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Manuscript of the New Testament in Old Syriac

The Syriac Sinaiticus or Codex Sinaiticus Syriacus (syrs), known also as the Sinaitic Palimpsest, of Saint Catherine's Monastery (Sinai, Syr. 30), or Old Syriac Gospels is a late 4th or early 5th century manuscript of 179 folios, containing a nearly complete translation of the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament into Syriac, which have been overwritten by a vita (biography) of female saints and martyrs with a date corresponding to AD 697. This palimpsest is the oldest copy of the Gospels in Syriac, one of two surviving manuscripts (the other being the Curetonian Gospels) that are conventionally dated to before the Peshitta, the standard Syriac translation.

Both the Syriac Sinaiticus (designated syrs) [Sinai, Syr 30] and the Curetonian Gospels (designated syrcur) [British Library, Add 14451; Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Orient Quad 528] known as the Old Syriac version contain similar renderings of the Gospel text; its conformity with the Greek and the Latin has been debated. Additional passages of the Old Syriac version were discovered among the New Finds (1975) of Saint Catherine's Monastery (Sinai, Syr. NF 37, 39). Even so, syrs retains some readings from even earlier lost Syriac Gospels and from the 2nd century Septuagint manuscripts, which brought the four Gospels into harmony with one another through selective readings and emendations. It had been ascertained that the Diatessaron, or Harmony of the Four Gospels, composed by Tatian in the second century, had to be supplanted in the Syrian churches. There was a promulgation by Bishop Rabbula of Edessa in between AD 411 and 435, that four separate Gospels come into being in use in Syriac churches. The importance of such early, least conforming texts is emphasized by the revision of the Peshitta that was made about 508, ordered by bishop Philoxenus of Mabbog. His revision, it is said, skilfully moved the Peshitta nearer to the Greek text; "it is very remarkable that his own frequent Gospel quotations preserved in his writings show that he used an Old Syriac set of the four Gospels".

The palimpsest was identified in the library at Saint Catherine's Monastery in February 1892 by Agnes Smith Lewis, who returned with a team of scholars in 1893 that included J. Rendel Harris, F. C. Burkitt, and R. L. Bensly to photograph and transcribe the work in its entirety. It is still kept by the Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai, Syr. 30). The German theologian Adalbert Merx devoted much of his later research to the elucidation of the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the results being embodied in Die vier kanonischen Evangelien nach dem ältesten bekannten Texte (1897–1905). The Sinaitic Palimpsest immediately became a central document in tracing the history of the New Testament. The palimpsest's importance lies especially in making the Greek New Testament manuscripts understandable to Aramaic speaking communities during that period.