Philology's Shadow II

Christianity's long ambivalence about the legacy of Hellenism and the extent of its reach into the formative stages of the new religion written in Greek continued to generate an immense amount of involved research throughout the 20th century. The intense debates that investigated the Hellenism of Early Christianity were first and foremost concerned with issues of language. What do the forms of syntax and vocabulary carry into the ideas they shape and their resonance?

Scholars of Mediterranean antiquity, Judaism and early Christianity have long been fascinated by the encounter between Greek and Hebrew in the ancient world and in Hellenistic Alexandria in particular. The very term “Hellenist” was coined as early as the turn of the 17th century, when humanists debated whether the Greek of the Septuagint, of Philo, of Josephus and the New Testament reflected the distinct Jewish dialect of a bilingual culture, an idiom redolent with Hebraisms, starkly different from that of Periclean Athens (Hardy 2012).

In the invitation to this panel, one organizer described the relationship between Classics and theology as that of ‘roommates’. This paper takes seriously the implications of this figure of speech and will begin from the few months in 1799 when Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher shared lodgings in Berlin, a period of co-habitation and sharing of ideas that also led to the plan for a collaborative translation of Plato’s works. In the end, Schleiermacher executed the project on his own, but in its conceptualization, it bears the traces of both (Arndt 1996; Lamm 2000).

Many of the pioneers of Classical philology, from Lorenzo Valla, to Richard Bentley and Karl Lachmann, to name just a few, moved with ease between Greco-Roman texts and the New Testament. According to the prevailing scholarly opinion, the relation between these two fields in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century was one of direct influence of sacred philology over its profane counterpart. Thus, according to Giorgio Pasquali, philologia profana is a “tributary” of philologia sacra” (Pasquali, 1952, 8).