[B-Greek] "Jesus Loves Me" in Greek

Mark Lama markosl80 at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 26 19:49:56 EDT 2004





Ted Shoemaker <tedsmath at yahoo.com> wrote: 

....Or, if this would be easier, perhaps someone can refer me to another
sample of ancient Greek poetry with a more obvious meter.




Given our current discussion of ancient Greek hymns, I thought some on the list might be interested in this hymn I recently uncovered on a forgotten piece of papyrus (as early as the second century?). Amazingly enough, it appears to fit to the tune of "Jesus Loves Me." (!) The text, as far as it can be reconstructed, appears below:

AGAPAi ME ALHQWS,

hH GRAFH GAR LEGEI MOI,

TOIS MIKROIS ESTI CRHSTOS,

ASQENEIS DECOMENOS,

NAI, AGAPAi ME,

NAI, AGAPAi ME,

NAI AGAPAi ME

IHSOUS hO KURIOS

Not good poetry by any standards, and DEFINITELY not an "early Christian hymn", but I thought this translation or paraphrase might interest a few of you homeschoolers out there. :-) The meter of course is stress-based as in Modern Greek. In fact this sounds better with a modern or nearly modern pronunciation. (personally, I like Randall Buth's phonemic Koine system) You will note that because the stressed beats in the song occur more frequently than accented syllables in Greek, I was inevitably forced to put some unstresses syllables in beat positions, like the first syllables of AGAPAi and ALHQWS. I have tried to mitigate the effect of this by keeping them on syllables on which it seems natural to put a secondary stress, at least to us native English speakers. If in so doing I am murdering the Greek, at least I am not doing worse than what, say, Bernard of Clairvaux did to Latin in his Latin hyms. 

B-Greek on!

Mark Lama



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