Imagine picking up a book that presents itself as the inspired word of God and finding it written in “Ebonics.” He was teachin’ the folk down by the water, and he tell ’em, “Don’t be worryin’ ’bout tomorrow.” For a reader raised to equate seriousness with “proper” English, the instinct is to flinch before the meaning has even registered. The words feel too casual, too low, too far from the dignity the subject seems to demand. This is probably how the Gospels struck the educated readers of the Roman world.
For those readers, how a thing was written was inseparable from whether it deserved to be believed. The Gospels arrived speaking the wrong dialect, breaking the rules of good composition, and framing the loftiest imaginable subject in what they deemed as undignified speech. To the trained ear, this was not a small matter of taste. It was a scandal—one the earliest Christians felt keenly, argued about, and eventually turned to their advantage.
A civilization that worshipped style
To understand the offense, one has to reconstruct the value system it offended. Greco-Roman elite culture was built on paideia, a lifelong formation in language and letters that certified a person as civilized. Its foundation was the grammatikos, the schoolmaster who drilled students in correct speech, and its summit was rhetoric, the art of persuasive and beautiful expression. A man’s prose was a passport. It signaled his birth, his schooling, and his fitness to be heard in public life.
That culture had also developed a precise doctrine about the relationship between style and subject: the principle of decorum, expressed in the theory of the three levels of style—high, middle, and low. Grand subjects demanded grand language; humble subjects took humble words; to mismatch them was a fault as visible as a false note. Educated readers were trained to detect two categories of error in particular. A barbarism was a fault in a single word; a solecism was a fault in the way words were combined. Spotting them was second nature to anyone who had passed through the schools.
By the first and second centuries this literary self-consciousness had, if anything, intensified. The movement modern scholars call the Second Sophistic prized a revival of pure Attic Greek—the polished idiom of Athens’ classical age, the Greek of Demosthenes, Plato, and Thucydides. Writers strained to imitate authors four centuries dead. Against this backdrop of studied refinement, a text written in ordinary contemporary Greek looked provincial before it had made a single argument.
What the Gospels actually sounded like
The Gospels were not written in that prestige idiom. They were written in Koine, the common Greek of the marketplace, the army, and the street—serviceable, widely understood, and utterly without literary pretension. Worse, from the elite point of view, their Greek carried the audible interference of a Semitic substrate. The narratives move forward by parataxis, stringing clauses together with an endless drumbeat of “and”—the Greek kai—where a cultivated writer would have subordinated, balanced, and varied. Hebrew and Aramaic idioms are rendered woodenly into Greek. The vocabulary is small; the sentences are short; the periodic architecture that marked good prose is largely absent.
The individual books differ, and the differences are telling. Mark’s Greek is the roughest and most colloquial, full of redundancy and a restless use of the present tense to narrate past events. Matthew is somewhat smoother. John uses a strikingly small vocabulary and simple syntax to carry ideas of great depth. Luke is the most self-consciously literary of the four, and he shows it: his Gospel opens with a single, carefully balanced periodic sentence in the manner of Hellenistic historians, a deliberate bid for respectability—before he modulates into a plainer, scripture-flavored style for the narrative itself. And then there is Revelation, whose Greek is so grammatically anomalous, with nominatives standing where other cases are required, that ancient and modern readers alike have puzzled over whether its author could write correctly at all.
To a reader raised on Demosthenes, the cumulative impression was of unschooled speech. The texts even admitted as much about their own protagonists. Acts describes the leading apostles as “unlettered and ordinary men,” using the very words—agrammatoi, idiotai—that named the uneducated. The movement’s own scriptures conceded that its founders stood outside the world of letters.
The pagan verdict: bad prose, doubtful truth
Cultured opponents did not miss the opening. The sharpest surviving example is Celsus, a pagan intellectual who, around 178, wrote a comprehensive attack on Christianity called The True Word. His treatise survives only because Origen quoted it at length two generations later in order to refute it, but through that hostile transmission Celsus’s disdain comes through clearly. He mocked the movement’s social lowliness—its appeal to wool-workers, cobblers, and laundrymen—and its origins among fishermen and tax collectors. The complaint was not merely snobbery about class; in the ancient equation, humble origin, defective education, and unpolished speech were of a piece, and together they discredited the message. A truth of cosmic importance, delivered in barbarous and ungrammatical prose by unlettered provincials, carried its own refutation on its surface. Style was credibility, and by that measure the Christians had none.
This is the pressure the earliest church lived under. Its most important texts violated the reigning canons of good writing, and the people best equipped to evaluate texts said so.
The first response: making a virtue of plainness
The initial Christian answer was not to apologize but to embrace the deficiency and reinterpret it. The template had been set before the Gospels were even written. Paul, addressing the Corinthians, insisted that he had come to them not with lofty speech or persuasive words of wisdom, precisely so that their faith would rest on divine power rather than on human eloquence. He turned the categories inside out: God had chosen the foolish and weak things of the world to shame the wise and strong. In this reading, rhetorical polish was not a missing virtue but a positive danger, because it would credit the persuader instead of the truth.
Origen, answering Celsus around the middle of the third century, developed the argument with more sophistication. The plainness of the scriptures, he contended, was deliberate and providential. Elaborate rhetoric would have restricted the message to the educated few; the unadorned style opened it to everyone, the simple and the learned alike. What looked like a defect was in fact a feature—accessibility purchased at the price of elegance, and a demonstration that the power lay in the content rather than the ornament.
This was a genuine intellectual maneuver, but it did not fully settle the discomfort, especially among converts who had themselves been formed by the classical schools and could not simply unlearn their taste.
The convert’s anguish: Augustine and Jerome
Two of the greatest minds of Latin Christianity felt the tension personally. Augustine records in the Confessions that when, as an ambitious young rhetorician fired by his reading of Cicero, he first turned to the scriptures, he was repelled. Compared with the dignity of Ciceronian prose, the sacred text struck him as unworthy—crude, beneath the notice of a cultivated man. He would spend much of his intellectual life coming to terms with, and then transfiguring, that first recoil.
Jerome’s version of the crisis is even more vivid. The finest Latinist of the early church, steeped in the classics, he was tormented by his own love of pagan style. In a famous letter, he describes a fever dream in which he is dragged before the divine judge and asked to account for himself. When he claims to be a Christian, the judge retorts that he lies: Ciceronianus es, non Christianus—”You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian.” Jerome awoke and vowed to abandon his pagan books. He never entirely kept the vow, but the dream captures exactly the wound the style problem inflicted on the educated believer, who could not honor his scriptures and his schooling at the same time.
The remedy that mattered: a new theory of eloquence
The deepest Christian solution did not try to fix the Gospels’ style. It redefined what eloquence was.
Augustine supplied the theory in his De Doctrina Christiana, arguing that Christian expression possessed its own dignity, one measured not by conformity to Cicero but by its fitness to convey saving truth. Out of this reorientation grew what the twentieth-century critic Erich Auerbach labeled the sermo humilis, the “humble style”—a manner of writing that deliberately broke the classical rule separating high subjects from low language. Where decorum demanded that the sublime be treated sublimely, Christianity insisted on treating the most exalted matter imaginable, the divine entering history, in the plainest human speech.
The move was not merely tolerated as a necessity; it was theologized as a fittingness. The mixing of the lofty and the lowly mirrored the central Christian claim itself: that the eternal Word had taken on ordinary flesh, that God had appeared not as a philosopher-king but as a carpenter’s son among fishermen. A style that joined the highest content to the humblest form was, on this understanding, the incarnation rendered as literature. The blemish had become a signature. What the schools condemned as a violation of decorum, the church claimed as the appropriate voice of a God who had chosen humility.
Auerbach argued that the consequences reached far beyond religion. By dissolving the ancient wall between elevated and everyday registers, the sermo humilis made it possible, over the long span of European literature, to treat common life with full seriousness—an inheritance he traced forward into the realist tradition. The stylistic scandal of the Gospels, in this account, seeded a revolution in how the West could write about human beings at all.
The other remedy: dressing scripture in classical robes
Alongside this profound revaluation ran a more straightforward impulse: if the content was embarrassing in its native dress, one could re-clothe it in the prestige forms of the age. As Christianity gained educated adherents in the fourth and fifth centuries, a genre of biblical epic emerged to do exactly that.
The Spanish priest Juvencus, around 330, recast the Gospel narrative as a Latin epic in Virgilian hexameters, effectively narrating the life of Christ in the meter and manner of the Aeneid. In the Greek East, Nonnus of Panopolis, a virtuoso poet who also composed a sprawling epic on the god Dionysus, produced a paraphrase of the Gospel of John in ornate Homeric hexameters, translating the plainest of the four Gospels into the grandest available idiom. Others followed—Sedulius with his Carmen Paschale, Arator versifying the Acts of the Apostles—each pouring the scandalously humble material into forms that any cultivated reader would recognize as literature of the first rank. These works were, in part, an answer to Celsus: proof that the Christian story could hold its own in the meters of Homer and Virgil.
Translation belonged to the same project. Jerome’s Latin Bible, the version that became the Vulgate, negotiated a careful path between fidelity to the sacred text and the demands of respectable Latin, giving the West a scripture that was accurate without being contemptible to educated ears.
The paradox
What began as a liability ended as an identity. The earliest Christians could not deny that their scriptures failed the literary tests of their world, and for a culture that read style as a measure of truth, that failure was a real and painful vulnerability. Their responses ran along two tracks that were less contradictory than they appear. Some dressed the content in classical splendor, making it acceptable on the world’s terms. Others—more radically, and more lastingly—refused the world’s terms altogether, declaring that the humble style was not a defect to be excused but the fitting garment to distinguish the sincere from the pompous.
The second answer proved the more consequential. The very quality that educated Romans marked as a blemish, the joining of the sublime to the ordinary, was reconceived as a theological principle and eventually reshaped the literary imagination of the West. The fishermen’s Greek that once disqualified the Gospels in the eyes of the schools became, in time, the source of a new and durable idea about what serious writing could be.
How language shapes the message
This reflex is not peculiar to Rome, nor to Christianity. Across the Abrahamic scriptures, the relationship between a message and the tongue that carries it recurs as a genuine obstacle for recipients—and it does not always take the same form.
Consider Moses. When he is sent to confront Pharaoh, he asks God to untie the knot in his tongue so that people may understand him (20:27–28). God, of course, already knows of Moses’s difficulty with speech. Yet the text also tells us that God made Moses under His watchful eye and fashioned him for Himself (20:39–41). This suggests that Moses’s speech was not merely an accidental limitation, but part of the test surrounding his mission.
Pharaoh, in turn, seizes on that limitation as an argument against him. He mocks Moses as a contemptible man who can scarcely make himself understood, contrasting Moses’s halting speech with his own status and authority (43:52). The messenger’s manner of speaking thus becomes part of the challenge posed to his audience: will they judge the truth of the message by the prestige and fluency of the person delivering it?
The Quran presents almost the inverse case. To its first audience—Arabs in a culture that placed extraordinary value on eloquence—the Quran’s style was itself part of its claim to authority. The text repeatedly challenges its detractors to produce something comparable, even a single chapter like it (2:23; 10:38; cf. 17:88). For an audience whose highest cultural art was the spoken word, eloquence could function not merely as ornament but as evidence. Islamic tradition accordingly preserves accounts of fierce opponents being shaken, or even disarmed, by the experience of hearing the Quran recited.
Yet the very eloquence that could serve as a sign within Arabia carried no automatic authority beyond it. To non-Arabic-speaking Jews, Persians, and Byzantines—communities with prestigious literary and imperial traditions of their own—Arabic possessed little of the cultural status it held among its native speakers. Arabs, meanwhile, could be stereotyped by their neighbors as peoples of the desert margins rather than heirs to an established high culture. What could sound like a divine signature to one audience sounded like the speech of camel-herders to another. The language that strengthened the Quran’s claim among Arabic speakers was a barrier to outsiders whose cultural prejudices would discount the message because of the language it came in, despite its literary excellence.
The Quran itself appears to anticipate a version of this problem. It imagines the objection that would arise had the revelation been delivered in a non-Arabic tongue: how could a scripture addressed to an Arabic-speaking audience arrive in a language they could not understand? (41:44). The broader lesson is the same in each case: a message is never received on content alone. It reaches its hearers through a language already burdened with judgments about prestige, education, ethnicity, and social rank—and therefore through judgments about the people who speak it.
