Folia Theologica 17. (2006)

Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language

EARLY CHRISTIAN LATIN AS A LITURGICAL LANGUAGE 137

There are stylistic features in all these liturgical languages that separate them from the ordinary languages of the people. This distance was often the result of linguistic developments in the common language that were not adopted in the liturgical language because of its conservative nature. However, the picture is not quite so simple. In the case of Latin, a certain distance existed right from the beginning. Vulgar Latin was never used in the Roman liturgy, and no Roman every spoke in the style of the Roman Canon or of the collects of the Mass. As soon as Greek was replaced by Latin in the Roman liturgy, a highly stylized medium of worship was created. This brings me to my next section.

4. From Greek to Latin:

The Language of the Roman Liturgy

As noted earlier, the language of the first Christian communities in Rome was Greek. This is obvious from St Paul's Letter to the Romans, and from the earliest Christian literary works that originated in Rome, for instance, the First Letter of St Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas and the writings of St Justin Martyr. In the first two centuries, there were several popes with Greek names, and Christian tomb inscriptions were written in Greek.28 During this period, Greek was also the common language of the Roman liturgy. We can presume that this situation was similar in most parts of the Western Empire. For instance, St Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, who died around the year 200, wrote in Greek. The shift towards Latin began not in Rome, but in North Africa, where converts to Christianity were largely Latin-speaking natives rather than Greek-speaking immigrants.29 By the middle of the third century, transition from Greek to Latin in the Roman church had much advanced. Members of the

28 M. K. LAFFERTY, ‘Translating Faith from Greek to Latin: Romanitas and Christianitas in Late Fourth-Century Rome and Milan’, in Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003), pp. 21-62, at p. 29 notes that epitaphs continued to be in Greek even for popes with Latin names, Urbanus, Pontianus, Fabianus and Lucius. The exception is Pope Cornelius (d. 253), whose epitaph is in Latin; see 1LCV 953-56, 958, 960-61. On the presence of Greek-speaking Christians in Rome, see C. P. CASPARI, Ungedruckte, unbeachtete und wenig beachtete Quellen zur Geschichte des Taufsymbols, vol. Ill, Christiania 1857, pp. 303-466, esp. pp. 456-457.