2 Baruch - Manuscript Tradition

Manuscript Tradition

The Letter of Baruch had a separate and wider circulation than the rest of the book, and is attested in thirty-six Syriac manuscripts.

The Apocalypse proper has been less widely available. One Latin excerpt was known from a quotation in Cyprian. A 4th-5th century AD Greek fragment was found among the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts. Two excerpts were known from 13th century lectionaries of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

The full text of 2 Baruch is now known from a 6th or 7th century AD Syriac manuscript discovered by Antonio Ceriani in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1866. An Arabic manuscript of the whole text was discovered in 1974. It is apparently a rather free translation from a Syriac text similar to the Milan manuscript.

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