The name 'Peshitta' is derived from the Syriac ܡܦܩܬܐ ܦܫܝܛܬܐ (mappaqtâ pšîṭtâ), literally meaning 'simple version'. Syriac is a dialect of Eastern Aramaic. It is written in the Syriac alphabet, and is transliterated into the Roman alphabet in a number of ways: Peshitta, Peshittâ, Pshitta, Pšittâ, and Pshitto.
The Peshitta is the standard version of the Syriac Bible used by the Syrian Christians. The Old Testament of the Peshitta was translated from the Hebrew, probably in the 2nd century AD. The New Testament of the Peshitta, which originally excluded certain disputed books (2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, Revelation), had become the standard version of the Syrian churches by the early 5th century A.D. It was accepted and honored by all the numerous sects of the greatly divided Syriac Christianity. It had a great missionary influence, and the Armenian and Georgian versions, as well as the Arabic and the Persian were translated from the Syriac Peshitta.
The Peshitta was first brought to the West by Moses of Mindin, a noted Syrian ecclesiastic, who sought a patron for the work of printing it in vain in Rome and Venice, but found one in the Imperial Chancellor at Vienna in 1555 - Albert Widmanstadt. He undertook the printing of the New Testament, and the emperor bore the cost of the special types which had to be cast for its issue in Syriac. Immanuel Tremellius, the converted Jew whose scholarship was so valuable to the English reformers and scholars, made use of it, and in 1569 issued a Syriac New Testament in Hebrew letters.
In 1645 the editio princeps of the Old Testament was prepared by Gabriel Sionita for the Paris Polyglot, and in 1657 the whole Peshitta found a place in Walton's London Polyglot. For long the best edition of the Peshitta was that of John Leusden and Karl Schaaf, and it is still quoted under the symbol Syrschaaf, or SyrSch. The critical edition of the Gospels which was edited by G. H. Gwilliam at the Clarendon Press is based upon some 50 manuscripts.
