Folia Theologica 17. (2006)

Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language

EARLY CHRISTIAN LATIN AS A LITURGICAL LANGUAGE 127

2. Early Christian Latin

At first, Greek was common language in which the Gospel was preached in the Roman Empire. The cultural unity of the Mediterranean world was a providential factor in the spread of the Christian faith. In particular, the diffusion of the Greek language in the urban centres of the Empire was a great help in this process. The Greek spoken in East and West was not the classical idiom, but the simplified koinè, the common language of the various nations living in the Eastern part of the Mediterranean world: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt. Koinè Greek was also the language of the urban proletariat in the West that had emigrated there from the Eastern territories of the Empire. It was the language of uprooted people, prisoners of war, small merchants, sailors and so on. These people had left their home countries because of wars, or for social and economic reasons, and flocked into the great cities of the West, above all Rome itself. Rome had become a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural city. It also had a substantial and well-organised Jewish community, which seems to have been mainly Greek speaking. St Paul's Letter to the Romans shows that koinè was the also the language of the primitive church in Rome.6 In fact, Greek continued to be the major language of the Christian community in Rome well into the third century.

Christian preaching was able to build on a foundation already laid by Hellenistic Jews in the centuries before Christ, that is, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek known as the Sep- tuagint. Through the Septuagint, Semitic thought was made accessible to the Greek world and language. With the presence of the Jewish-Hellenistic idiom of the Septuagint, early Christian Greek developed rapidly in the first two centuries, and can be distinguished from the older koinè by its many semantic innovations. Frequently, existing words adopted a new meaning within Christian6 G. BARDY, La question des langues dans l’Église ancienne, Paris: Beauchesne, 1948, pp. 81-85; W. MEEKS, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 37; see also P. LAMPE, Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries: From Paul to Valentinus, trans. M. Steinhäuser and ed. M. D. JOHNSON, London: Continuum, 2006.