THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
Greek. In commentaries on the New Testament these meanings have received much emphasis, the dogmatic utility of which would be undermined were a careful examination of the facts undertaken. Unfortunately the situation in this regard has been confused by not keeping distinct the linguistichistorical and the religious-historical points of view. It is true that both Greek Judaism and Christianity have created new words and new meanings for words; but these are facts in the history of religion, not of linguistics, since the words or meanings originate out of Jewish or Christian faith and not out of Jewish or Christian Grcecitas. It would be as correct to speak of Gnostic Greek or the Greek of the Stoa or the Greek of Neoplatonism as of " Jewish " or " Christian " Greek on the ground that they have created new words or given new meanings to words. So that from the lexicological point of view the Greek Bible is a document of the Hellenistic world-speech.
At first sight the syntax of the Greek Bible may seem to warrant the designation of Biblical Greek. In the Psalms and in the Synoptic 7. Syntax. Gospels there are constructions, collocations of words, and methods of sentence-building which can not be duplicated even in the papyri which proceed from the peasantry of Egypt. Here is a Greek which is full of Semitisms. Yet other parts of the Scripture do not contain these elements; IV Maccabees, the Pauline Epistles, the Epistle to the Hebrews differ in this respect from the books named above, and belong to the common Hellenistic speech. Syntactically these are to be disconnected from the works with so pronounced a Jewish flavor, and the reason is seen to be that they are original compositions while the others mentioned are translation^ from the Hebrew or Aramaic; thus for the latter a new measure is secured for their syntactical peculiarities, and we should speak not of Jewish Greek, but of translation-Greek. But a question arises whether this translation is in the every-day Greek of the translator or is simply a Greek fashioned upon the Semitic model. In the former case it would then be a part of the lingua franca ; in the latter case it would be a Jewish Greek existing only on paper in which the original was not translated into Greek, but simply transferred word by word into Greek equivalents. Or, to put the matter in another form, are the " Semitisms " of the Bible normal or exceptional ? Following out this distinction as made in H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (Halle, 1898), pp. 67 sqq., 145 sqq., translation-Greek is a variety which is seen to be artificial and existent only on paper; its numerous syntactic Semitisms are therefore exceptional. If there was a Jewish idiomatic Greek, how was it that the Greek Jew, Paul, who wrote not books, but only letters, did not employ it ? and why did Philo and the author of the Aristeas letter write Greek that was so un- Jewish ? Two Biblical authors make further argument unnecessary, Sirach and Luke. Both have prologues of which it can not be said that they are "Jewish-Greek" or that they "Hebraize." Yet both authors have made use of Semitisms, though not with the same frequency. For those who argue
for a " Jewish Greek " the occurrence of these two kinds of Greek from the same pen is embarrassing. The explanation is, however, exceedingly simple. In the prologues these authors wrote as they spokein the body of the work they were more or less dependent, directly or indirectly, upon a Semitic basis. The Jewish Greek was, therefore, not a living speech, but an inferior method of translation. The Septuagint is more Jewish than the Synoptic Gospels because the former had a documentary basis; the latter came probably from the oral tradition of a bilingual people (cf. Merx, in Deutsche Literaturzeitung, xix. [1898] 989). That there are, so to speak, normal Semitisms along with the exceptional is to be recognized; they exist as a coloring of certain books, just as sermons and religious papers of the present are colored with Biblical terminology. An investigation, therefore, of the Semitisms of, say, the old Christian texts is an urgent need. A comparative view of the writers of the Hellenistic common speech would doubtless show that many of the so-called Semitisms are rather parts of the every-day language. Such cases are the use of anastrephesthai ("to walk") and anastrophe ("walk") in an ethical sense, onoma (" name ") in the sense of person, the numeral used distributively by doubling it, and so on. The number of real Semitisms would be greatly reduced and would appear due to the religious terminology. How much came into the common speech in pre-Christian times can hardly be estimated, but that technical words were introduced is certain, though only a single " Egypticism " is known, onos hypo oinou. So that from the point of view of syntax the Greek Bible belongs to the common Hellenistic speech. Its Semitisms are curiosities, but are not of linguistic importance any more than are the Latinisms or other linguistic booty which Greek took over in its conquest of the world of the Mediterranean lands.
When the question is raised whether the Greek Bible is a monument of the vernacular or of the literary language, it must be borne in 8. The mind that the boundaries between the Greek two are fluctuating. Moreover, dis- Bible not tinction has to be made among the Literary various books in this Bible. Blass says Greek. of the Epistle to the Hebrews that it is the only book in the New Testament which in structure and style shows the care and finish of an artistic writer. The Pauline letters, on the contrary, are monuments of the vernacular; his vocabulary is of the sort that an Atticizing grammarian would have continually corrected in order to get rid of the words forbidden to literature. His sublime combination in I Cor. xvi. 13 of gregoreite stekete (" watch ye, stand fast ") is one that no writer who regarded form would have permitted himself to use; both verbs are, as Blass calls them, " plebeian." But to expect literary Greek of the apostle would be wrong — he was no litterateur, but a writer of letters, who spoke as the common people of Ephesus and Corinth spoke; he was just Paul who knew the world-speech of Asia, Europe, and Egypt, Paul with a native eloquence and a prophetic pathos which came from his soul of fire; and as he spoke so he wrote , Similarly the Gospels are monu-