The “Harklean Version” is an ancient version of the New Testament translated into Aramaic.
Now, this will all be a bit technical, but I’ll try to make it simple. This all will build off of different translation histories that I’ve written about before, but you don’t need to read those to understand this.
Thomas Of Harkel
So, to start, the Harklean Version was translated by the Bishop Thomas of Harkel (also called Tumo of Harqel). Its spelling can also be written as the “Harclean Version” or the “Harqlean Version”. Scholars use all three spellings.
Who was Thomas of Harkel?
Well, we don’t know too much about his life. But, there are a couple important details that we do know.
First, at some point in the late 500s AD, he became Bishop of the city of Mabbug in modern Syria. If you’ve read my post on the Philoxenian Version, you’ll recognize that this is the same city where Philoxenus was Bishop back in the early 500s.
Second, at some point, Thomas fled religious persecution and ended up down in the Enaton region of monasteries southwest of Alexandria, Egypt. If you’ve read my post on the Syro-Hexapla, you’ll know that this is the same area that Bishop Paul of Tella ended up when he too fled religious persecution.
That should get you caught up on the life of Thomas of Harkel. And, you also now know the other key characters in our story.
The Harklean Version
When Paul of Tella and Thomas of Harkel were both in the Enaton region, they began to work on a joint translation project.
You see, they both spoke Syriac, which is a dialect of Aramaic (the common language in Jesus’ day). At that time, Syriac was a wide-spread language across the Middle East, so a translation of the Bible into Syriac was critical for many believers.
And, there were versions of the Bible written in Syriac by that point. However, Paul and Thomas seemed to want to make a very literal translation, rather than the looser translations that existed at the time.
Paul of Tella created the Syro-Hexapla, which was a translation of the Old Testament into Syriac.
But, what about the New Testament?
That’s where our friend Thomas of Harkel comes in. Thomas worked on a new translation of the New Testament from Greek to Syriac. He finished it around the same time as Paul of Tella finished the Syro-Hexapla. They were both probably done in 616 AD.
The Harklean Revision
There is one other piece to this story though. Remember Philoxenus, the Bishop of Mabbug back in the early 500s AD? He made a translation of the New Testament which was considered very literal and word-for-word.
So, when Thomas started his translation of the New Testament, he apparently worked off of the Philoxenian Version as a base. For this reason, the “Harklean Version” is sometimes called the “Harklean Revision”, because it was a revision of the Philoxenian Version.
In fact, the Harklean Version became far more popular than the Philoxenian Version. That’s part of why we don’t have any copies of the Philoxenian Version left.
But still, Thomas made many updates and worked off of separate Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In the end, his version was even more literal than the Philoxenian. It was pretty much just a complete word-for-word translation of the New Testament from the original Greek to Syriac. I read one source that described it as a “mirror translation” of the Greek.
On top of that, Thomas also included many marks and footnotes throughout his translation where he explained different possible translations. The Harklean Version was in every way an ancient study Bible.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, the Harklean Version is a hyper-literal word-for-word translation of the New Testament. It was written by Thomas of Harkel in 616 AD. And, it was based, in part, on the Philoxenian Version, made a hundred years earlier.