18-i Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



Germanic nations came into possession of this word, but Ec- 

 clesiastical History alone. Of the attempts to account for the 

 introduction of " church^'' if derived from xupco:/.6v, I mention 

 the most important. Of. Grimnj's German Dictionary, Vol. V., 

 791 seqq., and Smith's 'Bible. Diet. I, 452. 



Jacobson, in his Church liistory, is of the opinion that this 

 word had been introduced into Germany by British missiona- 

 aries, either by the Anglo-Saxon Winfrith, or by the mission- 

 aries who had come before him from Brittany, who were how- 

 ever Celts. The Anglo-Saxons never came in direct contact 

 with the Greek church ; only an indirect contact may have 

 taken place through the Celts of Brittany, who must have re- 

 ceived their first missionaries from Asia Minor or from Gaul, 

 where the churches at Lugdunum and Vienna had been 

 planted by missionaries from Asia Minor. But this theory is 

 not supported by the fact, that the Celts themselves have only 

 Latin words: Ir. teampall, domhnach ; Kymr. te7nl ; Gael. 

 eaglais, eglwi/s, Bret His, His, i. e. ecclesia. In the Kymr. law 

 of the 10. century we find ecluys. Old Cornish, eglos.* The 

 introduction of the word into Germany by Winfrith, as men- 

 tioned above, is impossible, since we find, before his appear- 

 ance in Germany, names of places compounded with it, e. g. 

 in Alsace (a. 718) Chiricunvillare, a. o. For similar names of 

 places in England see Taylor's " Words and Places." 



The Greek influence can have made its way only from ihe 

 south, and a considerable time before the mastery of the Latin 

 <}hurch. But Ecclesiastical History is silent about such a far 

 reaching Greek influence. Still it might have come from the 

 lower Danube, where some Goths had been brought to the 

 knowledge of Christ by Greek missionaries from Constantino- 

 ple, since the 3d century; or from the river Rhone, across the 

 upper Rhine. The Bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, a Greek of the 



*Roinaa influence, however, had entered into England, even before the 

 landing of Roman missionaries, for Ninias, the apostle of the southern 

 Picts, had been educated at Rome, and died early in the fifth century. 



