Tres Linguae Sacrae: Three Sacred Languages--Hebrew, Greek, and Latin

By Andrew M. Greenwell, Esq.
2/19/2013
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ, wrote St. Jerome in his Commentary on Isaiah. And if what the Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik said is true for Judaism is also true for Scripture (which we have no reason to doubt)--that knowing Judaism in translation is like kissing one's mother through a veil--then we encounter at least some impediment, though it be as thin as a veil, in being ignorant of the Greek and Hebrew of the Scriptures.

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CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - In Book IX of St. Isidore of Seville's Etymologies--perhaps the world's first encyclopedia--St. Isidore (ca. 560-636 A.D.) states that three sacred languages (tres linguae sacrae) excel all others throughout the world: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

Tres sunt autem linguae sacrae: Hebraea, Graeca, Latina,
quae toto orbe maxime excellunt.
His enim tribus linguis super crucem Domini
a Pilato fuit causa eius scripta.

The justification for St. Isidore's claim was built upon Pilate's command--surely guided by divine Providence in St. Isidore's view--that the titulus crucis, the placard on the True Cross that identified Jesus' supposed crime, was to be written in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew: "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews." (John 19:19; cf. Luke 23:38; Matt. 27:37, 15:26)

In his poem "Apotheosis," the 4th century Christian poet Prudentius wrote about Pontius Pilate's stumbling into the truth that Jesus was, in fact, King of the Jews, and not only of the Jews, but of the entire Cosmos, the Pantokrator, as follows:

Pilatus iubet ignorans "I, scriba, tripictis
digere versiculis quae sit subfixa potestas,
fronte crucis titulus sit triplex, triplice lingua
agnoscat Iudaea legens et Graecia norit
et venerata Deum percenseat aurea Roma."

In ignorance, Pilate commands, "Go, scribe, and thrice
Inscribe the lines under which power hangs affixed,
Afront the cross, let the title be thrice, in three tongues
That by reading, Judaea may recognize, the Greeks know,
And golden and venerated Rome regard God."

To be sure, other religious traditions have their own sacred languages. For example, the Muslims have the classical Arabic of the Qur'an. The Hindus have their Sanskrit. The Copts have their Coptic, and the Eastern Orthodox Churches their Slavonic.

But for the Roman Catholic, and really for all Christians of the West, the three sacred languages have been, are still, and forever must be, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

St. Jerome, who translated the New Testament from Greek to Latin and the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin and gave the Church the Vulgate, obviously had intimate knowledge of all three sacred tongues.

Yet St. Jerome's contemporary St. Augustine, while he had knowledge of Latin beyond criticism, admits in his Confessions that as a youth he disliked Greek, though retained some facility with it, and that his knowledge of Hebrew was such that he would not even recognize Genesis 1:1 if Moses himself read it to him in Hebrew. Conf. I.13-14, XI.3 Also, we mustn't forget that St. Thomas Aquinas had virtually no knowledge of either Greek or Hebrew, and yet he is the common doctor of the Church, and his knowledge of the faith and his sanctity are both unimpeachable.

Goethe said that he who does not know foreign languages knows nothing of his own. But this is not entirely true. The critic Ben Johnson famously said of William Shakespeare that he had "small Latin and less Greek." Hebrew goes unmentioned by Johnson, but we may be sure that Shakespeare's knowledge of Hebrew was less even than his Greek. Shakespeare, we might hardly point out, got along quite famously without such knowledge, and knew his English quite well pace Goethe's observations.

So it is not necessary for salvation, or even necessary for literary ability, to know Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. Nor is it necessary to travel to Rome or Jerusalem to be a saint. Nevertheless, there is much value in having at least some familiarity with these three languages, or at least some of their words, just as there has always been value to going on pilgrimage to holy sites. Exploring Hebrew, Greek, and Latin is analogous to going on an intellectual or conceptual pilgrimage.

Perhaps we can learn something about ourselves, or about Church, or about our Faith, or even about God by learning a little about Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.

The Old Testament, of course, is by and large written in Hebrew, although the 2nd century B.C. Greek translation of it known as the Septuagint--itself a Greek word worth exploring--is of venerable pedigree. The New Testament comes to us in Greek, though it is full of Semitisms that one unfamiliar with Hebrew or Aramaic would be deaf to. Obviously, knowledge of some Hebrew and Greek helps facilitate or develop intimacy with Scriptures.

Ignorance of Scriptures is ignorance of Christ, wrote St. Jerome in his Commentary on Isaiah. And if what the Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik said is true for Judaism is also true for Scripture (which we have no reason to doubt)--that knowing Judaism in translation is like kissing one's mother through a veil--then we ...

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1 - 4 of 4 Comments

Tom McGuire
3 months ago
True Jesus spoke Aramaic and the Scriptures were written in Hebrew and Greek, later translated to Latin. This does not make Hebrew, Greek and Latin sacred languages. Scholars from other language groups have to learn these languages to do their research. One Chinese friend who was an Old Testament graduate of Catholic University wrote a thesis without any reference to Chinese scholarship. I asked why? The answer: "Because there were no scholars available with competence to evaluate work done in Chinese." Why not? The Catholic Church has been in China for centuries. Why are there no scholars with competence to evaluate graduate work at Catholic University? Could this be a sign of chauvinism? Here is the problem, the Christian message has become tied to Western Culture. Pope Benedict XVI has called for new ways to communicate the Good News, ways must be found to go beyond Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. The universal is not particular languages which you want to call sacred, the universal is the Good News itself. The Good News to be communicated in diverse human languages.
Andrew M. Greenwell
3 months ago
@ Tom and @ John: The Church is without doubt Catholic and encompasses the entire world, and I don't mean to deprecate any language or culture. I love languages and appreciate other cultures immensely. Syriac (Aramaic) has a particularly venerable history, and I do not intend to slight that language in the least. (There are a lot of spiritual gems in this language which are being translated by Gorgias Press.) But it is one of the "scandals of particularity" intrinsic in Christianity that God chose the Jewish people to reveal himself expressly through the Law and the Prophets, and not any other people, and therefore the revelations were in Hebrew (for the most part). God became incarnate in the "fullness of time," when Rome spanned the known world, and Greek and Latin was the lingua franca. The canon of the New Testament is Greek; that's just the way it is. God chose Peter who was Bishop of Rome, and the language of the Roman rite, the rite of the preeminent see, is Latin. This is simply how God worked things out in history. While it may be that the Japanese, or Chinese, or Indian, or African cultural and linguistic heritage is distinct from the West, it seems that in some way, even if the concepts of these languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) have to be translated, their "understanding [of] reality," at least if they are Christian, must "come through the historical sources" of the Old Testament (Hebrew), the New Testament (Greek) and the theological language of the Church (Latin). Doesn't the Chinese Catholic have to believe in "transubstantiation"? Isn't necessary for the Indian Catholic do understand about the "Logos." Doesn't the Japanese Catholic have to understand about the concept of berith (covenant)? As Catholics, we should all have a fond spot, it seems to me, for these three languages not because of any particular cultural chauvinism, but because we should accept the "scandal of particularity" that God revealed himself to one people, and then through the incarnation in the person of Jesus at a particular time and place.
Tom McGuire
3 months ago
Who are we? In the West we are not all people with roots in Greek and Latin or Hebrew. Many among us are from China, Japan and India. Their way of understanding reality does not come through the historical sources you site. The Church is no longer Western, the majority of Catholics now live in worlds where Greek, Latin and Hebrew are unknown. The challenge for the Catholic Church is to find ways to communicate truth in a way that can be universally understood. The study of Greek, Latin and Hebrew are important to the process of coming up with that understanding, but that does not make those languages Sacred in any sense.
John Anderson
3 months ago
Why not Syriac? Why is Latin more sacred that Syriac?

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