Tony Pope wrote: ↑March 8th, 2019, 12:44 pm
I have no expertise in this area but have read in more than one place that Christian writers in the centuries after the NT who were writing for an intellectual audience wrote in an atticized style. For example, Caragounis in his
The Development of Greek and the New Testament page 249 lists Athanasius with several other Greek Fathers, characterizing them as "Atticizing Christian authors" who "had received classical training and aimed at literary excellence."
Tony,
I distinctly recall recently reading comments[1] buy a 19th century scholar, Archibald Robertson or perhaps John Henry Newman, which compared Athanasius favorably to another church father. Athanasius' style was characterized as direct, lacking artificial qualities supposedly found in the imitators of Attic authors. Reading these comments caused some cognitive dissonance. Not sure what "Atticizing" looks like.
[1] Unfortunately I was unable to track down the source.
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Sample text:
§ 23.1 Εἰ δὲ καὶ χωρίς τινος νόσου καὶ χωρίς τινος ἀλγηδόνος, ἰδίᾳ που καὶ καθ' ἑαυτὸν ἐν γωνίᾳ, ἢ ἐν ἐρήμῳ τόπῳ, ἢ κατ' οἰκίαν, ἢ ὅπου δήποτε τὸ σῶμα κρύψας ἦν, καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα πάλιν ἐξαίφνης φανείς, ἔλεγεν ἑαυτὸν ἐκ νεκρῶν ἐγηγέρθαι· μύθους μὲν ἂν ἔδοξε λέγειν παρὰ πᾶσιν, ἠπιστήθη δὲ πολλῷ πλέον καὶ περὶ τῆς ἀναστάσεως λέγων, οὐκ ὄντος ὅλως τοῦ μαρτυροῦντος περὶ τοῦ θανάτου αὐτοῦ.
But even if, without any disease and without any pain, He had hidden His body away privily and by Himself "in a corner," or in a desert place, or in a house, or anywhere, and afterwards suddenly appeared and said that He had been raised from the dead, He would have seemed on all hands to be telling idle tales, and what He said about the Resurrection would have been all the more discredited, as there was no one at all to witness to His death.
Archibald Robertson 1891
Note the length and complexity of the conditional clause. The condition runs on lacking a finite verb until we reach τὸ σῶμα κρύψας ἦν followed by a second condition καὶ μετὰ ταῦτα ... ἐγηγέρθαι. While the structure is relatively straight forward it isn't simple.
C. Stirling Bartholomew