06-03-2008, 07:45 AM
[p.117-118, Luke]
Luke???s language is certainly not the classical Greek of Attica, but it has a refinement about it which is not usual in a Hellenistic writer. His vocabulary is rich and often literary, his sentences polished and dignified; so when modern philologists declare his style superior to that of the other Evangelists, they agree in substance with St. Jerome, for whom Luke ???of all the Evangelists was the most skilled in Greek, by virtue of his being a physician???. There are traces of Semitic influence in construction and even in the choice of words, however, and these are especially numerous in the first two chapters which recount the infancy of Jesus, which would indicate that for these the author depended more exclusively on Semitic sources.
Luke???s language is certainly not the classical Greek of Attica, but it has a refinement about it which is not usual in a Hellenistic writer. His vocabulary is rich and often literary, his sentences polished and dignified; so when modern philologists declare his style superior to that of the other Evangelists, they agree in substance with St. Jerome, for whom Luke ???of all the Evangelists was the most skilled in Greek, by virtue of his being a physician???. There are traces of Semitic influence in construction and even in the choice of words, however, and these are especially numerous in the first two chapters which recount the infancy of Jesus, which would indicate that for these the author depended more exclusively on Semitic sources.