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Message:: [QUOTE="Gavin Richardson, post: 2714218, member: 83956"]I think that's a very good point. One must consider, however, the essentially conservative and text-based nature of the Roman middle and upper classes. Case in point: St. Augustine writes his Confessions ca. 400 A.D., and he tells us that in his boyhood (ca. 370) he practiced memorization exercises of the Aeneid, a work "published" in the late first-century B.C. The Aeneid did for Latin what the KJV would do for English or the Qur'an would do for Arabic: fix a very conservative linguistic standard. Even today people in the American South pray using "thee's" and "thou's." Why? The KJV. Canonical texts act as a brake on language change. The schoolboy Augustine studying in Roman North Africa in the late fourth century would be looking at the same Latin text a young emperor probably studied in first-century Rome. That might argue for a more conservative view of language than the "snapshot" metaphor might allow. The question for me is how koine Greek became a lingua franca for the ancient Mediterranean world without such a textual standard. When Pontius Pilate spoke to Jesus in the New Testament, I bet they conversed in Greek.[/QUOTE]