“In the Shadow of the Almighty” W. Hartmann (b. 1953)
Improvisation
First of all, there’s an important (and hopefully interesting) clarification I need to make about last week’s Music Box. That M-Box was about the sentence in the Lord’s Prayer “Give us this day our EPIOUSIOS bread,” and we explored how “EPIOUSIOS” is a Greek word Jesus made up, that no one else used — before or since, so it’s unclear what He meant by it. Traditionally it’s translated as “daily”, but why would Jesus make up a word for “daily” when there are already standard ways of saying that in Greek?
I also pointed out that the Lord’s Prayer occurs in two places in the New Testament — the longer version we use in Matt 6, and a shorter version in Luke 11. Around 400, Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, and in Matt 6 Jerome translated EPIOUSIOS as “daily”, but in Luke 11 he translated it as “super-substantial” — an eminently plausible translation. There I said that “for Jerome, Greek was still a living language” when I really should have said, “KOINE (‘Koy-NAY) Greek was still a living language.”
When Alexander conquered the Mediterranean world around 300 BCE, he established Greek as the universal second language throughout his empire. This was really helpful — you could travel most anywhere in the Mediterranean region and get by with Greek. In much the same way you can go to any significant city in the Western world and get by with English. The Romans, being ever practical, let Greek continue to be the standard second language throughout their empire, reserving Latin for governance. This flavor of Greek is called “Koine” (“Koy-NAY”) which means “common” — because it was common throughout two empires. In the history of Greek literature, you start with Homeric Greek (Homer), then Classical Greek (Plato, Aristotle, the playwrights), then Koine, which was a going thing from around 300 BCE until around the 5th century. The New Testament is written in Koine Greek.
What brought Koine Greek to an end was the fall of the Roman Empire. With its demise, the Mediterranean divided itself back into smaller regions. In the West, Latin evolved into the “Romance languages” (notice “Roman” in “Romance”) — Italian, French, Spanish, etc. In the Middle East and Northern Africa, Arabic replaced Greek as the universal second language with the Islamic Conquests in the 7th century. Greek remained the language of the Byzantine Empire (centered in Turkey and Greece), but without the ballast of the Roman Empire, Greek evolved in the Byzantine Empire in much the same way that Latin evolved into the Romance languages in Western Europe. The Byzantine Empire came to an end in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople, ushering in the era of Modern Greek. Today a modern Greek person trying to read Koine would be something like a modern English reader tackling Chaucer — recognizable elements, but almost another language.
Well, after that hefty (but hopefully tasty) meal of history, I have a lovely story about compassion for you…
It’s well known that President Reagan suffered from Alzheimer’s in his waning years, and ultimately succumbed to it. In the last flickerings of his mind, one of his remaining joys was raking leaves. He simply found it one of the few activities he could still enjoy. As a former president, he was assigned a Secret Service detail. So every day Reagan would rake the leaves, and every night the Secret Service would spread them around again.