The
vellum manuscript acquired by Sir Chester Betty in 1957 contains a total of
seventy-five folios and consists of two clearly distinct sections. The first
ten folios reproduce an exchange of letters between Severus of Antioch and
Julian of Halicarnassus relating to the corruptibility or incorruptibility of
the body of Christ, while the remaining sixty-five folios contain a substantial
portion of Ephrem’s Diatessaron Commentary. The parchment is consistently thick
in this first part, whereas in the second it is sometimes thick, sometimes thin.
Leloir observes that since the writing in this first part is a mixture of the
Estrangela, Nestorian and Serta scripts, and contains certain distinctive
orthographic features, it should be dated several centuries later than the
second part, probably in the eighth or ninth century. The script in the second
part is Estrangela, and Leloir dates this part of the manuscript to the end of
the fifth or beginning of the sixth century, at the latest. He cites certain peculiarities
of script as a basis for this dating, and compares its script to that of MS
Syriac Add. 12150 of the British Museum [written in Edessa in 411/412 AD] which
contains writings of Clement of Rome. Titus of Bosra and Eusebius of Caesarea
Valdivieso agrees with this dating, also citing MS Syriac Add. 12150, as well
as three further MSS of a slightly labor period. (Saint
Ephrem's Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron: An English Translation of Chester
Beatty Syriac MS 709 with Introduction and Notes [trans. Carmel McCarthy;
Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 2; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993,
2000], 28)
