When and where was this translation made? An ancient Syrian tradition asserts that it was done by the Apostle Thaddaeus, who came on a mission to Abgar Uchama—_i.e._ Abgar the Black—King of Edessa, after the death of Jesus, which mission, they say, arose out of a correspondence that Abgar had previously had with Jesus. Another tradition ascribes it to Aggaeus (Aggai), the disciple of Thaddaeus, and it is even attributed to Mark the Evangelist. It is also said that Luke was by birth a Syrian of Antioch, a tradition which may preserve an element of truth. The earliest notice of a Syriac Gospel is found in Eusebius’s _Ecclesiastical History_, iv. 22. That historian mentions that Hegesippus (c. 160-180) quotes certain things from the Gospel of the Hebrews—_i.e._ of the Palestinian (?) Jewish Christians, and from the Syriac (_sc._ Gospel), and particularly from the Hebrew dialect, showing that he himself was a convert from the Hebrews (ἔκ τε τοῦ καθ’ Ἑβραίους εὐαγγελίου καὶ τοῦ Συριακοῦ καὶ ἰδίως ἐκ τῆς Ἑβραΐδος διαλέκτου τινὰ τίθησιν, ἐμφαίνων ἐξ Ἑβραίων ἑαυτὸν πεπιστευκέναι). This can hardly be understood otherwise than as implying that a Syriac version was already in existence. Whether it contained all the four Gospels or only one of them, or Tatian’s Harmony of the Gospels, as Michaelis supposed and as Zahn has recently shown some ground for believing, or whether it contained a primitive Gospel, now perished, cannot be established with certainty. From the middle of the present century manuscripts of this version have found their way into European libraries in great numbers. Some of these are inestimable. At least ten date from the fifth, and thirty from the sixth century. This is somewhat remarkable when we remember how small a remnant of the Greek manuscripts has been preserved. G. H. Gwilliam is at present engaged on an edition of the Syriac Tetraevangelium for the University of Oxford on the basis of forty manuscripts. The task might seem to be an easy one, considering that these Syriac manuscripts display a far greater unanimity in their text than is found in any written in Greek. The difficulty in their case lies in another direction. [Sidenote: Curetonian.] In the year 1842 a Syriac manuscript containing considerable portions of the Gospels was brought from Egypt and deposited in the British Museum. It was afterwards published by Dr. Cureton in 1858 with the title “Remains of a very antient recension of the four Gospels in Syriac hitherto unknown in Europe.” Cureton himself thought he had discovered the original of St. Matthew’s Gospel in this version. While this was easily shown to be a mistake, the question as to the relationship between the Curetonian Syriac and the Peshitto, whether the two texts are independent of each other, or if not, which is the earlier and which the recension, is not yet decided. [Sidenote: Lewis.]