“Word sower” deserves reviving. It comes from the Douay-Rheims translation of Acts 17:18: “What is it, that this word sower would say?” The word sower in question is the Apostle Paul, visiting Athens. “Word sower” is a literal rendering of the Latin word seminiverbius, which was intended as a calque of the Greek word spermológos. For a thousand years and more, the Latin translation was a cherished honorific of Christian preachers, the sowers of God’s Word. The tradition goes back, through the Glossa Ordinaria and the commentaries of St. Bede and Cassiodorus, to a sermon preached by St. Augustine. Augustine’s Bible contained an earlier version of the Latin, seminator verborum, “sower of words,” which sent Augustine’s mind directly to the Parable of the Sower. As the sower in the parable scatters seed along the roadside, on rocky ground, and among thorns before finally finding good soil, so Paul preaches to the ridicule of the learned until he finds those few Athenians who “cleaved to him and believed” (17:34).
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