Il latino come lingua di traduzione dal greco: note sulle lettere cristiane dei primi secoli

This work examines the Latin translation of the First Epistle to the Corinthians written by Clement of Rome, which is one of the first Christian texts spread in the Western Roman world, together with the New Testament versions of the so-called Vetus Latina. The Epistle shows some peculiar features of Christian Latin of the first centuries: the adaptation of a genre, the epistle, and its remodeling through the purposes linked to the diffusion of the Christian creed.
The analysis focuses on some linguistic traits of the Clementine epistle to illustrate the nature of this text and some characteristic features of the Latin translation: the opening, some forms of dialogical deixis, and the lexeme obaudio ‘to obey’.
The Latin translation of the Epistle of Clement proves to be an exceptional witness in various aspects: on the textual level, it provides evidence for a new genre, the Christian epistle, which is also a meeting point between writing and orality, between exegetical and normative texts. On the cultural side, it shows the transfer of the new doctrine in different languages, keeping traces of the cultural contents and traits of the languages that had conveyed it, as Hebrew and Greek.