The linguistic problem of spreading of christianity

Abstract

The spreading of Christianity to the areas where Albanian is spoken today was a double-faceted process. On one hand there was a new way of looking at the world and man, essentially different from the pagan belief since antiquity in these regions, being with it new institutions, rites and practices unknown before, including different clothes and calendars being accompanied by an art of construction, painting, music, and decoration. On the other hand, all of these novices demanded their linguistic expression, namely lexis, syntax structure and ways of text developing, as the resistance of a religion is essentially a linguistic existence. Therefore, one may say that in the first centuries AD our areas too faced a big and complicated problem that can be called in brief as Christianity as a new language. Christianity reached Albania from the West. It was preached in Latin in the beginning so that the earliest layer of church terminology was borrowed from Latin. Christianity in Albania spread after the 3"* century AD. Objects of religious Christian cult in Albania are no older than the 4th century.