Excerpt from Woodbrooke Studies, Vol. 1: Christian Documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshūni, Edited and Translated With a Critical Apparatus; 1. Barsal�bi's Treatise Against the Melchites; 2. Genuine and Apocryphal Works of Ignatius of Antioch; 3. A Jeremiah Apocryphon

When we have asked ourselves that question, there is one direction in which we immediately receive an encouraging response. Bar Salihi was not only a great ecclesiastic in a church that had passed its zenith, he was also a great scholar in the time of decline Of the Syriac literature, and being a scholar as well as an administrator, he had a great library, which he knew how to use as well as to value. Alas! That it has perished I It had many ancient works Of great worth, not only the original writings of Syrian fathers, but early translations made from Greek writers which have disappeared in the West. F or instance, it is almost certain that he had a copy Of the Diatessaron or Gospel Harmony of Tatian, to which he refers and from which he quotes he had also a copy Of a work Of Hippolytus of Rome, called Heads against Gains which was lost in the West its value can be inferred from its theme when the heads of the contention referred to are defined. There was a certain Gaius, who in the second or third century exercised his critical faculties, exactly as scholars are doing in the twentieth Christian aeon, over the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and its irreconcilability with the authorship of the Apocalypse. Bar Salibi gives us many quotations from the lost Gains, and helps us to see that this early devotee Of Higher Criticism was not, as Lightfoot supposed, a mere phantom, a creation by Hippolytus Of a straw-man for subse quent demolition, but a real man of flesh and blood, with a powerful intellectual apparatus attached to his anatomy.

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