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29-421: The Gospels are commonly named after William Cureton who maintained that they represented an Aramaic Gospel and had not been translated from Greek (1858) and differed considerably from the canonical Greek texts, with which they had been collated and "corrected". Henry Harman (1885) concluded, however, that their originals had been Greek from the outset. The order of the gospels is Matthew, Mark, John, Luke. The text

58-760: A Syriac codex in Berlin, once formed part of the Curetonian manuscript, and fill some of its lacunae . The publication of the Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest enabled scholars for the first time to examine how the gospel text in Syriac changed between the earliest period (represented by the text of the Sinai and Curetonian manuscripts) and the later period. The Syriac versions of

87-492: A miraculous Tree of Saint Ephrem . According to tradition, Saint Ephrem was a fourth-century Syrian theologian and ascetic from Nisibis . He sought to meet the holy monk Saint Pishoy , and thus came to the monastic centers of Scetes . When the two men met, they were unable to communicate because Ephrem spoke only Syriac . Yet, suddenly and miraculously, Saint Pishoy began to express himself in that language, enabling his visitor to understand him. During this exchange, it

116-727: A preface the Ancient Syriac Documents relative to the earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa and the neighboring Countries, from the Year of our Lords Ascension to the beginning of the Fourth Century; discovered, edited and annotated by the late W. Cureton . Monastery of St. Mary Deipara The Monastery of Saint Mary El-Sourian is a Coptic Orthodox monastery located in Wadi El Natrun in

145-749: Is one of only two Syriac manuscripts of the separate gospels that possibly predate the standard Syriac version, the Peshitta ; the other is the Sinaitic Palimpsest . A fourth Syriac text is the harmonized Diatessaron . The Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest appear to have been translated from independent Greek originals. The Syriac text of the codex is a representative of the Western text . Significant variant readings include: The manuscript gets its curious name from being edited and published by William Cureton in 1858. The manuscript

174-483: Is said that Saint Ephrem leaned his staff against the door of the hermitage and all at once it became rooted and even sprouted foliage. Near the church of the Holy Virgin, monks will continue to point out even today this tamarind, miraculously born from Ephrem 's staff. When Peter Heyling , a Lutheran missionary from Lübeck , and Yusuf Simaan Assemani , a Lebanese envoy of Pope Clement XI of Rome , visited

203-713: The Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire and at Christ Church, Oxford , he took orders in 1832, became chaplain of Christ Church, sublibrarian of the Bodleian , and, in 1837, assistant keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum . He was afterwards appointed select preacher to the University of Oxford , chaplain in ordinary to the queen, rector of St Margaret's, Westminster , and canon of Westminster Abbey . He

232-685: The Monastery of Saint Paul the Anchorite and twenty to the Monastery of Saint Anthony in the Eastern Desert when those two communities were damaged by Bedouin raids. In the seventeenth century, western travelers from France, Germany and England visited the monastery and reported that there were two churches, one for the Syrians and one for the Egyptians ( Copts ). They also mention

261-588: The Nitrian Desert , Beheira Governorate , Egypt . It is located about 500 meters northwest of the Monastery of Saint Pishoy . The monastery is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and carries her name. In scholarly references from the nineteenth century it is generally called the convent or monastery of Saint Mary Deipara. It is better known nowadays as the Syriac Monastery or the monastery of

290-401: The monastery of St. Mary Deipara , in the desert of Nitria , near Cairo . He held that the manuscript he used gave the truest text, that all other texts were inaccurate, and that the epistles contained in the manuscript were the only genuine epistles of Ignatius that we possess, a view which received the support of Ferdinand Christian Baur , Bunsen , and many other eminent scholars, but which

319-567: The Holy Virgin of the Syrians . This could be one of the sources of the monastery's modern name. Yet, it is also possible that the monastery had already been inhabited by Syrian monks since the fourth century AD, which could trace the monastery's name to that period. The Syrian Monastery, like the rest of the monasteries in Scetes , was subject to fierce attacks by desert Bedouins and Berbers . The fifth of these attacks, which took place in 817 AD,

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348-664: The Monastery of Saint Pishoy who rejected the Julian heresy. At the time of its construction, they called it the Monastery of the Holy Virgin Theotokos . Towards the beginning of the eighth century AD, the monastery was sold to a group of wealthy Syriac merchants from Tikrit , who had settled in Cairo , for 12,000 dinars. These merchants converted the monastery for use by Syrian monks, and rebaptized it Monastery of

377-586: The New Testament remain less thoroughly studied than the Greek. The standard text is that of Francis Crawford Burkitt , 1904; it was used in the comparative edition of the Syriac gospels that was edited by George Anton Kiraz , 1996. William Cureton William Cureton (1808 – 17 June 1864) was an English Orientalist . He was born in Westbury, Shropshire . After being educated at

406-524: The Patriarch of Antioch visited the Syrian Monastery, granting it many privileges and donations, in order to restore it to its former glory. However, Egyptian monks continued to populate the monastery and, by 1516 AD, only 18 out of 43 monks were Syrian . By the time of Pope Gabriel VII of Alexandria , who himself had been a monk at the Syrian Monastery, it was able to supply ten monks to

435-641: The Syriacs (Arabic: Dayr al-Suryān ) because it was mainly used by monks of the Syriac Orthodox Church from the 8th to the 14th century. The exact date of the monastery's foundation is unknown. Most sources seem however to agree that its foundation took place in the sixth century AD. The establishment of the monastery is closely connected to the Julianist heresy , which spread in Egypt during

464-602: The Syrian Monastery a prosperous and important facility, possessing many artistic treasures and a library rich in Syriac texts. Inside the monastery, there is a large door known as the Door of Prophecies or Gate of Prophecies, that features symbolic diagrams depicting the past and the future of the Christian faith through the eyes of Christian monks of the tenth century. Based on a census taken by Mawhub ibn Mansur ibn Mufarrig ,

493-674: The Syrian monastery between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, they found no Syrian monks living in it. The latter managed to acquire forty precious manuscripts from the monastery's library, which are kept today in the Vatican Library . Between 1839 and 1851, the British Museum in London was able to purchase about five hundred Syriac manuscripts from the monastery's library, concerned not only with religious topics, but also with philosophy and literature. Famous visitors to

522-656: The co-author of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria , the Syrian Monastery had some sixty monks in 1088 AD. It was the third at the time in the Nitrian Desert , after the Monastery of Saint Macarius the Great and the Monastery of Saint John the Dwarf. In the middle of the twelfth century, the Syrian Monastery witnessed a period of trouble, when no Syrian priest was present. However, in 2000 an inscription from 1285/1286

551-504: The fifth century; the text, which may be as early as the second century, is written in the oldest and classical form of the Syriac alphabet , called Esṭrangelā , without vowel points. In 1872 William Wright , of the University of Cambridge, privately printed about a hundred copies of further fragments, Fragments of the Curetonian Gospels, (London, 1872), without translation or critical apparatus. The fragments, bound as flyleaves in

580-554: The heresy obtained permission from the governor Aristomachus to erect new churches and monasteries, so that they could settle apart from the Julianists. These new facilities were often built alongside the old ones, even keeping the same name but adding to it the word Theotokos , thus recognizing the significance of the incarnation, which the Julians seemed to minimize. The Syrian Monastery was therefore established by those monks of

609-515: The monastery during this time included Lansing (1862), Chester (1873), Junkers (1875), Jullien (1881) and Butler (1883). The manuscripts found in the Syrian monastery inspired intense research on the Syriac language and culture, for until that time, many classical texts from Aristotle , Euclid , Archimedes , Hippocrates and Galen were known to Western scholars only in their thirteenth-century Latin translations. Even these were often translations from earlier Arabic sources. These documents are

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638-644: The oldest copies of important Greek classical texts, with some dating back to the fifth century. Today, the Syrian monastery provides a great opportunity to study the development of Coptic wall painting. Between 1991 and 1999, several segments of wall paintings layered on top of each other were uncovered in the Church of the Holy Virgin and the Chapel of the Forty-Nine Martyrs , dating from between

667-503: The papacy of Pope Timothy III of Alexandria . The Julianists believed in the incorruptibility of Christ 's body. This was in contradiction with the teaching of the Orthodox Church, which held that Christ had taken human flesh that prevented him from being ideal and abstract, and therefore corruptible. Yet, in the monasteries of Scetes , a majority of the monks embraced the Julian heresy. In reaction, those who did not follow

696-406: The seventh and the thirteenth centuries. There is currently an ongoing project to uncover, restore and conserve wall paintings within the monastery. The monastery is enclosed by a large wall, built towards the end of the ninth century, and whose height varies between 9.5 and 11.5 meters. The monastery also includes a keep (tower) and a refectory. The five churches inside the monastery are named after

725-645: Was among a mass of manuscripts brought in 1842 from the Syrian monastery of Saint Mary Deipara in the Wadi Natroun , Lower Egypt , as the result of a series of negotiations that had been under way for some time; it is conserved in the British Library . Cureton recognized that the Old Syriac text of the gospels was significantly different from any known at the time. He dated the manuscript fragments to

754-664: Was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and a trustee of the British Museum , and was also honored by several continental societies. For a time Cureton also served as curate of St Andrew's, Oddington , Oxfordshire. Cureton's most remarkable work was the edition with notes and an English translation of the Epistles of Ignatius to Polycarp , the Ephesians and the Romans , from a Syriac manuscript that had been found in

783-468: Was found, "which recorded building or other activities in the Monastery". This may have reflected an influx of Syrian refugees in the 1250s. In the fourteenth century, the monastery was decimated by the plague . When a monk named Moses from the Monastery of Mar Gabriel in Tur Abdin visited the monastery in 1413 AD, he found only one remaining Syrian monk . Towards the end of the fifteenth century,

812-589: Was opposed by Charles Wordsworth and by several German scholars, and is now generally abandoned. Cureton supported his view by his Vindiciae Ignatianae and his Corpus Ignatianum, a Complete Collection of the Ignatian Epistles, genuine, interpolated and spurious . He also edited: Cureton also published several sermons, among which was one entitled The Doctrine of the Trinity not Speculative but Practical . After his death William Wright edited with

841-562: Was particularly disastrous to this monastery. The monastery was then rebuilt in 850 AD by two monks, named Matthew and Abraham. In 927 AD, one of the monastery's monks, known as Moses of Nisibis , traveled to Baghdad to ask the Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir to grant tax exemption to the monasteries. Moses then traveled through Syria region and Mesopotamia in search of manuscripts. After three years of traveling, he returned to Egypt , bringing with him 250 Syriac manuscript. This made of

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