PESHI10, or rather PEsurr'To (Syr. not, as generally cupposed, "'simple," " faith ful," sell. version, but the "explained," i.e„ translated, Bible), is the name given to the , authorized Syriac version of the Old, and the greatest part of the New Testament. This version holds among the Syrian Christians the same place as the Vulgate in the Roman. and the "authorized version" in the English church. Many are the traditions about its origin. Thus, the translation of the Old Testament is supposed to date from the time of Solomon and Hiram; or to have been done by Asa, the priest; or, again, that it belongs to the time of the apostle Thaddxus (Adams), and Abgar, the king orOsrlicenc, in the 1st c. after Christ. To the same period is also supposed to belong the translation of the New Testament, which is ascribed to Admits, a disciple Of Thaddmus, the that Edessian bishop and martyr. Recent investigation has not as yet come to nearer' result than to place the latter vaguely in the 2d, and the former in the 3d c., and to make Judaic ' Christians the authors of both. Ephrrem Syrtis (q.v,), who wrote in the 4th c., certainly speaks of the Peshito as our version, and finds it already necessary to explain some of its terms, which had become obsolete. Five books of the New Testament (the apoca lypse and four of the epistles) are wanting in all the MSS. having probably not yet formed part of the canon when the translation was made. The version of the Old Tes
tament was made direct from the Hebrew, and by men imbued with the Palestinian mode of explanation. It is extremely faithful, and astonishingly free from any of those paraphrastic tendencies which pervade more or less all the Targums or Aramaic ver sions. Its renderings are mostly very havpy, and coincide in many places with those of the Septuagint, a circumstance which has given rise to the erroneous supposition, that the latter itself had been drawn upon. Its use for the Old Testament, is more of an exegetical, for the New Testament, more of a critical, nature. Anything like an edition of the Pcshito worthy of its name, is still as much a desideratum as is a critical edition of the Septuagint or the Targums, and consequently investigators have as yet been •unable to come to but very hazy conclusions respecting some very important questions connected with it. The cditio princeps of the New Testament part dates Vienna, 1555, that-of the Old Testament is contained in the Paris Polyglot of 1645. Several portions of the Peshito have been translated again into Arabic. The Syriac translation of those parts of the New Testament which are not to be found in the Peshito, but are now incor porated into our Syriac Bibles, are of late and uncertain date.