From: drmills@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Date: Tue Jan 16 1996 - 15:10:44 EST
On Mon, 15 Jan 1996, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Do you consider the Shepherd of Hermas to be difficult to read also?
Unlike the Didache and Polycarp, I have found it relatively easy to read.
David R. Mills
drmills@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Applied English Center
University of Kansas
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