The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

5.4 Christian Latin
In contrast to the terms above, Christian Latin is much more tangible in its definition.
The notion that there existed a specific Christian Sondersprache is neither novel nor
surprising; as Boethius had noted a century or so prior to the monastic rules: “cum sint
arcana fida custodia tum id habent commodi, quod cum his solis qui digni sunt
conloquuntur”. 442 Löfstedt echoed the sentiment a millennium and a half later: “the new
system of thought [i.e. Christianity] called for and created not quite a new language, but
certainly new forms of expression” (1959: 68). The existence of „special languages‟,
especially in a religious context, has been investigated often and there are parallels here with,
for example, the argument as to whether Spanish Jews spoke a peculiar version of Castilian in
Medieval Spain. 443
The idea of a Christian Latin, that is, a Latin peculiar to Christians, sprung from the
Nijmegen School in the early twentieth century, expounded by its two principal advocates,
Jos Schrijnen and Christine Mohrmann (for example, Schrijnen 1932; Mohrmann 1958). The
initial premise of these two scholars and their followers was not only that “the new song of
the logon demanded new logoi” (Mohrmann 1957: 13), but that beyond this there existed a
language peculiar to early Christians not only in its vocabulary, but also in its syntax,
442 Tractates 3.5.
443 See, for example, Marcus (1962). It was his opinion that there was a peculiar Jewish form of
Castilian; (ibid.: 129) “d‟abord parce que leur vie sociale se trouvait être relativement isolée, et
ensuite à cause de leur religion qui les avait habitué à se server en famille de termes particuliers et
d‟expressions différentes de cells qui étaient en cours dans les milieu nouveax où ils se trouvaient
après leur dispersion”.
178