You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Reynolds Price, and it's a special occasion.

Reynolds Price has translated two of the Gospels in his book,

three Gospels recently published by Scribner.

Now you are translating from the colloquial Greek.

From the colloquial or coinay Greek, which for several centuries,

from about the third century, BC until the third or fourth AD,

was effectively the commercial free market language of the Mediterranean basin.

Alexander the Great spread it around the Mediterranean, and the Romans, interestingly,

for all their self-assurance and egotism, never felt it necessary to impose Latin upon

their provincial captors. They were perfectly happy to conduct business with them in Greek.

I think even increasing numbers of 20th century scholars suspect that Jesus himself,

born a rural Jew in Galilee, may nonetheless have spoken a fair amount of this sort of common

market Greek of his time.

Now, we don't know, in fact, whether Jesus spoke Greek or Aramaic, I believe.

It would seem a certainty that he spoke Aramaic as probably, certainly the, his birth language,

the language of his parents, his family, in a small northern village,

largely a village of rural poor people, Aramaic being a sort of Middle Eastern dialect,

...