From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 17 1996 - 09:22:49 EST
At 2:10 PM 1/16/96, drmills@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu wrote:
>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.
I certainly didn't mean the "rule" above to be ABSOLUTELY INCLUSIVE, but I
think it's true by and large.
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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