What Is New Testament Greek? by Henry F. Brown

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · May 20, 1915

What Is New Testament Greek?

By Henry F. Brown

Its Origin and Its Relation to the Classical Greek

HENRY F. BROWN

Within two decades the New Testament Greek was regarded by scholars as related to the classical Greek much as we regard the speech of an uneducated backwoodsman of our day. It was called “bad” Greek, or vulgar or Hellenistic Greek. Biblical, Judaic, Hebraic, the language of the Holy Ghost, and various other epithets were used to distinguish it from the classical. But a complete revolution has been wrought by investigators in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. Moulton says: “Biblical Greek was long supposed to lie in backwater. It has now been brought out into the full stream of progress.” This same authority has taken issue with his father, an authority of the past generation, because of fresh evidence brought forward since 1895.

Many documents have been discovered relating to every department of life as it was in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ. Among these are legal papers, such as law reports, marriage settlements, contracts, and receipts; there are private documents, among which are letters between parents and children, and between friends. Then there are great quantities of commercial correspondence. Most of this is written on the papyrus tissue, and has been preserved in the dry climates of the East.

But in addition to this, quantities of the potsherd, or earthenware, used by the poorer classes as writing material have also been found. Here is represented the language of the lower classes. A single archeologist has translated over fifteen hundred pieces of this material. New Testament philology is at present undergoing a thorough reconstruction, and, says one authority, “Probably all concerned on both sides of the Atlantic are agreed that the starting point for the philological investigations regarding the New Testament must be the nonliterary papyri, ostraca, and inscriptions.”

In 1895 Professor Diesmann began to publish a series of dissertations on the comparison of this correspondence with the Greek in which the New Testament is written. He contended that the language of the New Testament was not an isolated dialect, peculiar to one class of writers, or even to one locality or race; but was simply the common vernacular of the Greco-Roman portion of the empire at the time of the apostles. This has since been called the koine, the Greek word for common or vulgar. This koine, or common speech of Christ’s time, is the Greek that Alexander scattered throughout Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, and which was fostered by his successors throughout the Alexandrine and Roman periods. There was a world speech, one common Greek language, as there was one common Greek culture. Men who aspired to literature wrote in an artificial dialect, described by Moulton as “a would-be rival of the language of Athens in her prime. But the writers of the New Testament, he adds, had little idea they were writing literature. The Holy Ghost wrote absolutely in ‘the language of the people.’”

This common language of the people, or the koine, as it is called, was without serious dialectic differences, except perhaps those due to pronunciation, being practically the same whether found in Egypt or Herculaneum, in Pergamum or Magnesia. It is found in inscriptions over the whole empire, having been in such common use that the Roman Senate translated decrees in it and scattered them to all parts of the country. It was spoken in Rome itself, so much so that one authority says that to live in Rome there was no necessity of knowing any other language. Paul wrote the epistle to the Romans in the koine, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his “Meditations” in this common speech of the time. Moulton says that in the first centuries of our era it was spoken by a far greater proportion of the civilized world than is the English today. The fact that it was used as the language of commerce means much. The Greeks were the school-teachers of the Roman Empire, and they taught in the koine, or the common language of the time. One writer thus forcefully expresses it: “It was an epoch in the history of the world when the Babylon of tongues was hushed in this wonderful language of Greece.”

The classic Greek was related to the koine, or common speech, about as Chaucer is related to our English of today. The classic was the ancient language, containing the poetry and the philosophy of the past, but was not used practically. It has been described as “an artistic language that everybody understood, but nobody spoke.” There were various dialects in the classic, Homer, Xenophon, Pindar, Sappho, Herodotus, and others each representing some peculiar dialect. These dialects were all blended in the koine. Under Alexander the mixture of nationalities in the newly rising communities demanded a common speech as a medium of intercourse, and the koine of the victorious Greeks was ready for the purpose. It became the speech of the empire; the weltsprache or lingua franca, says Moulton.

Robertson says, “The march of the Greek language has been steadily onward to the present day.” The koine was not the speech of Homer, nor is modern Greek the language of the koine, or the New Testament. He adds, “The New Testament stands in the center of development, the extremes of which are the classical Greek and the modern.”

An example of the practice of the universality of the koine is found in Acts 14. Paul here talks to the Lycaonians in the common language, the koine; and in the excitement that follows, the people lapse back into their native language, which is not understood by the apostles. The authorities differ on the point as to whether Christ’s public teaching was in the koine, but there is agreement that he was able to speak the Greek of his period, because he spoke to Pilate in some language common to both.

There was also a literary koine in that period, the same as we have today. We do not use the colloquial of everyday speech in our literature. Polybius and Josephus wrote in this literary koine. Moulton sums it up thus: “The conclusion is that Biblical Greek, except where it is translated Greek, was the simple vernacular of daily life. Words hitherto assumed to be Biblical, or technical words, are in reality normal first-century Greek; we have at last before us the language in which the apostles wrote. This is so clearly expressed by Glover (‘Conflict of Religions in the Early Empire’) that I quote him verbatim:—

“Towards the end of the first century of our era there began to appear a number of little books written in the ordinary Greek of everyday life, the language which the common people used in conversation and correspondence. It was not a literary dialect, which men of letters affected—a mannered and elaborated style modeled on the literature of ancient Greece and no longer a living speech. The books were not intended for a lettered public, but for the plain people who wanted a plain story, which they already knew, set down in a handy, readable form. . . . At an early date these books began to be called the Gospels.”

Classical Greek grammars of a generation ago, if they deemed the New Testament Greek at all worthy of notice, placed a few facts in the form of an appendix at the conclusion. Moulton says the Greek of the New Testament, or the koine, is coming into its own now, and having accorded to it the rightful independent dignity it deserves. Whole grammars devoted to it entirely are now obtainable.

Of what benefit, then, is the study of classical Greek to the understanding of the New Testament? The same value as the study of Chaucer or Wyclif would be to one wishing to learn English today. It will aid greatly in the etymology of many words; but the New Testament gives, many times, a different meaning to a word than is used in the classical, as well as uses many words that do not occur at all in the ancient Greek. There is no necessity of studying the classical Greek to understand the New Testament, as the two epochs in the development of the language are too remotely connected.

Washington (D. C.) Missionary College.