Turning from the range of the vocabulary to the significance of it, we are no longer in the region where mere numbers can tell the whole story. Words must be weighed rather than counted. The contact of Hebrew and heathen thought compelled the transfer of the conception of the Old Testament into a medium which, flex ible as it was, and finished as it had been, was yet a stranger to all those conceptions. Two fac tors were adapting the medium to its more ef fective use for Christ's own truth: the actual work of the translators of the Septuagint and that discussion of the relation of the Old Testa ment conceptions to philosophical dogmas which gave a broader, richer meaning to some of the Greek words afterwards to go into the New Tes tament.
These words had all their own meanings in classic Greek, but no dictionary of simple classic speech could define them. Take such a word as rreiiza, ftnyoo'mah. Professor Jowett tells us that "to have given a Greek in the times of Socrates a notion of what was meant by Holy Spirit would have been like giving the blind a conception of colors, or the deaf of musical sounds." That very word starts in the Old Testament with a conception entirely foreign to Greek thought.
This latter connects it always with its physi ological aspect wind, breath. As the expression of a psychological conception it is unknown in classic Greek. Of course the New Testament has deepened and more sharply defined the word, but the beginnings of the process are in the Old Testament. The word was carried over to a new sphere by the Septuagint. The deeply interest ing study of these changes is brought out in Cremer's great work, which deserves faithful usage by all New Testament students.
The center of philosophical discussion in Alex andria was the Museum. Here through all the years of the city's glory was carried on that de velopment, refinement and adjustment of thought which demanded a developed medium of expres sion. All philosophy in Alexandria had a deeply
theological interest, so much so that it has been denied that philosophy pure and simple could be heard there. Out of it all came the power to express in more significant forms the highest truths of which we are capable. It prepared the way for the "Logos," indeed, made that word familiar all about the Mediterranean.
It is to be noted that all that was serviceable for the New Testament was the vehicle of thought, not the thought itself. John's Logos differs from the Logos of Philo, but that John took a ter1.1 familiar in Alexandria and Ephesus is beyond doubt. Professor Jowctt's reflection upon the language of Philo will confirm what is meant : "As we read his works the truth flashes upon us that the language of the New Testament is not isolated from the language of the world in gen eral; the spirit rather than the letter is new, the whole, not the parts, the life more than the form. No study brings one more clearly face to face with the divine in this message from heaven to us than just this.
Such, in brief, is the part Alexandria had to take in helping toward the formation of the Greek of the New Testament. By reason of it she stands upon that line which begins in the days of Athens' glory and runs on through five hun dred years of varied Greek life. Even as con cerns the language in which the New Testament was written, had Christ come sooner than he actually did, the "medium" for his truth would not have been ready. The form in which we now have the New Testament belongs also to the "full ness of time." Alexandria had a definite mission in regard to that form. (See SEPTUAGINT). (Sec Alexandria and the New Testament, by J. S. Riggs, The A merican Journal of Theology.