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

primarily under the influence of Greek, and to a lesser extent Hebrew: “l‟influence grecque
dans le domaine de la syntaxe n‟est pas négligeable, quoique à première vue, elle pût sembler
moins radicale [...] a côté de l‟influence il faut tenir comple d‟une influence hébräique”
(Mohrmann 1956: 45).
Such a view has been met generally with scholarly temperance; as Sidwell (1995: 5)
stated: “the term „Christian Latin‟ has no linguistic validity. There was no „special language‟
which only Christians used, distinguished clearly from that employed by pagans”. 444 Indeed,
whilst it is clear that lexical development plays an important role in Christian Latin, changes
in syntax and morphology are less clear-cut, yet earlier commentators were wont to
emphasise exactly these areas as being peculiarly Christian; such a description has been
labelled a “misuse of language” (Löfstedt 1958: 68). It would, indeed, be erroneous to
understand Christian Latin as a form of langue spéciale, understood only by other Christians,
or even only used by Christians, as proposed by Palmer: “the early Christian communities
lived their lives in conditions eminently those which are creative of a special language. With
a new outlook which penetrated and transformed their whole world, living an intense and
highly organised community life with its ritual and common meals, rejecting the traditional
paganism and all its works, driven in on themselves by persecutions, the early Christians
became almost a secret society, evolving a species of Latin which was largely
incomprehensible to outsiders” (1954: 183). The development and peculiarities of such a
444 Burton (2008: 168-69) proposes a new and more positive approach in his work on the frequency of
employment of certain (not necessarily Christian) words in Christian authors: “I would suggest that
the earlier emphasis on radically new departures – the coinage of new words, and the creation of new
senses for existing words – may have led us to overlook the specialization and the increasing
frequency with which some words are used within Christian Latin. There is still very much to be
explored here”.
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