WHY DID GOD ORDAIN GREEK (RATHER 
THAN HEBREW, ARAMAIC, OR LATIN) TO 
BE THE MEDIUM FOR ENSHRINING AND 
PROPAGATING A GOSPEL WITH A
HEBREW ANCESTRY?

© 2000, 2002 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20020505]

     What must be the reason that accounts for why God chose Greek to be the vehicle for revealing the Gospel to Christians who have missed the glory of having been in Jesus's company?  Greek was of course the language of those parts of the Roman Empire that included Asia, the Balkans, and Egypt; but Latin was of course the official language of the Romans; and Hebrew was the language of the Old Testament.   That last statement requires qualifications.  Leaving aside some of the deuterocanonical books originally written in Greek, our manuscripts of the Rabbinic translation of the Mosaic books (we refer to the whole Greek Old Testament with deuterocanonical books as the LXX or Septuagint) and in fact the entire LXX are about 1170 years older than the oldest dated Hebrew manuscripts; where they differ (e.g. Isa. 7:14 with the Rabbinic change of "virgin" to "young woman" in the Hebrew text obviously meant to slant the text against a Christian interpretation ), the Dead Sea Scrolls (ca. two centuries later than the LXX) are said to confirm the LXX rather than the Hebrew text.  (It would be interesting to check Ps. 17:15, which in the Hebrew text does not agree with the corresponding Ps. 16:15 of the Septuagint.)  With a rare exception or so, citations of the Old Testament in the New Testament are from the Greek LXX. 
       So Greek it was!  Why?  What is it about Greek words--and therefore concepts--that made Greek so indispensable for setting forth Christian truth, even though the religious ancestry of Christianity was entirely Hebraic?  Of course, the Gnostic aspects of Hellenistic culture (its disdain for the material and temporal) had to be sloughed off in favor of the concreteness of the Hebrew outlook--its realistic view of matter and time . . . just as the Semitic (Hebrew, and later, Arabic--not to mention non-Semitic Germanic)  juridical emphasis, fixation on words and "the book," and eventually anti-iconism had to be denied entrance into the  Greek-language Christian paradigm being born.  

To begin with, Greek had an enormous vocabulary for refining and conceptualizing beliefs.  For example, though Hebrew had a very rich set of verb permutations, Greek opposes feminine verbal nouns with "energetic" import (they end in -sis or, following -s-, in -tis; these nouns correspond to causative verbs in -ize[in], sharing that honor with masculines in -ismos) to parallel static neuters in -ma that represent the result of an energization of even the abstract qualities of an energization.  Thus, [h]omoíosis is "assimilation" (or "cognation") while [h]omoíoma is the resulting "likeness."  (It is the former that humanity received when the first humans were created in the Icon of God and the Assimilation to God--this latter being the Energy of Grace that actualized the potential of the Icon).  This view of reality has proved so important (and so absent in the other languages named above as possible alternatives to Greek) that it offered a framework that would, in centuries to come, allow ostensible antinomies to be resolved without despite to the truths at either pole.  This is only one illustration, though a very important one, of the potential of Greek for expressing both cognitive, practical, and mystical notions.  And as already said, it had the advantage of being the language of learning over a vast geographical area.
     One cannot imagine that God would've failed to manage such an important thing as the formation and propagation of the Gospel without ensuring that it was ensconced in an adequate conceptuology or axiomatic paradigm.  Every language tends to favor, to some degree (which can be developed and reïnforced in time), a given view of being and its relation to matter and time--the economy of created being, to put it into Greek Orthodox terms.  It would of course be wrong to deny that any language has the potential to express any thinkable notion; but languages accomplish that goal in often widely differing ways.  More importantly, the people who spoke Greek formed a Greek-language culture, a whole congeries and indeed template of ideas whose vehicle was Greek.  Much of that had to be pruned away, namely the Gnostic idea that materiality and temporality have no worth, especially in religion, or are even positively counter to spiritual values.  Incarnation and Resurrection could have no value in this scheme, just as the Crucifixion could be weighted down with a multitude of  juridical categories--along with Hebrew latreutic (worship-related), sacrificial means and goals expressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews (which barely made it into the canonical Bible).  
     That the early Greek-language Christians could accomplish the paradigm-shift certainly appears miraculous.  The Orthodox believe, in accord with John 16:13, that the Holy Spirit guided this development.   But Christians saw the Incarnation or becoming flesh of God as a Mystery or Sacrament--a sentiment echoed by later Fathers of the Orthodox Church.  The Incarnation thus validated in the eyes of the early Christians the view of matter (Mysteries or Sacraments) and time (tradition guided by the Holy Spirit).  The Incarnation formed a template for accepting the value of water in Baptism, the benefits of Christ's Body (not just his spirit or ubiquitous Deity) and Blood in the Eucharist, the value of oil for ordaining and healing--and of course the value of time for sifting out a lasting truth from the plethora of erroneous opinions on each topic that was mooted by the Church--specifically in the seven Ecumenical Synods convened in the East and attended by Eastern bishops and in the Palamite Synods held in the fourteenth century, only a hundred years before the downfall of Constantinople.   This coherent world-view was based on the concept of energy:  Grace is divine uncreated Energy that can be channeled in material vessels (including the human Body) and seen (when enabled by a miracle) as the uncreated Light of God's Being.   While God's uncreated Essence cannot be participated in or even known by created beings, it is otherwise with that aspect of His Being beyond Being that radiates from His Essence and characterizes It for us creatures--viz. His uncreated Energies..
     John Calvin would, not long after the close of the Middle Ages, speak of the flesh as a prison of the soul and disallow material images, admitting only words (the juridical words of the  Ten Commandments) on the walls of the building where he preached.  Tradition meant nothing in the end; a timeless view of religious reality prevailed, when one got right down to the nitty-gritty.  However, these views did not reach Luther and Calvin in a direct line from early Christianity--but rather by a vast detour through Islam that culminated in Arabic Cordova, whose works reached Europe in Latin (mis-)translations.   (CLICK HERE.)   The words of the Bible remained (minus the Apocrypha--in Luther's case, also minus the books of the New Testament that were not consistent with his theology, which he relegated to the end of his translation of the Bible into German); but what those words meant was determined by the axioms of new framework.  A like detour through Islamic Cordova yielded Latin Thomism, but Thomism was less Islamically influenced than the Franciscan-Augustinian tradition (called the via moderna "modernism")--the framework that the revolutionaries we call the "Reformers" accepted as axiomatic.  (The Western tradition has been almost as juridically oriented as the Semitic scholars in Cordova from its beginnings in Carthage and Milan.)  The Eastern emphasis on Incarnation and Resurrection--the latter as completing and indeed reversing and overcoming the Crucifixion--was to become weakened in the Latin West and lost in the Reformation.
      When one considers how Biblical ideas have been mangled in Latin translations, it is easy to see why God did not plan for Latin, the official language of the Roman empire, to be the vehicle for forming and spreading the holy Gospel.  Should you doubt what has just been said, read the following short articles in English--an amazingly flexible language (partly because it lacks the straitjackets of inflection embedded in the older languages--including Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin.

Within the matrix of the Greek-language culture of Hellenism, it was possible to preserve the Greek outlook in Aramaic and Syriac Christianity.  The Viking overlords of the Slavs didn't have much more culture than their well-developed sense of world trade and business, but they managed, through the leading of the Paraclete, to adapt Slavonic--in what seems like a miracle--to make Greek thinking properly accessible to their people.  The early Christians had ceased to speak Greek in Rome in the third century.  Thereafter an adequate cultural matrix for Greek-Christian ideas ceased to exist in the West; the influential Augustine knew only a few words of Greek, though his early Carthaginian predecessor, Tertullian, had written in Greek as well as Latin.  (Note that Carthage was a Semitic foundation--it had been founded by the Phoenicians; it therefore had a juridical ambience.)   The seven and a half centuries of almost entirely illiterate Dark Ages broke the continuity of the West with original Christianity.  
      When learning returned to the Latin West in the later twelfth century, it came via the Semitic detour already mentioned--the brilliant Muslim and Jewish scholars in Cordova, whose impressive work stood on the shoulders of centuries of Arabic scholarship.  This scholarship had crossed with Christianity in the Orthodox territories of Asia first conquered by the Arabs.  The first translations of the Greek philosophers were made by Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christians--unitarians like the Arabs.  (The Nestorians missionized Asia as far as the Chinese capital of the Mogul Empire [the greatest and richest in history.  Note that  Syriac is closely related to Arabic.  At  Damaskos (vying with Jericho as being the oldest city in the world), the first Arab government did in fact use Greek, also taking over many Byzantine ways and customs--and dress.  A translation center was established at Damaskos and was functioning when our Orthodox St. John of Damaskos was Grand Vizier to the great Ummayyad Caliph.  That institute produced Arabic renderings of the Greek philosophers, astronomers, physicians, opticians, mathematicians, and historians and laid the ground for astonishing advances in many fields of scholarship--a complete contrast with the Latin Dark Ages.   The Arabs invented algebra; the word itself is Arabic-derived.  Culture also continued in Byzantion.  Arab scholarship grew ever more impressive and culminated in the immense city of Cordova with its 700 mosques--till it was overthrown by the conquering Moors (also Muslims) and its scholars fled into exile.  When Constantinople finally fell to the Turks, the flight of its scholars (mostly via Crete, a Venetian territory, and then Venice itself) opened up in the West what we call the Renaissance. 
      But if Hebrew was inadequate for the formation of the Gospel, so was Arabic, not to speak of Latin--a very great language in many important respects with an immense Mediæval and post-Mediæval--but nevertheless the lingua franca of a barbaric Dark Age culture.  Classical learning in the West remained alive in Ireland, where monks still read and translated Greek; Charlemagne smmoned the learned Alcuin (a monk from an Irish-founded monastery in Yorkshire) to the Continent to bring some order into Latin and to restore it to something like its Classical form.  (Patristic Greek had remained "Classical" with few exceptions, though its enormous vocabulary was enlarged yet more; after all, the Academy continued in Athens till Justinian closed it down--St. Vasil the Great and St. Gregory the Theologian studied there.)  A vast literature grew up in Mediæval Latin, the lingua franca of Western learning down to our own century.  But the roots of Latin Christianity nevertheless lay in the four formative jurist-theologians referred to earlier; and the Semitic influence of Cordova had a strong will-based, juridical thrust (both Ibn Rushd [Averroës] and the Jewish Ben Maimon [Maimonides] were jurists as well as philosopher-theologians).  Moreover, the ways of the Germanic tribes that overran and then ruled the Western territories of the Roman empire (except where the Arabs held out, such as southern Spain) shared a strongly will-centered outlook.  
     Those who insist that Orthodoxy is not cerebral or intellectual (but purely mystical, etc.) have not only failed to understand the Fathers; they would have to pretend that Byzantine culture was similar to the will-based (non-cognitive) Teutonic culture of the Dark Ages--and that the LOGOS is not the Reason and Wisdom of God!  It is one thing to be anti-rationalist (i.e. to be against dissecting Mysteries undecipherable by finite minds); it is another to be anti-rational; and of course, it is yet another to be irrational or relativistic or whatever.  Orthodox Icons of the incarnate LOGOS inscribe over His Image the Greek rendering of YHWH in Ex. 3:14; and His mother is called the Mother of YHWH in Luke 1:43.  So Jesus is both YHWH and LOGOS--Creator of the materiotemporal cosmos.  Anyhow, the philistinism of shunning the uses of the mind is as reprehensible as to overuse it to analyse Mysteries beyond its ability.
      When the Greeks underwent their own Dark Ages as the result of Slavic invasions and subjection to the Turks, the center of Orthodoxy moved to Moscow, where God had providentially ensured the suitability of Slavonic for forming and propagating the Gospel.  It is now for us to see if He will lead those of our time to make English an equally suitable vehicle for the Gospel--something that our language has not been (under Latin and Denominationist) influence till now.  Small but indeed remarkable progress has already been made in rendering icon art appreciated in the West; and even Orthodox music is coming to be appreciated and composed by contemporary composers.  (Cf. the music at Princess Diana's funeral, as the bier was being carried out of the nave.)  Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Checkov, and a number of Confessors under Communism have become part of our English-language culture.  But admirably adaptable though English is, it is still a long ways from being what it could--led by the Holy Spirit bestowing the uncreated Energies of Grace--be. 
      The challenge for the Orthodox is clear.  The time is ripe.  Energy is a basic form of matter in the paradigms of science.  Some day, some expert in science may find a way to show some compatibility (there is no incompatibility) between energy in the Orthodox paradigm and physical energy in current paradigms of science.  In the mean time, English-speaking Orthodox need to clean up the ways we speak and write English, taking advantage of its well-known potential for adapting to new paradigms.  We should not blindly follow the Latinizing uses of the non-native-speakers of English who built up Orthodox learning in North America--with Word for Reason (LOGOS) and Deification for Divinization, Lent for the Great Fast, etc.   (CLICK HERE.)  If things come full circle, a new Renaissance of Orthodoxy can open up in the New World--nothing equal to Byzantion or Moscow in past times, of course, but standing out sufficiently for the present day and age.  We should pray for that to happen--for it to be free of foreign domination, free to realize the language's potential, free to propagate the Gospel as it was in the Apostolic Age and early centuries--and indeed, in the East down till the present day.

SEE HERE FOR WHY THE INCARNATION OF THE LOGOS
TOOK PLACE WHEN AND WHERE IT DID

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