do you celebrate?

FrankS said:
Forgive me if this sounds cynical, but I believe that the early Christian church manipulated things to make itself necessary, by creating a distance and disconnect between God and the people. The priests made themselves necessary for people to commune and communicate with God. This ensured their privaledged position in society. Making the language of church Latin, which no one but priests and the most educated nobility could write or speak, was one way to do this.
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This is my first post on the forum... I just joined and have been reading various threads... was going to start with camera questions, but the Medievalist in me (grad school drop out) hates to leave something like this floating around. So forgive me for being pedantic.

First as a Catholic, I don't believe that priests are there to commune and communicate with God for us. They do spread his word, and minister his sacraments, but I can communicate with God directly through prayer.

Now, as for Latin, with respect, when Latin became the universal Language of the Western Church, it was because it was the universal language of the Western Roman Empire. The common people of the Western Empire did in fact speak Latin (There is a reason not much celtic made it into the Romance Languages, despite it being the native tongues of Gaul, Iberia and Britain). The Latin Bible is called the Vulgate because it was written in the Vulgar (common) Latin that was widely spoken as opposed to the highly stylized Latin of the educated classes. The only groups that probably had limited knowledge of Latin were the Germanic peoples, and they were mostly Arian or pagan. As the Romance Languages started to diverge from Latin, they were not yet written languages, so the texts of the liturgy, theology and the Bible all remained in Latin. By the time the Latin went from merely sounding archaic to being a different language, well, the pattern for the Western Church was set.

The Church became important not because of any direct manipulation, but because they remained the only institution in the West to survive the fall of the Western Empire.

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Bill
 
Bill, you should be right at home here -- the joint is jumpin' with medievalists. We argue fine points of lenses and films, and engage in all manner of insanely medieval hairsplitting. :) There's also the Great Schism: the analog/digital divide.

A hearty welcome to you!
 
Bill, that was very interesting, I wondered if it was some reason like that given that much of the New Testament was written in a form of Greek. My father decided to learn it for a bit of fun and has said it sheds a completely different light on a lot of passages.
Any how welcome.
 
In light of the amount of poverty that exits in the world and the "mission statement" of religious institutions like (but not limited to) the catholic church, the wealth of these religious institutions is obscene. IMO
 
al1966 said:
Bill, that was very interesting, I wondered if it was some reason like that given that much of the New Testament was written in a form of Greek. My father decided to learn it for a bit of fun and has said it sheds a completely different light on a lot of passages.
Any how welcome.
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Well Greek is another question. Greek was the most common language spoken in the eastern half of the Empire and during the first century it was also common amongst educated men in the Western Empire. By the time Christianity became the dominant religion of the Empire, the western half of the Empire was in serious decline (culturally if not quite yet militarily), so most literate citizens of the Western Empire could no longer read Greek. Hence Saint Jerome and his translation of the Bible from the original sources (Curiously enough the Greek Church continued to rely on the Septuigant for their version of the Old Testament).

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Bill
 
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