Mathetai (autou) and Luke's concern for the sound of his Gospel

Abstract

The purpose of this note is to affirm the importance of "sound" to the study of Luke. As is common knowledge, the purely quantitative rhythm of Hellenistic Greek gradually declined after the first century, and was replaced by the Bysantine system of stress and meter similar to our own language rhythm. Because of this change, we have no natural understanding of Hellenistic Greek as it actually sounded, and can only form a mental notion of its recitation. But in practical terms, such a rational reconstruction is only useful in the case of poetic recitation, where the same metric units are regularly repeated - something, by the way, looked upon unfavourably for prose writing by Aristotle.