>>I am sure that Italians who used to attend Mass that was sung in Latin had
>>>little idea of what the words they heard meant unless they had
>>>specifically been taught ecclesiastical Latin, although of course the
>>Latin >was the ancestor of their own native language. While I can't affirm
>>it for >sure, I rather suspect that the same is true of Greeks today who
>>hear the >NT read in the orthodox churches: unless they have been to
>>school and >learned the Koine, they are unlikely to make more sense of the
>>gospel of >Luke than will of Homer or Aeschylus.
>
>Your "suspicion" if unfoundedg. And in more ways than one. The Greeks
>who go to an Orthodox church and hear the NT read, and even the liturgy, as
>recorded in text from the first centuries, understand *very well*
>(not to say "all" and "everything") of what is read and is chanted - and I
>am not speaking of "schooled" Greeks in either Koine or in the language of
>Homer. Homer they do not understand, nor even Aeschylos (primarily
>because of grammatical differences *imposed* on the language by
>Hellenistic and early Christian era grammarians - the main "body" of the
>language remains remarkably the same.) But, Luke and Johm and Agios
My orthodontist in Louisville, Kentucky (about 7 years ago) was a very well
educated recent immigrant from Greece. He assured me that exactly the
opposite is the case. According to him, he could understand VERY LITTLE of
the koine, and often what he THOUGHT he had understood turned out to be
wrong.
Perhaps more of Isidoros' understanding is based on his education than he
would like to think.
I have also had the experience of having a student from Greece in one of my
religion classes (not a Greek class). His reaction was the same as my
orthodontist. He had never studied koine before. When some of the students
in my Hellenistic Greek class asked him to help them with their homework on
participles he responded that he could not understand koine. I spoke with
him on a number of occassions about the relationship between hellenistic
and modern Greek and he convinced me that there was enough similarity to
deceive the untrained reader into making some serious mistakes and enough
difference to prevent reading the New Testament intelligently text without
special training.
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Micheal W. Palmer
Religion & Philosophy
Meredith College
mwpalmer@earthlink.net
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