From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 15 1996 - 17:03:06 EST
At 7:03 PM 1/14/96, Kenneth Litwak wrote:
>> >I suspect that the Didache is a Christianization of the Damascus Documents
>> >found in Cairo and amonst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those interested may wish to
>> >look into this. Perhaps it will offer some insight to language usage within
>> >it.
>>
>
> Well, I don't know about the Dasmascus Document-Didache connection,
>ubt I do think the Greek of the Didache is interesting. In working
>throught he first five chapters, I've noticed a huge number of words
>which either do not occur in the NT or do not occur in secular Greek or
>both. There are somepalces where the only other known occurence is in
>the Apostolic Constitutions, quoting the Didache! Furthermore, while
>I generlaly think the Didache in this portion at least says lots of
>right-on stuff (except for the bit about bringing a gift for the ransom
>of your sins), for the most part it does not seem in these chapters to
>be distinctly Christian particularly. It talks about virtues and vices,
>but does not root them, as Paul or Peter or James do in their writings,
>with who believers are in Christ very much. Paul seems unable to write
>very many lines without mentioning Christ or Christ Jesus, etc. The
>Didache shows no such tendency. ALso, I've noticed what seems to me to
>be a trend of omitting the definite article with a clearly substantive
>participle. I don't think, though I don't have statistics for it, that
>this is a common NT Greek practice. So it seems to me that even though
>the Didache in this section at least quotes the Sermon on the MOunt
>(wihtout saying so), overall it does not seem that the author was
>interested in imitating NT style, vocabulary or syntax.
>
> Then again, I found the small amount of translation I've done this
>last weekend in the Martyrdom of Polycarp to not seem much like NT Greek
>either. In fact, MP is some of the hardest Greek I've ever worked on,
>Hebrews included.
I think, Ken, that what you're experiencing in reading patristic Greek is
not the exception but the rule: ALL of it is harder than most of the Greek
you read in the NT. There are several reasons for this; I'll only name a
couple: (1) Once the Christian faith definitively leaves the Hellenistic
Jewish linguistic sphere affected by LXX (Semitizing) Greek constructions
and enters the mainstream of Greco-Roman Koine, the more it will be
expressed in the literary and administrative language normal to
Greek-speaking Gentiles of the Roman empire; (2) by no means unrelated to
the foregoing, the style of the Greek is going to reflect a somewhat
standardized Greek educational curriculum emphasizing the literary classics
and rhetoric; this is all the more true in the second century of our era,
when the schools are increasingly subject to a movement to write Greek not
in the spoken vernacular Koine but in the archaizing Attic of the 5th and
4th centuries B.C.E.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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