Readings from the Greek New Testament

The New Testament introduces us to a register, or rather registers, of Greek radically unlike those of the high canon of classical texts. In broad terms, all the texts in the collection possess features that link them to the documentary Greek used in early imperial papyri and inscriptions, for example, the obsolescence of the optative, the infrequency of certain particles, and the relative simplicity of the syntax. But there is remarkable variety within these broad constraints: Matthew straightforwardly imitates the language of the Greek Old Testament, Markan prose is pared down to the point of being gnomic, Luke/Acts has some generic markers of historiography without any meaningful indication that the classical historians served the author as a model, and the lively paraenetic/argumentative/hysterical style of the authentic Pauline Epistles resists facile classification. The existence of such texts reminds us of the need to break out of the Atticistic canon if we want to get a full picture of Imperial Greek. We need to determine who in socio-economic terms the writers and readers of such texts may have been and whether there may not have been many more like them. In this way we can complicate the facile view that draws an excessively close connection between the eastern Empire, Greekness and the Greek city, and the Second Sophistic. Not all Greek writing was a vehicle for the dissemination of an exclusivistic Greekness.  It will also not be ignored that these texts are important not only for literary scholars and Roman social historians, but also for historians of Christianity and Judaism, for reasons too obvious to require explication. But no texts analyze themselves: students will be introduced to the central problems raised by the texts and the main methodological and theoretical approaches used to solve them.