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To Koine Phrase

The Greek of the New Testament

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.

The Language of the New Testament


It would be outside the province of this book to discuss the detailed development of the
Greek language from Homeric to modern Greek, but the lesson is plain that Greek, as it
spread over the civilized world, developed into a language of abiding importance. The
conclusion now universally accepted by philologists is that the Greek of the New
Testament, in all essential respects, is the vernacular Koine of the first century A.D., the
common language of the Roman imperial period.
Koine () means common in the sense of pertaining to the public at large. Hence
Koine Greek means the language commonly spoken everywherethe basic means of
communication of people throughout the Roman Empire. This dialect was basically the
late Attic vernacular, spoken in Athens, with dialectical and provincial influences. The
Koine has left, in addition to the Greek New Testament, other literary monuments that are
invaluable sources of light on the sacred text, including the papyri, inscriptions, and
above all the Septuagint, the ancient version of the Old Testament that became the Bible
of the early church and was used extensively by the New Testament writers.
Koine Greek itself exhibits three important characteristics. The first, semantic change,
is a natural feature of any living language. Often certain words simply weakened their
meaning in the Koine period. For example, the verb meant babble in Classical
Greek, but in the New Testament it appears as the ordinary word for speak. In the New
Testament the preposition can mean in as well as into. The conjunction , as we have
seen, has a much wider meaning than in order that (it is often used in content clauses). The
tendency to use the comparative degree of the adjective for the superlative has also been
noted.
In the second place, Koine Greek exhibits greater simplicity than Classical Greek. This is
seen particularly in the composition of its sentences, which tend toward coordination
rather than subordination of clauses. In morphology it has a clear tendency toward
simplification. This is perhaps most noticeable in the fact that the old -verbs are steadily
being replaced by -verbs (e.g., is competing with ). In addition,
periphrastic tenses are on the rise, and the optative mood is disappearing. The future
tense of infinitives and participles hardly occurs at all.

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).

New Testament Semitisms


The special case of Revelation raises the larger issue of possible Semitic influences in
the language of the Greek New Testament. No one who knows Hebrew or another Semitic
language could fail to be impressed by the Semitic tone and flavor of the New Testament
and by its adoption of Semitic modes of speech. For example, the expression he opened
his mouth at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:2) cannot be interpreted
solely in the light of Greek grammar but must also be read in the light of Semitic language
patterns, since the phrase indicates the beginning of some profound or solemn
pronouncement (cf. Job 3:1). Another example is the very common ,
answering, he said. No Greek person of any period would say or write
any more than you or I would say He answered and said unless we were seeking to
imitate biblical language. These are but two indications that the New Testament cannot be
interpreted solely in terms of Greek grammar but must also be studied in terms of its
Semitic background.
The occurrence of Semitisms in the New Testament can be attributed to four basic
causes. First, by the time the New Testament was written, Koine Greek had already
absorbed many Semitic words and idioms that were in use by Greek writers who knew no
Hebrew or any other Semitic language. Second, all the New Testament writers, with the
possible exception of Luke, were Jews whose usual language of speech was Aramaic or
Hebrew and who had a considerable knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. Third, these writers
consciously modeled themselves after the style of the Greek version of the Old Testament,
the Septuagint, which often gives a literal translation of the original Hebrew. Finally, it is
possible that the New Testament writers incorporated oral or written sources that were
translations of Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek and that contained Semitisms in proportion
to the literalness of the translation. Thus, it would be surprising if speakers whose

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.

For Further Reading


Robertson 49139
Dana and Mantey 115
BDF 16
Zerwick 16164
Wallace 1230

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