In the Greek gospels, one word-family (σῴζω / σωτήρ / σωτηρία, the family English renders save, savior, salvation) covers everything from a drowning man’s cry to the naming of a child. The Peshitta does not have one word for all of that. It distributes the family across four distinct roots, chosen verse by verse. This page documents how the rendering opened them back up, and the two places it did not.
Every σῴζω-family occurrence in all four Gospels was traced to its Peshitta wording. The Syriac witness answers with four words, chosen to fit each verse.
The dominant root by far. Life, not rescue: “he will live,” “who can live?”, “make a self live.” All of John’s “saving” runs through this root.
The liberation root: the noun is purqānā, the agent pārōqā. It lives in Luke’s infancy hymns and in bodily breaking-free.
Urgent, physical extraction: a sinking man, a man on a cross, a dreaded hour. Where English flattens to “save us!”, the substrate says rescue.
Where the Greek says a sick person was “saved,” the Peshitta simply says healed. These verses already read that way and were left alone.
Plus 15 idiomatic and other cases, among them the settled healing idiom “your trust has made you well.” In total: 43 verses recast, 11 already faithful, 2 kept and flagged. English “save” survives only in the “save his life” saying (Mt 16:25, Mk 8:35, Lk 9:24; ruled 8/22). The name-line is flagged below.
John never uses liberation-language for this family. Every σῴζω-family word in John runs through life, including the two most famous verses. Putting “set free” there would place purqānā where the substrate put ḥyā.
The same root carries Lk 1:47 “God my Life-Giver,” Lk 19:9 “Today life has come to this house,” Lk 19:10 “to seek the lost and make them live,” and the taunt at the cross: “He made others live … he can’t make himself live” (Mk 15:31, Mt 27:42).
The liberation root stands under Luke’s birth announcements and under two moments of physical breaking-loose. The rendering uses liberation-language in these places only.
Beside these stand the rescue root √pṣy: “Father, rescue me from this hour” (Jn 12:27), “Master, rescue us!” (Mt 8:25), “Rescue yourself, and us too!” (Lk 23:39); and the healing root √ʾsā, where “saved” simply meant healed (Lk 8:36, Mk 6:56, Mt 9:21).
Two verses carry a flag in the record rather than a quiet exception. Disclosing a departure is part of the method.
The name rests on a Hebrew wordplay (Yeshua from yēšūaʿ, “Yah saves”) that only “save” keeps transparent in English. The line follows the Peshitta instead, naḥḥēyw(hy), “he will give his people life, freeing them,” and the wordplay is disclosed here and in the record rather than carried by the verb.
Rendered from the Greek σωτήριον. Here the Peshitta reads neither purqānā nor ḥayyē but ḥnānāk: “your mercy” (√ḥnn). A Greek-faithful and a Peshitta-faithful reading part ways, and here we go with the Greek.
These conclusions are already applied. The 43 recast verses stand in the reading pages, the interlinears, the glossary, and search. Nine machine-checked taste-lint rules now retire “savior,” “salvation,” and “be saved” corpus-wide and anchor the key verses (Jn 3:17, 4:42, 12:47; Lk 1:47, 1:69, 2:11), so a rebuild cannot quietly reintroduce the flattening. Where any of these words appears in the interlinear, the row shows the Peshitta wording (and its root) underneath the Greek.