Bible Dictionaries
Greek Language

Holman Bible Dictionary

The Greek language has had a long and illustrious history and continues to this day as a vital and viable language. In contrast, Latin survives only in the current romance languages. Greek was the language of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. It is also the language of modern day Greece. Like English, Greek is classified as a part of the Indo-European family of languages. It is a more highly inflected language than English. These inflections identify the uses and functions of the words in a sentence. The stems of Greek words are modified by the addition of prefixes, by the changing of the endings of words, and by the insertion of a letter or letters in the midst of words. In the hands of a skilled writer, the Greek language is able to communicate the nuances of philosophy and the deep emotional feelings of a Sophoclean tragedy.

The origins of the Greek language are buried in antiquity. Its development centered in the Greek mainland and the coastal areas around the Aegean Sea. Prior to the time of Alexander the Great, there was no central form of government which held power over all Greek-speaking people. Their territory, for the most part, was comprised of a series of independent city-states. Because these city-states were relatively isolated a variety of Greek dialects developed. The major literary dialects were Attic, Ionic, Doric, and Aeolic. In time the Attic dialect became dominant. The less influential dialects did continue to be used in many parts of the land.

The extant literature which represents the earliest form of literary Greek begins with Homer and the Iliad and Odyssey . These epic poems reflect the richness of the language from ancient times. Homer used the Greek language to portray the heroic portions of humanity. On the other hand, Hesiod, who lived about a century later, left a different type of poetic literature. In his Works and Days , Hesiod pictured the daily human struggle to survive. Although these writers used different dialects, they both wrote in the same basic language known as Greek.

The Golden Age of Greece differs from the other periods in two ways. It spanned a relatively brief period of time, lasting less than a century. In addition, the literary brilliance of the period was limited primarily to the Attic Greek dialect and to Athens. Its influence, however, has been far reaching. The tragic and comic playwrights left an indelible imprint on the theater of succeeding generations. Similarly Plato, Aristotle, and other writers from the Golden Age of Greece have influenced modern philosophy, logic, ethics, and even science.

The Golden Age of Greece was followed by the Hellenistic Greek period. This period lasted from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 600. It was succeeded by the Byzantine period with its political and ecclesiastical separation between East and West. The Greek Orthodox Church began during this period. Later, the fall of Constantinople ushered in the Modern Greek Period.

Of all of the linguistic periods in the development of the Greek language, the Hellenistic period is of particular importance. During this time Greek became the universal language of the “known” world. The Greek language had already spread to the West through the colonies which had been sent out from the Greek mainland. It spread to the East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great. His conquering armies carried with them the Attic dialect from their Greek homeland in Macedonia and Achaia to the West as far as India.

Although Rome was the dominant military and political force throughout Europe and Asia Minor during the Hellenistic period, Greek rather than Latin maintained its domination as the language of the people. Latin was the language of the Roman government; Greek was the language of the Empire, the lingua franca . Popularly, it has been referred to as koine Greek. The word “ koine ” is a transliteration of the Greek word which means “common.” The word itself had reference to that which was everyday, that which was of ordinary people, that which was “vulgar” or common.

Biblical scholars have long known that the Greek of the New Testament is considerably different from the Greek of the Golden Age. The differences were explained by referring to the New Testament Greek as “Biblical Greek” or “Holy Ghost Greek.” This implied that, although the roots of the New Testament were in the Greek language, its style and form differed sharply from the literary Attic Greek with which scholars were familiar.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, archeologists began to find fragments of papyri, the “paper” of the ancient world. Much of this papyri was found in Egypt in the garbage heaps of some of the major cities. Adolph Deissmann, one of the important scholars of the day, realized that much of the Greek which he was finding in the papyri was similar to that found in the Greek New Testament. He published the results of his investigation in a work called Light from the Ancient East . This work along with that of others revolutionized biblical study. Scholars were able to demonstrate that the Greek found in the New Testament was the same as that found in other writings of the day. It was not some special dialect or Holy Ghost language. The New Testament was written in the universal language of the Empire.

The understanding of the New Testament has been enhanced by the discovery of secular texts which were written during the Hellenistic period. These texts include the papyri, pieces of broken pottery called “ostraca,” inscriptions on monuments, as well as a number of formal works by such authors as Josephus, Epictetus, Philo, and Plutarch. A study of this material has revealed a wide variation in literary skills and style of the writers. They ranged from the semiliterate to the highly stylized. The latter attempted to imitate style and form of the Golden Age of Greece and were called Atticists. As should be expected, the literary style of the writers of the New Testament falls somewhere between these two extremes. Consequently, the average citizen who lived in Alexandria (Egypt), in Jerusalem, or in Rome could have easily understood the writings found in the Greek of the New Testament.

W. Ray Ellis