What Greek Testimony Can Offer

The phrase Greek Testament can suggest the attraction of this project: perhaps Greece has something to tell us about an ancient world also remembered in Scripture. It can also suggest an authority that Greek literature does not possess. We need to be clear about the difference.

For a Catholic reader, the Old and New Testaments belong to the Church's received Scripture. Greek epic, family legend, and accounts of the gods belong to the history of human testimony. They can tell us what communities believed and how they remembered their origins. Whether they also preserve a memory of real events must be considered story by story.

The distinction does not make Greek literature unimportant. A fallible witness may know something that another witness leaves unmentioned. A tradition can contain insight even where it also contains error. Reading Homer or Hesiod seriously therefore need not mean giving either poet the authority of revelation.

Christian faith receives its account of God through revelation, fulfilled in Christ. Greek stories cannot add another creator beside him or revise the nature of angels to accommodate a heroic genealogy. Their value here lies in the questions they raise about memory, worship, ancestry, and encounters with powers beyond humanity.

We will use Greek testimony in that sense throughout the book. The phrase Greek Testament, where it appears, names an analogy. The task remains to discover what the testimony can bear.