Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Lajos Szőke: Aspects of liturgical languages in Europe

tongue during the Babylonian captivity and then accepted the Chaldeic (Aramaic = Syriaic) on which a small portion of the Old Testament is written (Böhm, 1897:7). In order to understand the language of the Bible they had to study it in the same way as the Christians and Muslims had to centuries later. Although at the beginning the conditions and the criteria of the languages used in the liturgical books were the same in all the three religions - they were written in the everyday speech of the common people - later, due to different dogmas and traditions, the situation changed. In the first centuries AD the Christians held to the principles of Paul expressed in his letter 2 to the Corinthians 3:6, according to which not the written law is important but its spirit. The same thought is made even more explicit in his letter 1 to the Corinthians 14:11: "But if I do not know the language being spoken, the person who uses it will be a foreigner to me and I will be a foreigner to him." (Good News Bible, Today's English Version, The Bible Societies, Collins Fontana, 1977) Some verses later, he once again underlines the importance of native language-use in church service: "But in church worship I would rather speak five words that could be understood, in order to teach others, than speak thousand of words in strange tongues." (14:19), (Good News Bible, 1977) The Jewish tradition at this time did not differ very much from the Christian one because both of them used the Greek Septuaginta (a very literal translation of the Old Testament, see - Barr, 1975:325). However, in the course of time the authority of this version began to be questioned by the Jews. They gradually came to the conviction that only the Hebrew text could be really relied on. We have to admit that in medieval Hebrew theology there existed tendencies emphasizing the importance of peculiar language forms in the Writings; nevertheless, we cannot speak about a strict sticking to the letters of the Tora (and not to the sense) in the Jewish religion. The basis for the different attitudes to the form of the sacred text can be found in the various interpretations of the divine revelation. Although it was generally accepted that the Bible, God's word, was 142