ABSTRACT
Sibboleth? Shibboleth? Pronunciation matters, as the Ephraimite spies found to their cost in Judges 12.1 And vocabulary matters too. Augustine pointed out how the Christian, as opposed to the philosopher, had to speak ad certam regulam.2 From the start Christians felt the need to confess, to cry out Christianus sum and be countedand to recognize one another.3 They also had to negotiate a strange, authoritative, and constantly-to-be-cited book whose language was distinctive at best, substandard and obscure at worse. Even in the second century ad there were authors who bellowed their Christianity and their Bible.4 But until Christianity became the norm, Christiansin-the-making and Christians who needed to communicate with literate nonChristians had to tread carefully around obviously Christian and biblical speech. This
* This piece was written at the same time as I was preparing “Interpreting the Consolation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. John Marenbon (Cambridge 2009) 228-254. There is some necessary overlap between my discussions of Boethius and the Bible here and his Christianity there. I would like to thank the members of my Fall 2006 seminar on the Consolation for their patience, Howard Jacobson, as always, for his advice and scholarship, and Ralph Mathisen, for always keeping me on track. On 17 June 2008 Henry Chadwick died. This piece is dedicated to his memory. He was for 30 years a mentor, and my guiding light in Boethian studies.
