If there’s a password needed at the gates of heaven, only Latin will unlock it, he thinks.
Kimberly Morgan
If there’s a password needed
This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.
I would have thought Aramaic or possibly archaic Greek, given that was what the bible was written in..
You mean Koine Greek (the demotic language of the period), which is the language of the New Testament, and the common translation of the Old Testament. (“Archaic” Greek would refer to Homeric Greek, perhaps, or even Mycenean Greek.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koine_Greek
For the Old Testament “original”, Hebrew (and its Aramaic successor) would apply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Aramaic
But, yes, I agree that Latin is not the answer, not for the original words. Personally, if I were starting from scratch on learning the languages, I’d do Greek before Latin anyway — such a great language, and so much more fun to read.
When I was a pre-teen child stuck in a Catholic Latin mass with nothing to read/do, before I’d ever heard of classical Greek, I used to wonder what the “Kyrie eleison” was all about, since it clearly wasn’t Latin. That was my first introduction to Greek. (You can get a pretty good start on learning Latin when you have a line by line liturgical translation and a major boredom factor for an hour every week… Later in youth, when I gave up caring about church-goer social conformity (my parents dropped me off each Sunday so I was alone in this process) I would just smuggle in paperbacks and sit in the back row to pass the time (the way they were drinking coffee at home and reading the NY Times) until I was able to opt out altogether at 10. I had to wait for 8th grade for more advances in dead languages…)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyrie
Of course you are correct, I should’ve said Koine Greek. Though to be fair, I was ignorant of the term, but I might have used demotic, which I have a passing knowledge of.
Thank you for the information. Much appreciated.