Re: Recovery, just not the normal sort

in Mon, 19 Mar 2007 11:54:32 -0600, Robert Uhl in hic locum scripsit:

David Cameron Staples <staples@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Before Jerome, you had to be fluent in Greek to read the New Testament
and Septuagint (the translation of the OT into Koiné Greek for
Hellenised Jews). This wasn't uncommon, as Greek was the Latin of its
day, but it did mean that the hoi polloi had to rely on someone to
translate.

Koine Greek was more the English of its day, or maybe even the pidgin,
wasn't it? I could swear that it was more than just a widely-understood
intellectual language, but was also the language of the docks, of trade
and so forth. Maybe it was the Spanglish of its day?


When the Septuagint was translated, yes. When S^HPaul was writing letters
to people, yes. Three hundred and fifty years later, somewhat less so.



PS: And I realised after I hit <send> that my post to which you replied
contradicts itself: I say that Jerome was the first Bible translation into
a vernacular, and that the Septuagint was a translation. The bit about
Jerome being *first* is obviously wrong. Well, unless you only count the
NT. But it was his that stuck, and his that was used as the baseline, from
which heresy and blasphemy was measured.

--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT cs DOT mu DOT oz DOT au
Melbourne University | Computer Science | Technical Services
If you piss off enough people, it's hard to tell the difference
between a distributed denial of service attack and public opinion.
-- bash.org/?22352
.

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