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To Koine Phrase
tarting in May of 334 B.C., Alexander, the 22-year-old king of Macedon, led his
victorious army through four pitched battles, two sieges, and innumerable smaller
engagements that enabled him to conquer territory that now goes under the names of
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Reaching the
banks of the Beas River in Pakistan, he reluctantly turned back as his exhausted troops
threatened mutiny. Three years later, in 323 B.C., he died in Babylon, just as he was
planning an expedition all the way from Egypt along the North African coast to the
Atlantic.
Historians agree about the magnitude of his conquests and about one of its most
important effects: the establishment of a city-based Greek colonial aristocracy that
imposed its culture on the native peoples in what we know today as the Middle East. But
about the motives and character of the young man who carried out this tremendous
enterprise there has been continual controversy. On the one hand, he has been credited
with a belief in and a policy of establishing the brotherhood of mankind. On the other
hand, his expedition has been dismissed as utter folly, and scholars have compared him to
a young Nazi let loose on the world, a visionary megalomaniac serving the needs of his
own all-consuming ego.
In his short lifetime he defied the limits set on human achievement by the gods; after
his death, he became the stuff of legend. Contrary to popular belief, Alexander did not
burn the Persian kings great palace at Persepolis during a drunken stupor. He did indeed
burn the palace, but it was in retaliation for the Persians desecration of Greek temples
during the Persian invasion of Greece, not as the result of a drunken escapade. On the
other hand, the story of his taming of the wild horse Bucephalus, the horse he later rode
all the way to Pakistan, is based on solid historical evidence.
There is, however, one aspect of Alexanders saga on which all historians are in
agreement: he had, as has been said of the Germans, a genius for warfare. From childhood
he had been trained for it as a member of the corps of royal pages. Later, at the ripe old
age of sixteen, he suppressed a tribal revolt in Macedon while his father Philip
campaigned abroad. Two years later he led the famous cavalry charge that delivered the
decisive blow to the Greek forces at Chaeronea, thus making Philip the master of Greece.
And at the age of twenty-two, now king after Philips assassination, he moved with
astounding speed to defeat the Getae on the Danube far to the north and then swept south
to suppress a revolt of the Greek cities led by the city of Thebes, which he destroyed. In
the great pitched battles that followed, in a swift maneuver through the awesome
mountains of Afghanistan, and in the complicated siege operations at Tyre and Gaza, his
courage in the vanguard of his troops (he was wounded six times) made him ,
invincible, the word the Sibyl at Delphi screamed at him and which he adopted as an
official title.
After the defeat of the Persian kings last army at Gaugamela in 331 in what is now Iraq,
and after the death of Darius shortly afterward, Alexander faced a crucial choice between
two policies. He could have called a halt there and established a defensible frontier that
gave him control of the most fertile areas of the Persian Empire. Instead, he chose to press
on into unknown and fearsomely difficult terrain, most of it mountain or desert. This
decision was partly the result of his belief that the gods had decreed that he would be king
of all Asia. He had been taught by his tutor Aristotle that the land mass of Asia met the
encircling ocean not far east of where he was. Yet the sober political reality was that he
and his Macedonians, in an age when communications were no faster than a horse could
ride, could never effectively govern an empire as large as the one he had acquired. So he
appointed more and more high-ranking Persian officials to positions of influence on his
staff, encouraged intermarriage between Macedonians and Persians, and instituted a
program for training Persian boys for eventual service in the army. Measures such as
these did not sit well with some of his older generals, and growing resentment fueled
conspiracies against him.
When Alexander died, his empire broke up into separate kingdoms headed by his
disgruntled generals. But he had changed the world. In the old, now liberated cities of Asia
MinorEphesus and Pergamumas well as in the newly founded cities of the Middle
EastAntioch and Alexandriathe culture and language of the colonial aristocracy was
Greek. When three centuries after Alexanders death the life and teachings of Jesus of
Nazareth were written down, the language used was not Jesus native Aramaic but Greek,
which, thanks to Alexanders conquests, had become the cultural lingua franca of the
Mediterranean world.
Finally, Koine Greek shows unmistakable traces of a tendency toward more explicit
(some would say more redundant) expression. We see a preference for compound verbs
over simplex verbs, the use of pronouns as subjects of verbs, the use of prepositional
phrases to replace simple cases, a preference for instead of the infinitive, and the use
of direct rather than indirect discourse. Adverbs abound, as do parenthetical statements
and emphatic expressions such as each and every and the very same.
For the most part, the men who wrote the New Testament employed this common
language, and students of the New Testament would do well to study its characteristics in
detail. Like a new alloy, the Koine powerfully blended together the various Greek dialects
into a single language used by Greeks as well as non-Greeks. Even those who held
tenaciously to their native tongues, like the Egyptians, knew Greek.
At the same time, Koine Greek was not entirely uniform. Various literary levels existed,
depending on the writers background or education. In the first century A.D. some writers
even attempted to turn the clock back by advocating a return to the old classical form of
Greek, decrying the Koine as a debased form of the language. The artificial style they
produced (called Atticistic Greek) contrasted with the dialect of everyday life.
The New Testament itself reveals several styles of Greek among its authors. The Epistle
to the Hebrews, with its careful progression of argument and elevated diction, lies at one
extreme. Luke and Acts also reveal good, literary style, though the author is able to vary
his style considerably (cf. the colloquial Greek of Peters speech in Acts 15:711 with the
rhetorical nature of Pauls Areopagus speech in Acts 17:2231). Pauls Greek is more or less
colloquial, but that may be partly due to his amanuenses, the secretaries who wrote from
his dictation. At the other end of the spectrum lies the grammar of Revelation, which
reflects the work of a Semitic-speaking person who is just learning Greek (though many of
the idioms he uses have parallels in colloquial papyri texts).
linguistic background was Semitic did not betray some Semitic influence in their use of
Greek.
The most common Semitisms are the following:1
Word order. In Semitic languages the verb tends to come first in a sentence or clause,
and this tendency is also found in the New Testament (see Luke 1:5155; 1 Tim.
3:16).
Asyndeton. The absence of a conjunction where one might be expected is a feature
that is contrary to the nature of the Greek language. Most Greek sentences are
linked by a connecting particle and asyndeton is generally used for rhetorical effect
(see Acts 20:1735). The frequent use of asyndeton in the Fourth Gospel (see, for
instance, John 5:3) is best explained as the result of Semitic influence.
Coordination of clauses. In Classical Greek, sentences usually contained one main verb;
all other verbs tended to be subordinated in adverbial clauses of one kind or
another. Hebrew, on the other hand, tended to place main verbs side by side, joining
them together with a simple conjunction (waw, and). The constantly recurring and
() of the Gospels is certainly Semitic in flavor. This type of construction is most
characteristic of the Gospel of Mark, which has only a single instance of a longer
Greek sentence with subordinating participles (see Mark 5:2527).
Redundant pronouns. The Hebrew relative pronoun is indeclinable and genderless
and therefore requires a personal pronoun in the clause that follows. This has
influenced a few New Testament passages in which an unnecessary pronoun
appears after a relative pronoun (see, for example, Mark 7:25).
Redundant use of prepositions. A characteristic feature of Semitic usage is the
repetition of a preposition before every noun of a series that it governs. Such a
construction is intolerable in literary Greek, but it occurs no less than eleven times
in Mark alone (see, for example, Mark 3:78; 6:56; 11:1).
The use of the positive adjective for the comparative or superlative. Semitic
languages, with the exception of Arabic, have no special forms for the comparative
and superlative adjectives. Instead, the positive adjective is used, as reflected, for
example, in Mark 9:43: If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better
(, good) for you to enter life crippled than to have your two hands and to go to
hell.
Redundant use of saying. Indirect speech is unknown in biblical Hebrew. All speech
is recorded directly, whether the words recorded were the actual words spoken or
represent the general meaning of what was said. The Hebrew word most closely
corresponding to the Greek participle (saying) is used to introduce a
quotation. This idiom is well illustrated in Mark 8:28: And they said to him, saying. .
. . For other examples, see Matthew 23:12; 28:18; Luke 14:3; 24:67.
Introductory . The peculiar use of the Greek verb with another verb
often reproduces a closely corresponding Semitic idiom meaning so it was or it came
to pass. This Semitism appears far more frequently in Lukes writings than anywhere
else (Mark has only four instances). An example is Luke 2:6: And so it was, while
they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth.
Future indicative used as an imperative. The Hebrew verb form most closely
corresponding to the Greek future indicative is often used to express commands.
This construction has probably influenced a passage like Mark 9:35: Whoever
wants to be first, he will be last [= he must be last].
The use of . The particle (behold) is often used in the New Testament in
imitation of the corresponding Hebrew expression (see Matt. 1:20; 2:9; 3:16; Luke
1:20, 31, 36; Acts 12:7; James 5:9).
The meaning of words. Probably the most important influence exerted by the Semitic
languages on New Testament Greek is found in the meaning of certain theological
and ethical terms. One example is the Greek word , which is usually translated
law. The basic meaning of the word in Greek is custom or convention, for the Greeks
held that law was simply codified custom. But in the Septuagint the word is used as
the equivalent of the Hebrew term torah, which means instruction and was applied to
the Books of Moses, or the Law. Thus, when the New Testament writers wished to
speak of law, not in the sense of human convention but in the sense of Gods
revealed will, the noun lay ready at hand. Much the same happened with a
number of other words, including names and titles of divine beings, psychological
terms, and words denoting such theological concepts as righteousness, mercy, sin,
atonement, sacrifice, propitiation, and reconciliation. Thus the meaning of many
significant words in the New Testament cannot be found in the ordinary Greek
dictionary but must be sought against the background of the Hebrew Old Testament
and its Greek translation, the Septuagint.
Conclusion
Flying into Rome one day, the thought occurred to me that our Italian captain, piloting
an Alitalia jetliner that was landing at Da Vinci Airport, was required by international law
to speak, not Italian, but English with the tower.
Similarly, two thousand years ago Greek was the lingua franca of the civilized world,
the medium through which the apostles could communicate their message across the
length and breadth of the Mediterranean regions. Who but Providence could have enabled
the apostles to carry the message of Christ in one language and be understood wherever
they went? The conquests of Alexander had, it seems, a divine purpose after all.