The Old Syriac and the Peshitta

The Peshitta of the Gospels is often more satisfactory than the Greek. My impression on reading the Peshitta of the Gospels is that the editors often understood what the original wording behind the Greek must have been. Also, there is often an important difference not explicable by clumsy translation into Greek, as you have noticed. There is an older Syriac version of the Gospels called the Old Greek. I hadn’t realised that a translation of it had been made. Here is the location. Look up Gorgias Press, and look up the edition with TRANSLATION & NOTES by F. C. Burkitt. (And go through their whole catalogue of both reprints & new books. There is some useful stuff there. I’ve met the owner and general editor, who is an accomplished scholar in his own right). This work of Burkitt’s was done nearly a hundred years ago, as I recall, but it’s definitely not outdated. You will find a lot in the Old Syriac that isn’t in the Peshitta, and vice-versa, and the two between them are mutually illuminating. As to the reason for the insight of the editors of both Syriac versions, the answer is NOT that they give the Aramaic original, since the dialect is too late and too Eastern. My guess is that the editors translated from the Greek, but WITH CONSTANT COMPARISON WITH AN OLD ARAMAIC TEXT THAT WAS CLOSE TO THE ORIGINAL, though not quite identical with the original because of some secondary development. Quite often the Old Latin (not the same as the Vulgate) gives the same impression. So does the Ethiopic.