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To: pbear8
Jerusalem was a cosmopolitan city in the Roman Empire. When Our Lord addressed the centurion He mostly likely used Latin. Multiple languages are not that difficult to acquire.

Possible. But it's more likely He addressed him in Kione Greek. It was the common language in that part of the Empire at the time.

It is a rather odd notion that Latin is necessary for salvation, no one has ever claimed that. Having a liturgical language is common though.

Sadly, roman catholicism spends more time on the Latin than the Kione. If they focused on the latter it would aid in an understanding of the Word.

40 posted on 06/21/2016 10:51:39 AM PDT by ealgeone
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To: ealgeone
Sadly, roman catholicism spends more time on the Latin than the Kione. If they focused on the latter it would aid in an understanding of the Word.

That's "Koine" Greek, not "Kione". I studied both Koine and Classical Greek at the Catholic university I attended. Actually, Roman Catholicism draws heavily from native Greek-speaking theologians called the Greek Fathers, along with Latin-speaking theologians who knew Greek such as St. Augustine and St. Jerome. As for why we spend time in Latin, there are several good reasons for that. One is that Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, and our liturgy preserves the liturgy practiced in the 1st century when Peter and Paul were in Rome and spoke Latin. (We also include a few Greek phrases in our liturgy, for instance when we say the Kyrie.) Another reason we spend time on Latin is because many of the oldest preserved complete NT manuscripts (as well as many of the oldest manuscripts of secular Greek authors such as Homer) are in Latin, not Greek, and often when we do have Greek fragments as counterparts, it turns out the Latin is often closer to the original than some Greek versions. (A parallel case is true of the OT with respect to Greek translations of the OT often being closer to the original than Hebrew versions, due to some peculiarities of the history of the OT Hebrew and Greek traditions.) A third reason is that many of the best ancient and medieval Scriptural commentators and theologians wrote in Latin, which was the dominant language for many centuries.

42 posted on 06/21/2016 2:34:20 PM PDT by Fedora
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