from the enfeebled hands of emperors. It is a truism to say that the contribution of Rome to the development—and subsequent degeneration—of the Church is a factor of immense importance.[1] Nevertheless it is an unfortunate fact that reiterated insistence on the Roman influence has distracted attention from the Grecian. Until recently it was supposed that the New Testament was composed in a peculiar provincial and theological dialect. But the discovery of contemporary papyri at Oxyrhynchus and the study of inscriptions found in Egypt, Asia Minor, and indeed scattered over a wide area of the empire, have shown that this "Hellenistic" Greek was the common language for business documents and private correspondence—bills of lading, receipts, family letters—throughout all those widely scattered regions. This is a new and convincing proof that the "common dialect" of Greek was very much more used than had been imagined hitherto. It is quite sufficient to account for the fact that the earliest Christian literature is in Greek, and it disposes of the erroneous idea that the authors were following a literary convention like the mediæval monks in their use of Latin.[2] They wrote in Greek simply because everybody wrote in Greek, whether in business or in social intercourse. The consequences of this fact are many and various. In the first place, the Christian missionaries found a lingua franca in which they could proclaim their message wherever they went, at all events on the main roads which they usually followed, and in the large centres of population where for the most part they carried on their work. Thus the widespread use of this one language co-operated with the common government of the one empire in providing such conditions for the dissemination of a universal faith as the world had never witnessed before. In the second place, the fact that this language was Greek had as strong intensive effects on the missionary work as its extensive influence due to the
- ↑ See Renan, Hibbert Lectures (1880).
- ↑ See Deissman, Bible Studies, passim; Moulton, Grammar of New Test. Greek, vol. i. ch. i.; Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei Ersten Evangelien, 9.
