I was asked recently by a parishioner to speak to his Rotary Club….he already had the topic in mind: “It’s Greek to me,” he smiled as he told me. He thought given my occasional penchant for citing the Koine Greek during sermons relative to the Gospel appointed for the day…and thereby looking for perhaps a new or more enlightened contextual interpretation…He thought that the topic would be interesting to some people. I worried about how to make this interesting to business people in the middle of a business day…work in the morning, work in the afternoon. I used to be a Rotarian, and during Rotary lunches I usually had things going on at the office on my mind, and I could only rarely give the speaker all of my attention. But the talk went well…in fact there were a couple of folks who were jazzed about it…stayed late asking questions.
Since that talk I’ve been thinking a lot about how language and therefore culture have such tremendous influence on the religious enterprise. Language the outward and audible and visible means that carries within it the culture of the speaker. Noted anthropologist Clifford Gertz argues that it is within the cultural Matrix that religious consciousness is formed and informed…so it follows that as cultures evolve and as cultures integrate the religious consciousness evolves and integrates as well.
Christianity is a prime example of such evolution and integration. When Alexander the Great conquered the Mediterranean world in the Fourth century B.C.E. he installed the Greek way of life across the region…cities were redesigned to emulate the Greek polis, the advanced scholastic methods of the Greeks became the means of learning throughout the realm. Greek became the language of the academy. The Greek language became the language of commerce as well. (much the way English is today) In the late third century, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated Hebrew scripture into Greek, a volume called the Septuagint, which became widely used by Jewish scribes throughout Judea and the Mediterranean basin diaspora…so we have a melding , an integration of Greek and Semitic thought, which would profoundly affect both….a cultural synthesis, and therefore religious, contained in language.
Later the New Testament Jewish scribes would write their letters and Gospels in Greek, and their references to Hebrew scripture, of which there are countless many, are from the Septuagint, the Hebrew translated into Greek. Plato believed that every “form” in earth represented, had a likeness to a perfect form in the eternal. The Incarnate Jesus is the form of God in earth…the Word…the Logos of the eternal….without the Greek language perhaps the writers of scripture would have been at a loss of words, as it were, in describing the God-Man Jesus. This is a gross oversimplification of course, because certainly other cultural and religious ideologies via trade routes exerted influence as to the evolution of Christianity: Zoroastrianism in Persia; the Mithra cult of the Roman provinces; the gnostic movement in intellectual circles just to name three.
The point I’m making is that the religious consciousness is not something that just appears on the scene. Christianity didn’t just happen in 33 years; it is in fact still evolving. The religious consciousness is a confluence of cultural predispositions that are forever evolving , forever integrating, forever growing as the human community evolves. With technology and communications shrinking the language barrier, or perhaps better said, bringing the world’s languages together, which is the same as bringing cultures together…what new synthesis for the religious consciousness lies ahead. It will undoubtedly be more global and highly synthesized. In a Hundred years how will we speak of Jesus of Nazareth, of Mary, of the Ladyof Guadalupe, the lost goddess of the indigenous Americans. Surely it will evolve as we discover more about ourselves and our world, and I believe in the Wisdom of God we will be led by the golden thread of truth which will keep us on the enlightened path of serving ever more artfully the greater good…because in any language, that, in essence is what religion is all about.
