"Do You Speak Greek?"

 Fifth Friday after Pentecost

Ordinary Time--Color Green

Lectionary Texts:

Friday

1 Samuel 29-30

Saturday

1 Samuel 31

2 Samuel 1

Since I had only one Acts Bible Study day last week, instead of the normal two, I'm making up for it by having three this week. Please read Acts 21:37-40.

As Paul is being led away by the Tribune and the Roman cohort with the angry Jewish mob following, Paul politely asks the Tribune for permission to speak to him. Paul speaks to the Tribune in Greek, the language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. The Tribune acts surprised and says, "Ellenisti ginoskeis" (English transliteration--this blog format does not have a Greek font), "Do you know Greek?" The question is rhetorical, since Paul is speaking to him in Greek.

The tribune then concludes that Paul is not "the Egyptian," a Jewish rebel leader from Egypt who, among other rebel leaders/messianic pretenders, had led "assassins," men with knives who sneaked up on Roman soldiers and officials and slashed their throats. We know more about the Egyptian and his assassins (sicarii) from the Jewish historian Josephus (30-100 A.D.). The one significant difference between Luke and Josephus is that Luke says there were 4,000; Josephus, 400. 

Paul responds that he is a Jew, a citizen of Tarsus. Tarsus was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, about 400,000 population. It is located in what is now southeast Turkey. It had a highly reputed School of Rhetoric, that it seems likely Paul attended. Paul is a master of Greek rhetorical forms. Rhetoric is the art of using speech for persuasion. Greek rhetoric had three major forms. Deliberative rhetoric was to persuade people to believe something or to act on something or both. Judicial rhetoric was courtroom rhetoric, speech to persuade concerning guilt or innocence. Epideictic rhetoric is speech of praise or blame, such as funeral orations or political denunciations of an opponent. Paul had occasion to use each of the three, but most frequently deliberative rhetoric.

I've been to Tarsus, a bustling modern day city about the same size as the ancient one. Hardly anything from Paul's time survives. There are some Christians there, some of the very few in Turkey. There is a church built in the 19th century when Turkey had a 5-10% Christian minority. In the 1890's, almost all Christians were expelled from the country. The Grand Patriarch of Eastern Orthodoxy, who roughly corresponds to the Pope in Catholicism, is confined to what amounts to house arrest in an office area of about an acre of land. The great and massive Orthodox Church Hagia Sophia, one of the largest churches ever built, is in Istanbul (known as Constantinople before the Muslim conquest in 1453). The Turkish Muslims have trashed it, ripping out almost all of the beautiful Christian mosaic art and all of the sculpture. For many years it was a mosque. It is now a museum. 

 

Paul gets permission to speak to the crowd. He speaks to them "en Ebraidi dialecto," which is literally, "in the Hebrew language," but has long been taken by scholars to mean Aramaic, the common spoken language of Palestinian Jews of Paul's time. The NRSV gives a footnote, "that is, Aramaic." The scholarly assumption is that scarcely any Jews spoke Hebrew during Paul's time. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed us that there was a Jewish community, eight miles from Jerusalem, that did speak Hebrew. The two languages are very similar, like Spanish and Italian. Generally, if you could speak one, you could pretty well understand the other. We have no language close enough to English to make the same comparison. I'm beginning to think when Luke said "Hebrew," he meant "Hebrew," not Aramaic, although I'm not quite ready to mark out the NRSV footnote.

 

Tomorrow we will read and talk about Paul's speech.

 

Lord of all,

We pray for Christians around the world who live with persecution or threat of persecution. Although some Americans may think that having to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is persecution, we know that no one in America is being tortured or put to death for being a Christian. In dozens of other countries they are. Grant us a better understanding of both their plight and our own freedom. In the name of the crucified savior. Amen

 

Faithfully,

Christians