In this chapter, I argue that the expression “God is one” in Greek emerges later than some of the current scholarship supposes. I suggest that the expression is first attested, not among the Presocratic philosophers, but in Hellenistic Jewish pseudepigrapha. But the idea finds its first clear theological explication in the works of Philo of Alexandria. Yet speculations about divine unity and transcendence immediately led Philo into a philosophical quandary that has not been resolved two thousand years later. How can a God who is one and transcendent interact with a material world that is immanent and diverse? Philo endeavors to solve this problem by means of divine agents that he refers to as “Words” and “Powers.” But in so doing, he creates the potentially more serious problem of the relationship of the highest of these divinities with God, a problem that continued to trouble Jewish thinkers throughout history.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.