The Holy Bible

...in reliability, but the same defects remained that were in the others. For the first one, Yohan referring to Oskan, as we have to philosophize from the fruits of his works (just as we see he did also in the printing of other works of our ancestors, I mean the sharakans hymns and common prayers, of which the first and best printer happened to fall into his hands), first, being entirely uncelebrated in precise Armenian studies, according to the state of the time in which Armenian philological literature was very much diminished in our nation; and second, he was also unacquainted with the knowledge of philosophical studies, by which one gains the rules of correct judgment. Having taken upon himself such a cautious operation, he became capable, not only according to the art of grammar, of altering the ornate arrangement of the composition in parts of speech and in the agreement of nouns, along with other things; but also, according to the guidance of his own simple-minded preconceptions, he invented a way to "correct" the Armenian text from the Latin translation called the Vulgata Vulgate. He was certainly ignorant of the fact that ours originates from the Greek source of the Septuaginta Seventy translators, as we saw above, and the Vulgata of the Latins is from the Hebrew copy, between which there are immense differences; it is not the place here to examine them. But in truth, if he had made himself excusable in one aspect—if at least he had succeeded in his supposed "correctness" everywhere—yet he increased the accusation against himself in that very thing, because he appeared to be guided indiscriminately according to his own whims, not keeping a uniform rule, but rather according to two manners of change which we mentioned. Through this, his Bible, according to its meanings, turned into a mixture of various translations: the Greek and the Latin. And according to the art of grammar, it was a discordant mixture of the ancient Armenian aesthetic with a new-fangled, foreign-sounding dialect. I leave aside how he translated the books of Sirach and Fourth Ezra, along with some letters of the prophet Jeremiah, as complete parts from the Latin—as if he were truly lacking skill in the knowledge of that dialect—adding to ours a crude, broken Armenian; like a patch of sackcloth sewn onto silk, so that even the evening student of Armenian literature can make a distinction between the differences in them. For this reason, his idle labor, rightfully becoming unacceptable, was criticized by the intellectual philologists of his time. Although he himself, being angered, as he hints somewhere, calls them "Matakapats foul-mouthed/slanderers" and "Barebardzn imnastaks self-exalting wiseacres." The fact is that, on the contrary, according to the right speech of reason, having only one manuscript archetype of the Holy Scripture in hand, and that one not free from multiple errors (as he himself testifies in the epilogue), when forced by the necessity of printing, it was his duty to copy from it with all faithfulness; even if one might say, even according to the obvious errors he encountered in the books, he should have indicated the correct [version] that appeared to him outside the main text in the margins, until a more accurate copy appeared in time and it became possible to correct its slips.

a. From what has been said about the varying circumstances of Oskan’s printing, the necessity of a newly made printing is clearly evident. It remains for us now to give notice to our well-intentioned readers of the manner of this undertaking, which we have performed in accordance with the precise rules of faithfulness from the noblest manuscript archetype, about which we spoke fully above. Now, first and foremost, we have kept the same number and order of the books as we found in our archetype, in agreement with many other ancient copies. And for this very reason, we did not hesitate to leave outside the order the Book of Sirach, which, although it was sometimes in the newly written copies—the fourth, fifth, and eighth had it—it was placed absolutely without the usual preamble and list of chapters, but others along with ours omitted it entirely. And indeed, having wished to research the circumstances of that book which we have today in Armenian, apart from a choice manner of its translation compared with the Greek, we also see a very different style of composition from other similar books which our ancient translators made, to the extent that it is not for us to present it to their youngest students. But we think that much later, in the scarcity of volumes, its translation was provided with a choice Armenian style, and finally, in later times, it was introduced into Armenian from the comparison with the canon of the Latins by well-meaning scribes. Where, as a proof of such a new creation of his, it is not out of place to understand that, in the lists of our ecclesiastical services, the last regulation of which occurred in the twelfth century, no reading from the books of Sirach appears to be indicated, as is taken from almost all other books of the Old Testament, except for a few, because the words were not suitable, and except for the Revelation of John—the new one—whose translation also we suspect does not go back in identity beyond the eighth century, and was added later to the canon, just as all the manuscript copies that appear to us today possess it.

But how these events happened to the books of Sirach, as well as the Revelation of John, it seems to me thus without a doubt (which no excuses can refute—perhaps thinking of the faithfulness of our divinely inspired fathers), that our translators, not having them in their Greek archetype from which they were translating, they remained outside. And later, as we said, translated by others, they appeared to ours, by which they are cited here and there as testimony by our medieval vardapets doctors/teachers. But Sirach was never placed by the ancients in the content of our canon, but was honored outside of it; as also the canon of the council of Catholicos Zion of the Partav a region in the eighth century, after listing the books of the Old Testament, adds: And from the outside, the messengers, to teach your children... the wisdom of Sirach. According to which we see, indeed, that a large portion of its copies...