ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews Alexander Kazhdan's rhetorical question on its head by focusing exclusively on Greek Christian literature written outside the immediate environs of Constantinople and Asia Minor. It devotes sustained attention, diachronically and synchronically, to the social presence of Greek among the cultures and institutions of 'eastern Christianity', that is, groups of Christians whose primary language was not Greek, but who interacted with Greek to one degree or another. The interplay between the Greek literature written in the East and that written in Constantinople is one of the most interesting aspects of the history of Byzantine Greek, there is no denying that Constantinople mattered to the Greek of 'eastern Christianity'. The intellectuals and writers of eastern Christianity in Late Antiquity and Byzantium (here defined as c. 200-1200 CE) very often knew Greek, even if it was often not their native language.
