Book Description

The aim of this book is to make the Gospel of John accessible simultaneously to intermediate students of Ancient Greek and Latin. There are lots of resources available for the study of John's gospel, particularly in Greek, but this edition juxtaposes the Greek text to one of its most famous translations: the rendering into Latin by St. Jerome known as the vulgate. The running vocabulary and grammatical commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page, so that readers can progress through the text, improving their knowledge of Greek and/or Latin while reading one of the key texts of early Christianity. For those who know both Greek and Latin, it will be possible to use one language as a resource to read the other. Meanwhile, the vulgate is a key index of how the Greek text was understood by early Christians in the Latin west. The Gospel of John is a great text for intermediate readers of both Greek and Latin. It is one of our best examples of koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries after the time of Alexander the Great. The sentence structure is very simple and there is a great deal of repetition in vocabulary and syntax. The Latin translation follows the Greek closely, translating word for word as much as possible, so that it is a fascinating exercise in translation.