The Expositor 6th Series Vol. IX
(1904): 67-75
The
digital form was graciously edited by Christopher Pfohl
at
67
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT
GREEK
J.H.
Moulton
I.
As
recently as 1895, in the opening chapter of a beginner's
manual of New Testament Greek, the present writer
defined
Hellenistic
Greek as “Hebraic Greek, colloquial Greek, and
late Greek.” In a second
edition, just published, the first
of these three elements has to disappear, and when
“common” has been
substituted for “Hebraic,” it is soon
made clear that the addition of “late” makes little differ-
ence to the definition. The
disappearance of that word
“Hebraic”
from our definitions marks a revolution in the
conception of the language in which the New
Testament is
written. It is not a revolution affecting theories
only. It
touches exegesis at innumerable points. It
demands large
modifications in our very latest
grammars, and an over-
hauling of our best and most trusted
commentaries. To
set forth the nature of these new lights, with
reference to
the grammar of the sacred books, will be the aim of
the
present series of papers.
It was of course the isolated position of
Biblical Greek
which was responsible for the older view. That the
Greek
Scriptures
were written in the koinh<, the “common”
Greek
which superseded the dialects of the classical period,
was well enough known. But it was most obviously
different from the koinh< of the later
literature. It could not
be adequately paralleled from Plutarch or Arrian, as little
from the Jewish writers Philo and Josephus.
Naturally
the peculiarities of Biblical Greek came to be
explained
from its own conditions. The LXX.
was “translation Greek,”
its syntax determined perpetually by that of its
original
68 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
Hebrew. The New Testament writers were so
familiar
with the LXX. that its
idiosyncrasies passed largely into
their own style. Moreover, they used Greek as
foreigners,
in most cases thinking in Aramaic what they
expressed in
Greek. Hence this “language of the Holy Ghost,” this
“Judaic”
or “Biblical” Greek, a phenomenon perfectly
explicable by the laws of the science of language,
and
evidenced by scores of usages which had Hebraism
written
over their very face and denied every effort of the
Purist to
dislodge them.
And now all this has vanished, for Biblical
Greek is
isolated no more. Great collections of Egyptian
papyri,
published with amazing rapidity by the busy
explorers who
have restored to us so many lost literary treasures
during
the last decade, have shown us that the farmer of
the
Fayûm spoke a Greek essentially identical with that
of the
Evangelists. The most convincing “Hebraisms”
appear in
the private letters of men who could never have
been in
contact with Semitic influences. And lest we
should imagine
this vernacular peculiar to
of inscriptions from
practically no difference in colloquial Greek
wherever it was
spoken, except, no doubt, in pronunciation, and in
minute
points of usage which lie mostly beyond our reach. The
Holy
Ghost spoke absolutely in the language of the people,
as we might surely have expected He would. The
writings
inspired of Him were those
Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave;
nor less—as the centenary of the Bible Society so
vividly
reminds us just now—
those wild eyes that watch
the wave,
In roarings round the coral reef.
The
very grammar and dictionary cry aloud against those
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. 69
who would allow the Scriptures to appear in any
other
style of speech than that understanded
of the people.
The evidence for this new view starts from the
lexical
researches of G. A. Deissmann
in his now famous “Bible
Studies (1895, 1897; E.T. 1901).” It is needless to de-
scribe how he showed from the monuments of spoken
Greek
that scores of words, hitherto assumed to be “Biblical”—
technical words, as it were, called into existence
or minted
afresh by the language of Jewish religion—were, in
reality,
normal first-century Greek, excluded from literature
by the
nice canons of Atticizing
taste. Some gleanings after
Deissmann, all tending to confirm his doctrine,
have re-
cently appeared in the Expositor; 1 and the present
writer has also endeavoured
to set forth, in the Classical
Review,2 the grammatical side of
the case, only briefly
adumbrated by the pioneer. Every fresh volume of
papyri
has exploded some old-established “Hebraism” or
sec-
ularized some relic of a “Biblical”
vocabulary. Let us
endeavour, before going further,
to see how Hebraisms stand
now, and on what principles we are to interpret
what
remains of this element in the language.
For this purpose we must endeavour
to realize the condi-
tions of countries where the
mass of the people are bilingual.
It
would be difficult to find a better object lesson than that
which we have at our own doors in the people of
some leading statesman were to visit a place in the
heart of
hear him, though they would take for granted he
would
speak in English. If he did, they would understand
him.
But
if he unexpectedly addressed them in Welsh, we may be
very sure they would be “the more quiet”; and a
speaker
who was anxious to conciliate a hostile meeting
would gain
a great initial advantage if he could surprise
them with the
1See the issues for April 1901, February and
December 1903.
2The first two papers
appeared in February and December 1901.
70 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
sound of their native tongue. Now this is exactly
what
happened when Paul addressed the
stairs of Antonia. They took for granted he would
speak
in Greek, and yet they made “a great silence” when
he
faced them with the gesture which indicated a wish to
address them. Schurer
nods, for once, when he calls Paul's
Aramaic
speech as a witness of the people's ignorance of
Greek.1
It does not prove even the “inadequate” know-
ledge which he gives as the alternative possibility
for the
lower classes, if by “inadequate knowledge” is
implied that
the crowd would have been unable to follow a Greek
speech.
They
thought and spoke among themselves, like the Welsh,
exclusively in their native tongue, but we may well
doubt if
there were many of them who could not understand the
world-language or even speak in it
when necessary.2 We
may compare the situation at Lystra
(Acts xiv. 11-18),
where the people obviously understood Paul and
Barnabas,
but would probably have grasped their message much
better
if they had been able to speak Lukaonisti<. The imperfect
knowledge of Greek which may be assumed for the
masses
in
would be found there as in
of foreigners would be much larger. That Jesus
Himself
and the Apostles regularly used Aramaic is beyond
question,
but that Greek was also at command is almost
equally
certain. There is not the slightest presumption
against
the use of Greek in writings purporting to emanate
from
the circle of the first believers. They would write
as men
who had used the language from boyhood, not as
foreigners
painfully expressing themselves in an imperfectly
known
idiom. Their Greek would differ in quality according
to
1 Jewish People, div. II. i.
48 (=vol. ii. p. 63 of the third German edition).
2 The evidence for the
use of Greek in
Zahn in
the second.
chapter of his Einleitung i. d. N.T.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. 71
their education, like that of the private letters
among the
Egyptian papyri. But even the Greek of
the Apocalypse
itself does not seem to owe any of its blunders to “Hebra-
ism.” The
author's obvious indifference to concord can be
abundantly paralleled from Egypt1. We do
not suspect
foreign upbringing in an Englishman who says “between
you and I.” He
would not say “between I and you,” any
more than the author of the Apocalypse would have
said
a]po> o| ma<rtuj o| pisto<j (i.5); it is only that
his grammatical
sense is satisfied when the governing word has
affected the
case of one object.2 Close to the other
end of the scale
stands the learned Rabbi of Tarsus. “A Hebrew, the son
of Hebrews,” he calls himself, and Zahn is no doubt right
in inferring that he always claimed Aramaic as his
mother
tongue. But he manifestly used Greek from childhood
with
entire freedom, and during the main part of his life probably
had very few opportunities of using Aramaic at all.
It is
extremely risky to argue with Zahn
from “Abba, Father”
(Rom.
viii. 15, Gal. iv. 6), that Aramaic was the language
of Paul's prayers: the peculiar sacredness of
association
belonging to the first word of the Lord's Prayer
in its
original language supplies a far more probable
account of
its liturgical use among Gentile Christians.3
Finally we have
the Gentile Luke, who may well have known no
Aramaic
at all.4 Apart from what may be directly
translated from
Semitic
sources, we have accordingly no a priori
reason to
expect in the New Testament any Greek which would
sound strangely to speakers of the koinh< in Gentile lands.
1 For examples cf. Tb. P.
41 (ii/), B.U. 1002 (ii) bis,
910 (1/), A.P. 78 (2/),
Letr. 149 (2/), etc. All
these (abbreviations as in previous papers) are
examples of a nominative in apposition to a noun
in another case. I
have several cases of false concord in gender. ]
an intentional tour
de force.
2 We find this sometimes
in correct English: e.g. “Drive far away the
disastrous Keres, they who destroy” (
Greek Religion, p. 168).
3 Cf. Chase, in Texts and Studies,
4 Cf. Dalman, Words of Jesus, 40 f.
72 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
To what extent then should we expect to find
Jewish
writers of Greek colouring
their style from influences of
Aramaic or Hebrew? Here our Welsh analogy
helps us.
Captain
Fluellen is marked in Shakespeare not only by his
Welsh
pronunciation of English, but also by his fondness
for the phrase “look you.” Now “look you” is English:
I
am told it is common in the Dales, and if we could dis-
sociate it from Shakespeare's
Welshman we should probably
not be struck by it as a bizarre expression. But
why does
Fluellen use it so often? Because it translates
two or
three Welsh phrases of nearly identical meaning,
which
would be very much on his tongue when talking with
his
own countrymen. In exactly the same way the good
Attic
interjection i]dou< is used by the New
Testament writers, with
a frequency quite un-Attic, simply because they
were accus-
tomed to the constant use of
an equivalent interjection in
their own tongue.1 Probably this is the
furthest extent to
which Semitisms went in the ordinary Greek speech or
writing of men whose native language was
Semitic. It
brought into prominence locutions, correct
enough as Greek,
but which would have remained in comparatively rare
use
but for the accident of their answering to Hebrew
or
Aramaic
phrases. And rarely a word with some special
metaphorical meaning might be
translated into the literally
corresponding Greek and used with the
same connotation,
as when the verb jlh, in the ethical sense,
was represented
not by the exactly answering a]nastre<fesqai, but by
peripatei?n.2 But these
cases are very few, and may be
transferred any day to the other category,
illustrated above
in the case of i]dou<, by the discovery of new papyrus texts.
1 Note that James uses it
six times in his short Epistle, Paul eight times
(and one quotation) in all his writings. In
Acts i.-xii. it
appears 16
times; in xiii.-xxviii., only seven, one of which is
in narrative, the rest
in words of Paul.
2 Deissmann, Bible Studies, 194.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. 73
It
must not be forgotten that the instrumental e]n in e]n
maxai<r^ (Luke xxii. 49) and e]n
r|abd& (1 Cor. iv. 21) were
only rescued from the class of “Hebraisms” by the
publication of the Tebtunis Papyri (1902), which presented
us with half-a-dozen Ptolemaic citations for it.1
There remain Semitisms due to translation, from
the
Hebrew
of the Old Testament, or from Aramaic “sources,”
underlying parts of the Synoptists
and Acts. The former
case covers all the usages which have been supposed
to
arise from the over-literal phraseology of the LXX.,
the
constant reading of which by Hellenist Jews has uncon-
sciously affected their Greek.
Here of course we have
abnormal Greek produced by the effect of
Greek-speaking
men to translate the already obsolete and
imperfectly
understood Hebrew. When the Hebrew puzzled them
they would take refuge in a barbarous literalness,
like a
schoolboy translating Virgil. It was ignorance of tx,, not
ignorance of su<n, which was responsible
for
kefalai<&
e@kitsen o| Qeo>j su>n to>n ou]rano>n kai> su>n th>n gh?n.
It is
not antecedently probable that such “translation-Greek”
would influence free Greek except by supplying
phrases for
conscious or unconscious quotation: these phrases
would
not become models to be followed by men who wrote
the
language as their own. The “pure Hebraisms” which
Dalman2
finds in Luke's writings are possibly exceptions;
but we may perhaps assume that Luke would intentionally
assimilate his style to that of the Greek Old
Testament in
those parts of his story where a Hebraic colour was specially
appropriate. The construction of e]ge<neto
impersonal3
is
markedly transformed in a classical direction in Acts, partly
(we may suppose) because the author wearied of what might
seem a mannerism, and partly because the Hebraic colour
1 Expositor, Feb. 1902, p. 112.
2 Words of Jesus, p. 37.
3 See detailed note at
the end of this paper.
74 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
was less appropriate in a book which moved so
largely on a
wider stage. That the Greek Evangelist should exhibit
the
capacity of varying his diction to suit the
change of scene
is only what we should expect: no other New
Testament
writer, except the author of Hebrews, betrays any conscious
attention to Greek ideas of style.
Such then is the issue of the long strife over
the “Hebra-
isms” of New Testament Greek, so far as our present
lights
enable us to apprehend it. We must not forget the
danger
of going too far. The deeper knowledge of
Palestinian
Aramaic,
which Dalman’s researches have brought us, may
disclose traces of imperfectly translated phrases
from
Aramaic
documents; nor could the bald literalism of parts
of the LXX. remain wholly
without influence on the style
of Evangelists and Apostles. We must allow for
possible
Semitisms
from these very different sources, and must be
more careful to distinguish them than scholars
before Dal-
man were wont to be. But the papyri have finally
disposed
of the assumption that the New Testament was
written in
any other Greek than the language of the common
people
throughout the Greek-speaking lands. With this fact
as a
basis, we shall endeavour
in the successive papers of this
series to describe the main features of the common
Greek
of daily life, in so far as its grammatical
structure bears
upon the unique literature which survives to glorify
the
“degenerate” speech of provincial Hellenists in the first
century A.D.
Note on the Hebraisms with e]ge<neto.
The impersonal e]ge<neto, answering to the narrative
yhih;va, is in the
New
Testament very rare outside Luke's writings, in which the supposi-
tion of a Hebrew original is
seen to be impossible (Dalman, p. 33). There
are
three constructions :—(a)
e]ge<neto
h#lqe, (b) e]ge<neto kai>
h#lqe, (c) e]ge<neto
(au]to>n) e]lqei?n. In the Gospel we find in W.H. text 22 cases of (a), 11
of (b),
and 5 of (c);
in the Acts there are 17 of (c), but
none of (a) or (b). (Blass
gives one of (a)
from the b
text, and finds (b) in v. 7; but
since the
latter construction is isolated in Acts, it seems much better to make
CHARACTERISTICS OF
NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
75
dia<sthma subject of the verb.)
It may be added that the construction
occurs
predominantly in connexion with e]n,
and especially e]n t&? c.
inf.,
which is another of Dalman's
Hebraisms. In the (a) passages 10 out
of
22
have e]n t&?, and 4 have e]n with a noun: in the (b) 8 have e]n t&?, 3 e]n,
and there is no other occurrence (W.H. margin in ix. 28 being the only
exception); while in the (c), in the Gospel, only xvi. 22 is without e]n.
Mark
has the (a)
construction twice, both times with e]n, and Matthew five
times,
in
the phrase e]gene<to o!te
e]te<lessen k.t.l. We have one case of (b) in Matthew
(ix.
10—a time clause and kai>
i]dou<), and one of (c) in Mark (ii. 23—also
ii. 15 with gi<netai). It seems to follow that
the phrase originated in
temporal sentences like our phrase, so much beloved
of novelists, "It was
in the days of . . . that . . .” This is the (c) form, but we could use the
paratactic (a),
or even (b), without transgressing
our idiom. Greek idiom
is affected by the substitution of e]ge<neto for sune<bh which in the (c) con-
struction would be normal. But I
do not feel sure that (a) was foreign
to the vernacular. It is found in the modern
speech: cf. Palli's version
Matt. xi. 1, kai> sune<bhke,
sa>n te<liwse . . . , e@fuge . . ., etc. (In Athenian
vernacular sune<be
o!ti h#rqe is idiomatic: in the
country districts, I am
told, e@tuxe
na> e@lq^
is more common.) At the same time it must be allowed
that the correspondence with Hebrew is exceedingly
close in (a) and (b).
Driver
(Tenses § 78) describes the yhiy;va construction as occurring when
there is inserted “a clause specifying the
circumstances under which an
action takes place,”—a description which will suit the
Lucan usage every-
where, except sometimes in the (c) class (as xvi. 22), the only one of the
three which has no Hebrew parallel. We must infer
that the LXX. trans-
lators used this locution as a
just tolerable Greek which literally repre-
sented the original; and that
Luke (and to a minute extent Matthew and
Mark)
deliberately recalled the Greek Old Testament by using the phrase.
The
(c) construction appears to be a
fusion of this with the normal Greek
sune<bh c. acc. et inf. Its
rarity in Luke's Gospel and marked development
in Acts even suggests that it was his own coinage.
The solitary LXX.
parallel (W.M. 760 n), 2 Macc.
iii. 16, has h#n which may be an indepen-
dent attempt to bring the Greek nearer to the
familiar Hebrew. In Mark
ii.
23 we might explain its isolated occurrence as a primitive assimilation
to Luke vi. 1; note that so
early a witness as the combination B C D does
assimilate the infinitive here (diaporeu<esqai
for Mark's parapor.). There
only remains Mark ii. 15 gi<netai katakei?sqai
au]to<n . .
Here the parallel
Matt. ix. 10 has the (b) form, no doubt diverging from (a) only to bring in
the writer's favourite kai> i]dou<. Is it possible that Mark originally had
simply kai>
kata<keitai au]to<j? If so, gi<netai will be due to a
blending of
Matthew's
e]ge<neto with
the present tense of Mark: the later MSS. made the
assimilation more complete by
changing the tense.
JAMES HOPE
MOULTON.
(To be continued.)