Syriac Infancy Gospel of Thomas: Edition in Progress (Part 1)
One of the projects I hoped to finish over this past summer is a long-percolating critical edition of the Syriac tradition of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Alas, I was not able to complete the project, but instead of spending my time responsibly and working on it some more, I thought I’d put together a series of posts on the various stages the project has gone through so far. I hope the posts will be of interest to those who work on the text, on Syriac literature, or on text critical work in general.
I became interested in the Syriac tradition of Infancy Thomas while writing my doctoral dissertation, published in 2010 as De infantia Iesu euangelium Thomae graece (Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 17; Turnhout: Brepols). The dissertation focused on the Greek manuscripts of the gospel, but it is well-known among those who have worked intensely with the text that a number of early versions (Syriac, Latin, Georgian, Irish, and Ethiopian) preserve a form of the text that is more primitive than the Greek (and two related traditions: one in Latin and one in Slavonic). Of these early versions, the Syriac is the earliest, with manuscripts dating to the fifth and sixth century, and in many ways the best witness. So it was necessary that I incorporate the published Syriac manuscripts into my comperanda for determining the original readings of the Greek tradition.
The first Syriac source known to scholars is a fifth/sixth century manuscript in the British Museum …