Pt1-01-THE LANGUAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
THE LANGUAGE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
THERE was a time when students of the New Testament language were divided into two hostile camps. Scholars of the one group insisted that New Testament Greek was in the Attic as used by Plato and Thucydides, and that Classical lexicons could be used as the basis of appeal. Those in the other group claimed that the New Testament was in a "Biblical Greek"--i. e., a language so influenced by Hebraisms as to be rendered quite distinct from ordinary Greek, and consequently not yielding to the tests of ordinary language as to grammar and meanings of words. So great was the confusion resulting from the wordy warfare concerning New Testament language that one writer (Jowett) declared: "There seem to be reasons for doubting whether any considerable light can be thrown on the New Testament from inquiry into language." As Prof. A. T. Robertson says in his Grammar of the New Testament: "That prophecy is now almost amusing in the light of historical research."
Recent discoveries have shown conclusively that both groups were wrong, and that the New Testament language was the normal Greek of its own period-not the stately, polished phrasing of the Attic writers, nor yet a "Biblical Greek," but simply the language of everyday life as used throughout the Empire. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek language was carried far and wide, until it became practically a universal speech. Naturally, it tended to lose something of its Attic dignity, and became modified in the course of time by the various elements which affect all speech. To an extent the language of the study gave place to the language of the street. Hence colloquialisms became frequent, grammar less rigid, and the vocabulary was considerably enlarged. This "common" Greek--the Koine--was so widespread that Roman decrees were issued in it, and a Roman boy who had the advantages of education learned Greek from his schoolmaster, who, in all probability, was a Greek by birth. When the New Testament came to be written the Koine was the language used. It can even be called the Vernacular Koine, but it was used with a restraint which kept it free from vulgarism, and its vocabulary was strongly influenced by its religious environment and its holy purpose. At first it may seem that the fact that the common speech was used must detract from its excellence; but full consideration of the facts will dispel that notion. Literary language is apt to be over-refined, and make its appeal chiefly to the cultured taste; whereas the vernacular is a speech which the common people can hear gladly, and it reaches all. It is, moreover, a language which can be translated into other tongues more readily than its Classic parent-speech. A language always tends to absorb elements from other speeches. So the New Testament Greek discloses a certain amount of Hebrew influence, and also a number of forms from Latin and other sources. But a great number of the words which once were supposed to be Hebraisms or peculiar to Biblical Greek have now been shown to have parallels in the papyri and inscriptions of the period. The Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament, by Moulton and Milligan, has many surprises for the student. He finds, for example, that the word diakonoi was applied in inscriptions to dedicators of a statue of Hermes, presbuteroi to members of a corporation, and the word translated evangelist to a "chief priest of Daphne and the god". The New Testament language was not an isolated speech, nor was its vocabulary a list of coined words.
Probably the greatest results in New Testament linguistic research will come in the field wherein the light from inscriptions is breaking upon words of Scripture. It was in 1897 that the new era of papyri discovery began. In that year two young scholars, B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, commenced to dig at Oxyrhynchus, in Upper Egypt. So great was the mass of papyri discovered that when the store boxes containing these treasures reached London they were weighed by the ton. Camden M. Cobern, in his New Archæological Discoveries, writes: "In 1897 these men gave their first official report, having examined at Oxford the contents of some 1,300 of these documents. This first volume contained 158 texts, though four-fifths of the whole collection had not yet been unpacked, and the best part of what they had obtained had been left at the Cairo Museum."
Adolf Deissmann, to whom the honour is given that he was the first to recognise that "these papyri were written exactly in the language of the New Testament", in his latest edition of Light from the Ancient East wrote: "The period of excavations for papyri in Egypt is by no means ended, and many workers are still required for the systematic collection and preservation of the despised ostraca." The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, the first part of which was prepared by Moulton and Milligan, began publication in 1914 and was completed by Dr. Milligan in 1929.
Dr. Deissmann claimed that there was need of a new lexicon. He said that this lexicon must fulfil three main tasks: (1) "to place the New Testament vocabulary in living linguistic connection with the contemporary world"; (2) "to ascertain carefully the phases in changes of meaning"; (3) "to simplify once more and put warmth again into the popular concepts of Primitive Christianity, which have been artificially complicated and deprived of life by scholastic prejudice and a too anxious process of isolation. The new lexicon must bring out once more afresh the simplicity, inwardness, and force of the utterances of evangelists and apostles."
About the time of the publication of Deissmann’s book, a Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, by Abbott-Smith, a work of very great value, appeared. The great Classical Lexicon by Liddell and Scott has been revised and augmented by Sir Henry Stuart Jones, D.Litt., with the co-operation of many scholars. This work was completed in 1940, and will be of immense value to Classical and New Testament Greek students.
Every hour spent in the field of linguistic enquiry will be richly repaid. Only the expert can do the foundation research work in bringing the treasures to the surface, but every student of the Word can be alert to view the treasures when they are brought to the light. As Deissmann said, in closing his great book: "It is always the New Testament itself that calls the man of research back from his wandering thoughts to work on the New Testament again. Daily it bears witness to him of its own veriest nature: the little Book is not one of the paralysing and enslaving forces of the past, but it is full of eternal and present strength to make strong and to make free."