Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Sesamo m." <sesamox AT hotmail.com>]

> Concerning Latin, the letters of Paul cannot be used as evidence against 
> Latin
> and on favour of Greek as the language of Rome and its provinces. Latin was 
> well
> alive and this fact is confirmed by its fruiets: the Romance languages that 
> are
> still spoken in the former Roman territories (Castillian, Galego, Catala,
> Rumanian, Italian, Portuguese, French etc).

However, we can notice that these Romance languages are spoken in what was 
the Western part of the Empire (with the exception of Rumanian, that was the 
result of the intense collonization that followed the conquest of Dacia by 
Traianus). When two peoples get in contact, the language of the more 
prestigious culture use to prevail. When the less "civilized" peoples of the 
West were conquered by Rome, they didn't have a common advanced culture nor 
a spread and widely known lingua franca, so the Roman culture and language 
prevailed easily.
But the situation in the East was very different. The former Hellenistic 
kingdoms had a culture far more prestigious than the Roman one, and a very 
prestigious and widespread language that easily prevailed. In fact, when the 
Empire was divided, Greek was the official language of the Eastern Empire, 
and so was during all the existence of the Byzantine Empire.
It seems logicall that in times of Cicero, Greek was a foreign but very 
prestigious language in Rome. However, Cicero himself, along with many 
others in the next few years contributed largely to the prestige of Latin, 
so I can't be sure of the situation into Rome. I guess that being a 
cosmopolitan city, there could be a lot of people who didn't speak Latin. 
And Greek could easily be a lingua franca for them. That could be the case 
of the congregation in Rome in those early days, composed to a certain 
extent of Jews and other inmigrants (Aquila and Prisca, for instance).
Also, I also think that Greek would have been a better option than Latin for 
the film "The Passion".

Sergio (Madrid)

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