MetaCatholic

One of the blogs I enjoy is Separated by a Common Language, exploring the differences between American and British English usages, and along with that some inevitable cultural differences. By coincidence, immediately after reading it today, I read Mark Goodacre’s post on the invisibility of the Farrer theory in the US. While the two-source hypothesis still reigns here as in the US, my feeling is that if anyone here was asked what alternatives there were, Farrer would be the one that gets mentioned.

This serendipitous sequence of reading prompted two quite different questions for me. First, given that we broadly read the same books in the same language(s), what brings about this cultural difference in academic preference? And are there any other theories that seem more dominant in one English-speaking culture than the other? I’ve heard it sometimes suggested that different solutions to the pistis Christou debate are culturally preferred, but I can’t say I’ve enough first-hand knowledge to have observed this myself.

The second area is in our different usages of the same language. One regularly reads statements such as: “The Koine dialect is a direct descendant from the earlier Attic one.” Or, “The Greek of the New Testament contains many Hebraisms” but I’ve never come across (either as a book or a reference) any real exploration of language differences within Hellenistic Greek, of which “Hebraisms” may only be one instance of local usage / dialect form. There are probably several, in which case I’d be glad to be pointed to one, although I suspect the surviving evidence may be too scanty for such a work.

But, given our own daily experience of English, in an age when communication has never been so easy, and cultures less isolated from one another’s linguistic development, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that there were at least as many differences between the Greek spoken in, say Ephesus, and the Greek spoken in Egypt, as there are between the English spoken in London and New York? Was “Hellenism” quite as mono-cultural and mono-linguistic as many discussions seem to assume?