The Cochin Hebrew New Testament Manuscripts at Cambridge (MS Oo.1.32, Oo.1.16.1, Oo.1.16.2): Late Copies with Signs of an Early Semitic Tradition
Keywords:
Hebrew New Testament; Cochin Jews; post-biblical Hebrew; Syriac Peshitta; manuscript studies; codicology; textual transmission; Semitic philologyAbstract
This article re-examines the Hebrew New Testament manuscripts associated with Cochin and now held at Cambridge University Library, especially MS Oo.1.32, MS Oo.1.16.1, and MS Oo.1.16.2. Although these manuscripts are early modern codices, they preserve a recurring Hebrew profile that warrants closer philological and codicological attention than it has typically received. The study does not argue that the extant Cambridge manuscripts are ancient, nor does it claim direct proof of descent from a single early exemplar. Its narrower aim is to test whether selected features of their language, idiom, and internal differentiation are fully explained by current models that treat the corpus simply as a late polemical or missionary translation.
Methodologically, the article first situates the manuscripts within the multilingual world of eighteenth-century Cochin, where Jewish, Christian, Dutch, Portuguese, and other textual influences may have shaped the surviving witnesses. It then examines representative passages and lexical patterns to distinguish, as far as possible, evidence of Hebrew register, translation technique, and possible layered transmission. Particular attention is given to post-biblical Hebrew diction, Hebrew-Aramaic contact features, bounded variation across books and sections, and selected readings that are not easily reduced to straightforward dependence on familiar Greek, Syriac, or European source models.
The argument is exploratory and cumulative rather than definitive. It does not claim that the corpus preserves a recoverable early Hebrew New Testament in any simple sense. Rather, it argues that the Cambridge Cochin manuscripts should be treated as a stratified textual complex, with uneven, mixed, and historically significant internal evidence. On that basis, the article proposes a methodological reassessment: rather than dismissing the corpus as uniformly late and derivative, scholars should evaluate it book by book and passage by passage as evidence of a layered multilingual history of Hebrew New Testament transmission.
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