Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Uwe Michael Lang: Early Christian Latin as a Liturgical Language
128 U. M. LANG ity, whereas they kept their old meaning in general language. A good example is the use of e'pfivri, 'peace', in Christian Greek. The word carries with it a plethora of theological ideas deriving from the Hebrew word shalom with its messianic and eschatological connotations. E"pf)vr| was given a fullness of meaning that is accessible only to those who are familiar with the Jewish and later Christian background. The same can be said of the Latin equivalent pax, but here the situation is made even more complex by the fact that both the classical Roman tradition and the Christian liturgy made the word develop a yet richer variety of meaning. Christine Mohrmann and others have observed that Christian Greek introduces practically no foreign loanwords: 'Greek Christians were able to manage with the existing Greek linguistic material'.7 Obviously, with the Greek Old Testament, it already had a medium in which it could express Christian life and thought.8 With Christian Latin, the situation is different. It is obvious that, from the very beginning, Latin speakers had to make a greater effort than the Greeks to express the new faith, because they could not rely on an already established Jewish Biblical tradition in their mother tongue. Other factors may have contributed to this, for instance, the fact that Greek was further developed than Latin as a medium for expressing abstract thought. Classical Latin authors, such as Quintilian, Seneca and Cicero commented about the limits of their own language, which they considered inferior to Greek. Cicero in 7 C. MOHRMANN, Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character. Three Lectures, London: Burns & Oates, 1959, p. 18. 8 Pope Benedict XVI commented on the importance of the Septuagint in the encounter between Biblical faith and Greek thought in his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections’ at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2006: ‘Thus ... biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity’. The text of this lecture can be found at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/septem- ber/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html.
