ABSTRACT
Greek Christians of the Late Antique period had a highly ambivalent relationship with their language. While they relied on it in their quest for an unequivocal definition of the Christian faith, they were at the same time only too aware of its slipperiness, which made it all but impossible to control the meanings of words. The term theotokos, on the other hand, did exactly that: by asserting that Jesus' human mother Mary 'gave birth to God' it expressed in the most concise form possible the teaching of the communication of idioms, i.e. the process by which the human and divine natures in Christ exchanged their defining qualities. This chapter attempts to show how judicious use of such techniques could achieve the ambiguation of the conventional meaning of the term theotokos, 'God-bearer'. However, if parechesis implies a link in content between the corresponding elements, such a link should exist between diadoche and the whole compound theotokos.
