Koine Greek – Discovered as the New Testament Language in the 1890s
by Luther Martin
via Sentry Magazine, Vol. 21 No. 1, March 1995
It could be considered one of the most mysterious yet most important detective stories of ancient and modern times. The God of heaven had provided a collection of sixty-six separately written books, designed to instruct mankind in morally upright thought, speech, and action. This collection ultimately came to be known as ta biblia, “The Books.”
The Bible actually received its name from the Phoenician city of Byblos, whose fame and history antedated Tyre and Sidon. The purpose for which the Holy Scriptures were to be used by the human race is set forth in numerous Bible passages. We give only a few:
“From childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work” (II Timothy 3:15-17).
“For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope” (Romans 15:4).
“These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
“And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (John 20:30-31).
The Great Language Mystery?
There is no question or speculation as to the language in which the Old Testament was written. It was given to the Hebrew people in their own language. Essentially, the Old Testament is a record of God’s dealings with the tribe of people that developed into the nation from which Jesus, the anointed One, would be born. The Hebrew prophets foretold the coming of Christ, who would, from the fleshly standpoint, be a descendant of David. The Old Testament contains nearly four hundred prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah, which the New Testament describes as fulfilled in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The great mystery concerns the language in which the New Testament was originally written. In the late Middle Ages, German Bible Scholars who had been schooled in Classical Greek developed the idea that the New Testament had been written in a special “Holy Ghost Greek,” because they recognized that the Greek of the New Testament was not the Classical Greek of Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Plato, or Thucydides.
As late as 1851, a 23-year-old student of classical Greek set out to dethrone the Textus Receptus, and with it, the King James Version of the Bible. F.J.A. Hort mistakenly thought that the New Testament had been written in a poor quality of classical Greek, and therefore referred to it as “vile and villainous” as to style of language. He was not aware that the New Testament had been written in Koine Greek, which was the commonly spoken Greek of the 1st century A.D. Hort considered the Byzantine majority of Greek manuscripts to have been carelessly or poorly written, inasmuch as they did not measure up to the classical Greek in which he had been trained!
Parkhurst's Greek-English Lexicon - 1826
John Parkhurst was born in England in 1728. The first edition of Parkhurst’s Greek-English Lexicon was published in 1769. In his Preface to the first edition, Parkhurst speculates upon the Greek of the New Testament, noting that even at that date, there were textual critics who attacked the Greek New Testament text:
“Among the various attacks that have been, of late years, made upon divine revelation by open or disguised infidels, it is not to be wondered that the style of the inspired penmen of the New Testament has not escaped their malignity: and it must be owned that some well-meaning Christian writers have undesignedly contributed to propagate and confirm the notion of its barbarousness,...” (See Parkhurst’s Preface, pages viii - ix).
A Greek Lexicographer - Edward Robinson - 1861
Edward Robinson was one of the first lexicographers to suggest that koine was the Greek idiom in which the New Testament was written. This, however, would not be proven until Adolph Deissmann made his discoveries in the 1890s.
"In respect to the Greek, it should be borne in mind, that there are three great epochs which mark the progress of the language; through all or some of which, the different meanings and uses of a word can be traced with more or less distinctness. These are its youth, in the heroic or epic poems of Homer and Hesiod, with which may be joined the Ionic prose of Herodotus; its prime, in the palmy days of Attack elegance and purity, as exhibited in the great tragedians, and in the prose of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato; and its decline, after the Macedonian conquest, and still later under the Roman dominion. In this latter period, the breaking up of the various independent states, the mingling together in armies of soldiers enlisted from every quarter, and the founding colonies and large cities peopled with inhabitants fr om every part of Greece and also from foreign lands, could not fail to produce great changes in the language of different communities; which, by natural consequence, would speedily be reflected in the language of books. Thus was formed the later Greek idiom he koine dialektos, which every where superseded the pure Attic,...”
“The language of the New Testament is the later Greek language, as spoken by foreigners of the Hebrew stock, and applied by them to subjects on which it had never been employed by native Greek writers. The simple statement of this fact, suggest at once what the character of this idiom must be; and might, one would think, have saved volumes of controversy...” (Preface, page v).
Writer's Grammar of the New Testament Idiom - Joseph Henry Thayer's Edition - 1873
“When this Grammar first made its appearance, in 1822, the object proposed was to oppose the unbridled license with which the diction of the New Testament was then, and had long been, handled in commentaries and exegetical lectures...”
“It was high time that some voice should be raised against the inveterate empiricism of expositors, and that some effort should be made to emancipate the writers of the N.T. from the bondage of a perverted philology, which styled itself sacred and yet showed no the least respect towards the sacred authors and their well-considered phraseology...”
“The fundamental error — proton pseudos — of the Biblical philology and exegesis to which we refer, consisted ultimately in this, that neither the Hebrew nor the language of the N.T. was regarded as a living idiom (Herm. Eurip. Med., p. 401), designed to be used by men as the medium of intercourse. Had scholars deliberately inquired, whether those departures from the current laws of speech which were assumed to exist in the Bible in such prodigious multitudes, were compatible with the essential principles of a language intended for the ordinary purposes of life, they would not so arbitrarily have held every kind of anomaly to be permissable; and would not have delighted to attribute to the Apostles in almost every verse and enallage or a substitution of the wrong construction for the right.
“The older commentaries belonging to the period of the Reformation are comparatively free from such perversions; but when we read certain commentaries of the 18th and 19th centuries still current, we are constrained to conclude that the main characteristic of the language of the N.T. is a total want of precision and regularity. For these interpreters are continually showing how here a wrong tense is used, there a wrong case, here a comparative for a positive, there ho for tis, instead of for, consequently for because, on the other side for on this side (what for so Isa. viii 20). Such exegetical learning makes the reader quite impatient with the sacred writers for their ignorance of the ordinary principles of language. He cannot comprehend how such men in oral discourse, where this lawlessness of speech must certainly have been more conspicuous, could have made themselves understood even, much less how they could have won over to Christianity a great number of persons of education." (See Winer, Preface to the Sixth Edition, 1855, p. v-vi).
Philip Schaff - Translator - 1883
Philip Schaff waxed eloquent in his attempt to describe the language of the New Testament in 1883: after Westcott and Hort’s work, after the English Revised Version (1881), but before the discovery and analysis of the Egyptian Papyri by Deissmann; he wrote:
“The New Testament idiom consists of three elements, which we may compare with the three elements of man-- body, soul, and spirit. It has a Greek body, animated by a Hebrew soul, and inspired and ruled by a Christian spirit...”
“The NT in classical Greek might have been understood and appreciated by the learned few, but not by the masses of Jews and Gentiles...”
“During the seventeenth century there was much useless controversy between the ‘Purists,’ who defended the classical character of the New Testament Greek, and the ‘Hebraists,’ who pointed out its Hebraisms. Both parties ignored the necessity and beauty of its composite character for its cosmopolitan mission.” (A Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Revision, by Philip Schaff, President of the American Committee on Revision. 1883, London, Macmillan and Co., pages 26-27.)
Edgar J. Goodspeed - Translator - 1923
“The longer papyrus letters generally have an opening address or greeting, a thanksgiving and prayer, special contents, and closing salutations and valediction. These are exactly the main features which, in a more elaborate form, are found in the letters of Paul. [G. Milligan, The New Testament documents, their Origin and Early History, 1913, page 93]. Even more important is the fact that the language of the papyri is similar to that of the New Testament. Both the grammar and the vocabulary of the New Testament are strikingly different from classical Greek. Out of approximately 5,000 words in the vocabulary of the Greek New Testament, more than 500 formerly had to be classified as “biblical” words since they were unknown except in the Bible, [Deissmann, Licht Vom Osten, p. 60], and the language was regarded by some as standing quite by itself as “New Testament Greek. ’ Others tried to explain it as ‘Hebraic Greek,’ while one German scholar even called it a ‘language of the Holy Ghost.’ [R. Rothe, Zur Dogmatik. 1863, p. 2w38. Quoted by J. H. Moulton and G. Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-literary Sources. 1930, p. xi.]. A new understanding of its character was found by Adolf Deismann, then Privatdozent (instructor) at Marburg and later Professor of New Testament at Friedrich Wilhelms University at Berlin. When looking at a volume in the University Library at Heidelberg, containing transcripts from the papyrological collections at Berlin, he suddenly recognized that the Greek which he was reading was similar to that with which he was familiar in the New Testament. This proved to be a clue to the solution of the Problem, and now it is widely recognized that the language in which the New Testament was written was not the formal language of literature, in which an attempt was made to imitate the classical authors of the past, nor a special kind of ‘biblical’ language, but rather the non-literary language of everyday life, the Koine or common Greek, which was spoken by the ordinary men and women of the Greco-Roman world. The New Testament was written, not in the language of books, but in the language of life, and it spoke with bold and unpretending vigor directly to the life of its day. [E.J. Goodspeed, Preface to The New Testament, An American Translation, 1923]. (Light From the Ancient Past, by Jack Finegan, Princeton Univ. Press, 1946, pages 330-331).
Greek Grammar Author A.T. Robertson - 1934
A.T. Robertson wrote, in his Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, 1934:
“...I wish to acknowledge here my very great indebtedness to Dr. Moulton for his brilliant use of the Egyptian papyri in proof of the fact that the New Testament was written in the vernacular koine. Deissmann is the pioneer in this field and is still the leader in it. It is hard to overestimate the debt of modern New Testament scholarship to his work...” (Preface, page x).
Robertson gives the following quote:
“...The language of the New Testament, on the other hand, has not yet attracted the special attention of any considerable scholar. There is no good lexicon. There is no good philological commentary. There is no adequate grammar.” (Footnote from Hatch, Essays in Biblical Greek, commenting that Moulton and Deissmann disprove the pessimism of Hatch. From the London Quarterly Review, 1908, page 214).
D.A. Carson: On the Koine Greek --1989
“The translators of the KJV, as accomplished as they were, were totally unaware of the differences between Hellenistic Greek and the classical (usually Attic) Greek of earlier centuries. Ilie relevant manuscripts had not yet been discovered. As late as 1886 Joseph Henry Thayer could list 161 distinctively ‘New Testament’ words with no parallels in any known Greek literature. The list is now is considerably under 50 and still shrinking. Moreover in 1611, translators followed the syntax of classical Greek; but now we know that the Greek of the New Testament corresponds syntactically to Hellenistic Greek. This makes a tremendous difference in, for example, the connecting phrases of the Johannine epistles. Moreover, some wrds and idioms had changed their meaning over the centuries, and the New Testament writers used the language of their times.” (The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism, by D.A. Carson, 1989, Baker Book House, page 95).
“It follows, then, that we should be a trifle suspicious when any piece of exegesis tries to establish the meaning of a word by appealing first of all to its usage in classical Greek rather than its usage in Hellenistic Greek. (Exegetical Fallacies, by D.A. Carson, 1989, Baker Book House, page 26).
Summation
The Preface of Parkhurst’s First Edition, 1769, spoke of the “barbarousness” that some in the 17th and 18th centuries considered to be the style of the Greek New Testament.
F.J.A. Hort wrote in 1851 of the “vile and villainous” grammatical style of the Textus Receptus.
A.T. Robertson, in 1934, quoted from the London Quarterly Review of 1908, in which it was stated that there was [at that date] no good lexicon, adequate grammar, or philological commentary of the Koine Greek. This meant, of course, that the lexicons of the 1800s, and before, were Classical Greek works and therefore not appropriate for dealing with New Testament textual matters.
Philip Schaff, Chairman of the 1881 New Testament American Revision Committee, was still struggling in 1883 to identify the idiom of the Greek text by description.
J.H. Thayer’s Edition of Winer’s New Testament Grammar, 1873, bemoaned the “unbridled license” with which the diction of the N.T. was handled. And, how scholars criticized the New Testament language as lacking “in precision and regularity.”
Finally, D.A. Carson wrote as recently as 1989: “The translators of the KJV, as accomplished as they were, were totally unaware of the differences between Hellenistic (Koine, Iwm) Greek and the classical Greek.” The same could still be said of the English Revisers in 1881.
