. [UPDATE (2 April): Now see here.]

UPDATE (2 April): On the Hugoye list Kristian Heal clarifies the contents of the digitized manuscripts:

All of these manuscripts are known from the catalogues of Assemani, Mai and Lantschoot. Many of the manuscripts have been published, some in critical editions (e.g. all of the Ephrem manuscripts (110, 111, 112, 113), and the Severus manuscripts (140,141)). However, some of the manuscripts contain texts which have not been published before in any format. For example, none of the liturgical texts have been published, though Borgia 60 is the object of a very interesting study by Joseph Marie Sauget (Studi e Testi 326). Among the literary texts included in the manuscripts many have not been published or used in critical editions. These include texts from Vatican Syriac 586, 283, 191, 189 and parts of 92, 93, 114, 117, 147, 151, 161, 252. Of note is Vatican Syriac 117, a collection of homilies by Jacob of Serugh, Isaac of Antioch and Ephrem. Of the 227 individual pieces that are included in the manuscript 60 have not been edited and published before. Of course, in most cases these manuscripts contain just one of a number of surviving witnesses.

It would perhaps be useful to identify a continuum by which to grade our awareness and use of a given manuscript/work:

1. Previously uncataloged/unknown
2. Cataloged manuscript
3. Published in facsimile
4. Users edition (e.g. those of Bedjan) that does not take full account
of all known manuscripts
5. Critical edition that takes into account all known manuscripts

With this publication all of the manuscripts have reached level 3. Many individual works had previously reached 4 or 5, though many have not.

Kristian also has a listing of catalogue numbers and short titles on this Hugoye post. I am grateful for the additional information. This is an exciting project and both BYU and the Vatican are to be commended for it. For more, see here.