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). It is still kept by the Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai, Syr. Bensly to photograph and transcribe the work in its entirety. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. Even so, syr s 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. Additional passages of the Old Syriac version were discovered among the New Finds (1975) of Saint Catherine's Monastery (Sinai, Syr. Both the Syriac Sinaiticus (designated syr s) and the Curetonian Gospels (designated syr cur) known as the Old Syriac version contain similar renderings of the Gospel text, its conformity with the Greek and the Latin has been debated.

Codex syriacus