Letter 47 of Mār Timothy I, Catholicos of the Church of the East

In Letter 47, written by the Catholicos of the Church of the East Mār Timothy I, important information was preserved about the rewriting of the Syro-Hexapla manuscript, carried out under his leadership, which foregrounded this monument for his Church (as it is well known, Syro-Hexapla arose and was originally used in Western Syrian Church). Thanks to the difficult process of rewriting the Syro-Hexapla manuscript, which forced Mār Timothy to directly correct the work of scribes for a long time, he himself saw that the number of biblical books, as well as the content of biblical texts, mainly focused on the Septuagint and other translations of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek in version of Origen’s Hexapla (meaning the translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion) differs in many ways from the Peshiṭta version of the Old Testament, which is mainly oriented towards the Masoretic text. Moreover, Psalms 151–155 have been preserved in the Church of the East. As a result, Mār Timothy saw that the 151st psalm existed in the Syro-Hexapla (which is not found in the Peshiṭta manuscripts), but at the same time he did not find biblical textual evidence for other psalms. All this influenced the emergence of criticism of the text in the mind of Timothy I and, obviously, the opinion that there should have been an older version of the Old Testament. Thanks to this, a story appeared (it is doubtful that this was a real story) that during the life of Timothy, biblical manuscripts from the time of the prophet Jeremiah were discovered in a cave near Jericho. So, in this article, the key topics of the Letter 47 were analyzed (I mean such as Syro-Hexapla, found biblical manuscripts, biblical quotations). The main attention is paid to textual criticism and other problems of the Old Testament. After the research part of the article, I bring to the attention of readers my own translation of the Letter 47 from Syriac into Russian. 

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