The
Expositor, 6th Series Vol. IX (1904) 215-25.
The
digital form was graciously edited by Christopher Pfohl
at
215
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW
TESTAMENT GREEK. (Pt. 2)
J.H.
Moulton
II
IT
will be necessary to deal more minutely with the two
classes of Semitisms which the negative evidence
of the
papyri may compel us to recognize provisionally in the
Greek New Testament. But for the present we
may be
content with the general thesis that the Greek
Bible is
written in the common Greek vernacular, modified
through-
out the Old Testament and some parts of the New by
conditions which are abundantly paralleled in the
literal
translations of the English Bible.
It is time now to pass on
to the description of Hellenistic Greek, apart
from its special
use in the Bible. But before leaving the subject I
should
like to mention two or three examples of the bearing
of this
grammatical study upon literary criticism.
In dealing with the New Testament constructions
with
e]ge<neto in the note appended to
my last paper, I had
occasion to record that this notable Hebraism was
in the
New
Testament almost confined to the writings of the
Gentile
Luke.1 It does not of course stand alone. There is
an instructive little point in Luke's report of
the preaching
of John the Baptist. In iii.
8, he has kai>
mh> a@rchsqe
le<gein e]n e|autoi?j. Dalman,
Words of Jesus, p. 27, shows
that in narrative "the Palestinian-Jewish
literature
uses the meaningless 'he began,'" a
conventional locution
which was evidently parallel with our Middle-English
auxiliary gan. It is very common in the Synoptists,
and
occurs twice as often in Luke as in Matthew. Dalman
1 My suggestion (p. 75)
that the construction of e]ge<neto with infin. was
Luke's
own coinage is dispensed with by two papyrus quotations which
I
noticed too late to include. In Papyrus Cattaoui, a Roman-named
soldier
says a@rti e]a>n
ge<nhtai< me a]podhmei?n; and in B. U. 970
we find e]a<n
ge<nhtai mh> eu]tonh?sai au]to<n. They are both dated 2nd cent. A.D. I fully
except that I have overlooked other examples.
216 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
thinks that if this Aramaic yriwA with participle had
become
practically meaningless, we might well find the same
use in
direct speech, though no example happens to be known.
Now in the otherwise verbal identical verse
Matt. iii.
9
we find do<chte for a@rchsqe, “do not presume to
say,” which
is thoroughly idiomatic Greek, and manifestly a
deliberate
improvement of an original preserved more exactly by
Luke.
It seems to follow that this original was a Greek
translation of the Aramaic logia-document, used in
common
by both Evangelists, but with greater freedom by
the first.
If
Luke was ignorant of Aramaic, he would be led by his
keen desire for accuracy to incorporate with a
minimum of
change translations he was able to secure, even when
they
were executed by men whose Greek was not very
idiomatic.
But
ne staff ultra crepidam:
these things belong to the
higher critics and not to the mere grammarian. I must,
however, venture to hammer on their last a
little longer.
The
grammarian necessarily claims his say on the Johannine
problem. We saw above (Expositor, January, p. 71), that
the author of the Apocalypse writes as a man whose
Greek
education was not yet complete: like many of the
farmers
of
and case. If then his date is to be 95 A.D., he
cannot have
written the fourth Gospel only a short time
after. Either,
therefore, we must take the earlier date for the
Apocalypse,
which would allow the Apostle to improve his Greek by
constant use in a city like
would be useless; or we must suppose that the authors
of
John xxi. 24 mended his grammar for him throughout
the Gospel. Otherwise, we must join the ranks of
the
Xori<zontej.1 Here, of course, I am only putting the
question, leaving it to the experts to solve it.
Finally, as a transition to the next subject,
let me note
1 May I, in passing,
express the malicious satisfaction which a
grammarian feels in reading the words of a very
cocksure critic,
Prof. B. M Bacon, in the current Hibbert Journal (p. 345)? “Jesus ‘is
CHARACTERISTICS
OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK 217
one or two suggestions by the great modern Greek
scholar,
Albert
Thumb who has used dialectic differences in the
language of to-day in a way which promises to
repay further
research. In an article in Theologische Literaturzeitung,
1903,
p. 421, he calls attention to the prominence of e]moj,
etc., in the fourth Gospel, as against mou, etc., elsewhere.
[
]Emoj occurs thirty-six times in John, once in 3 John,
once in Apocalypse, and thirty-four times in the
rest of the
New Testament. I am bound to admit
that the argument is
not strengthened by the figures for so<j, h|me<teroj
and u|me<te-
roj], which between them
occur 11 times in John (Gospel
and Epistles), 12 times in Luke's two books, and 21
times in the rest of the New Testament.] He tells us
that
e]moj and the rest survive:
in modern Pontic-Cappa-
docian Greek, while the
genitive has replaced them else-
where. The inference is that the Fourth Gospel comes
from
Luke
has his Macedonian origin encouraged, for he hardly
uses e]moj; and the Apocalypse,
which has only one occur-
rence between the four
possessives, suits a recent immigrant
very well. In the same paper Thumb shows that the
infinitive still survives in Pontic,
while in
yields entirely to the periphrasis. Now the
syntactical
conditions under which the infinitive is still
found in Pontic
answer very well to those which appear in the New
Testament,
in uses where western Greek tended to enlarge
the use of i!na. Obviously this tells
us little more than that
the New Testament has eastern provenance, which no
one
is likely to deny. But the principle will be found
useful later.
We proceed to examine the nature and history of
the
vernacular Greek itself. It is a study which has
almost
come into existence in the present generation.
Classical
scholars have studied the Hellenistic literature
for the sake
raised’— e]gei<retai—not ‘rises’ — a]ni<sthsi
(sic !!)—from the dead” [in
John xxi]. If John's grammar was equal to this, the
work of the
Ephesian
revisers was
no sinecure.
218 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
of its matter: its language was never considered
worth
noticing, except to chronicle contemptuously its
deviations
from “good Greek.” There perhaps the authors were
only
receiving the treatment they courted, for to write
Attic was
the object of them all, pursued doubtless with
varying
degrees of zeal, but in all cases removing them
far from the
language they used in daily life. The study of
the vernacular
itself was not possible, for the Biblical Greek was
inter-
preted on lines of its own,
and the papyri were mostly
reposing in the Egyptian tombs, the small
collections that
were published receiving but little attention. And
equally
unknown was the scientific study of modern
Greek. To this
day, even great philologists like Hatzidakis decry as a mere
patois, utterly unfit for literary use, the living
language
upon whose history they have spent their lives. The
translation of the Gospels into the Greek which
descends
directly from their original idiom is treated as
sacrilege by
the devotees of a “literary” dialect which no one ever
spoke. It is left to foreign students to recognize
the value
of Pallis’ version to
those who would study the original in
the light of the continuous development of the
language
from the age of Alexander to our own time.
As has been hinted in the preceding paragraph,
the
source of our present-day study of New Testament Greek
are threefold :—(1) the prose literature of the
post-classical
period, from Polybius down
through the Byzantine age;
(2)
the Koinh<
inscriptions, and the Egyptian non-literary
papyri; (3) modern vernacular Greek, with especial
refer-
ence to its dialectic
variations, so far as these are at present
registered. Before we discuss the part which each
of these
must play in our investigations, it will be
necessary to ask
what was the Koinh< and how it arose.
The history, geography and ethnology of
responsible for the remarkable phenomena which even
the
literature of the classical period presents. The
very school-
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK 219
boy in his first two or three years at Greek has to
realize
that “Greek” is anything but a unity. He has not
thumbed
the Anabasis
long before the merciful pedagogue takes him
on to Homer, and his painfully acquired irregular
verbs de-
mand a great extension of
their limits. When he develops
into a Tripos candidate he
knows well that Homer, Pindar,
Sappho, Herodotus and Aristotle are all of them in
their own
several ways defiant of the Attic grammar to
which his own
composition must conform. And if his studies
ultimately
invade the dialect inscriptions, he finds in
Lacedaemon and
for which his literature has almost entirely failed
to prepare
him. And the Theban who said Fi<ttw
Deu<j and the
Athenian
who said i@stw
Zeu<j lived in towns exactly as
far apart as Liverpool and
variety of dialects within that little country
arises partly
from racial differences. Upon the primitive “Pelasgians,”
represented best by the Athenians of history, swept
first
from
then, in post-Homeric days, the Dorian invaders.
Dialectic
conditions were as inevitably complex as they were
in our
own country a thousand years ago, when successive
waves
of Germanic invaders, of different races and
dialects, had
settled in the several parts of an island in
which a Keltic
population still maintained itself to greater or
less extent.
Had
the Norman Conquest come before the Saxon, which
determined the language of the country, the
parallel would
have been singularly complete. The conditions which
in
off each little State from regular communication
with its
neighbours—an effect and a cause at
once of the passion for
1 I am assuming as proved
the thesis of Professor Ridgeway, in his
Early Age of Greece, which seems to me a
key that will unlock many of
the problems of Greek history, religion and
language. Of course adhuc
sub iudice lis
est.
220 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
autonomy which made of
Meanwhile a steady process was going on which
deter-
mined finally the character of literary Greek.
win the hegemony of
wrest it from them at Leuktra;
but
duce a man of letters, and Pindar,
the lonely “Theban
eagle,” knew better than to try poetic flights in Bœotian.
The
intellectual supremacy of
long before the political unification of
plished; and Attic was firmly
established as the only
possible dialect for prose composition. The
post-classical
writers wrote Attic according to their lights,
tempered
generally with a plentiful admixture of
grammatical and
lexical elements drawn from the vernacular.
Strenuous
efforts were made by precisians
to improve the Attic quality
of this artificial literary dialect; and we still
possess the
works of Atticists who cry
out against the “bad Greek”
and “solecisms” of their contemporaries, thus
incidentally
providing us with information concerning a Greek
which
interests us more than the artificial Attic they
prized so
highly. All their scrupulousness did not however
prevent
their deviating from Attic in matters more important
than
vocabulary. The optative
in Lucian is perpetually misused,
and no Atticist
successfully attempts to reproduce the
ancient use of ou] and mh< with the participle.
Those writers
who are less particular in their purism write in a
literary
Koinh<
which admits without difficulty many features of
various origin, while generally recalling Attic.
No doubt
the influence of Thucydides encouraged this
freedom. The
true Attic, as spoken by educated people in
hardly used in literature before the fourth century.1
the
Ionic
dialect having large influence on the, to some extent,
artificial idiom, which the older writers at
1 Schwyzer,
Die Weltsprachen
des Altertums, p. 15 n., cites as the earliest
extant prose monument of genuine Attic in literature
the pseudo-Xeno-
phon's De republics Atheniensi, which dates from
before 413 B.C.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW
TESTAMENT GREEK. 221
was not strange therefore that the standard for
most of the
post-classical writers should go back,
for instance, to the
pra<ssw of Thucydides rather
than the pra<ttw
of Plato and
Demosthenes.
Such, then, was the “Common Greek” of literature,
from which we have still to derive our illustrations
for the
New Testament to a very large extent. Any lexicon will
show how important for our purpose is the vocabulary
of
the Koinh< writers from Polybius
down. And even the most
rigid Atticists found
themselves unable to avoid words and
usages which Plato would not have recognized. But side
by side with this was a fondness for obsolete
words with
literary associations. Take nau?j, for example, which is
freely found in Aelian,
Josephus, and other Koinh<
writers.
It
does not appear in the indices of eight volumes of Gren-
fell and Hunt's papyri—except where literary
fragments
come in—nor in those to vol. iii. of
the
and the small volume from
collections that I happen to have by me.) We turn to
the
New
Testament, and find it once, in Luke's shipwreck
narrative, in a phrase which Blass (Philology of the
Gospels, p. 186), suspected to
be a reminiscence of Homer.
In
style and syntax the literary Common Greek diverges
more widely from the colloquial. The bearing of all
this
on the subject of our study will come out
frequently in the
course of our investigation. Here it will suffice to
refer to
Blass's Grammar,
p. 5, for an interesting summary of
phenomena which are practically restricted to Harnack's
Priscilla,
and to parts of Luke and Paul,1 where
sundry
logical and grammatical elements from the
literary dialect
invade the colloquial style which is elsewhere
universal in
the New Testament.
1 In quoting Blass here I
should not like to accept too unreservedly his
opinion that Luke, in Acts xx. 29, misused the
literary word a@ficij. The
suggestion that Paul meant “after my arrival, home-coming,” while not
without difficulty, at least deserves
considering.
222 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
The writers who figure in Dr. W. Schmid's well-known
book, Der Atticismus in seinen Hauptvertretern von Dio-
nysius von Halikarnass bis auf den zweiten Philostratus, were
not the last to found a literary language on the
artificial
resuscitation of the ancient Attic.
Essentially the same
thing is being tried to-day. The “mummy-language,” as
Krumbacher calls it, will not stand the test of use
in
poetry, but in prose literature, in newspapers, and in
Biblical
translation it has the dominion, which is vindi-
cated by Athenian
undergraduates, with bloodshed if need
be.1 We have nothing to do
with this curious phenomenon,
except to warn students that before citing modern
Greek in
illustration of the New Testament
they must make sure
whether their source is kaqareu<ousa or kaqomiloume<nh, book
Greek
or spoken Greek. The former may of course have bor-
rowed from ancient or modern sources—for it is a
medley far
more mixed than we should get by compounding
together
Cynewulf and Kipling—the particular feature for
which it
is cited. But it obviously cannot stand in any
line of his-
torical development, and it is
just as valuable as Volapuk to
the student of linguistic evolution. The popular patois,
on
the other hand, is a living language, and we shall
soon see
that it takes a very important part in the
discussions on
which we are entering.
We pass on then to the spoken dialect of the
first century
Hellenists, its history and its peculiarities. Our sources are,
in order of importance, (1) non-literary papyri,
(2) inscrip-
tions, (3) modern vernacular
Greek. The literary sources
are almost confined to the Biblical Greek. A few
general
words may be said on these sources before we examine
the
origin of the Greek which they embody.
1 See Krumbacher's
vigorous polemic, Das Problem d. neugr. Schrift-
sprache summarized by the
present writer in Expository Times,1903,
p. 550
Professor
Hatziclakis replies with equal energy in Rev. des Etudes greques,
1903, p. 210 ff.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK. 223
The papyri have one very obvious disadvantage in
that,
with the not very important exception of
their provenance is limited to one country,
see, however, that the disadvantage does not
practically
count. They date from the third century B.C. to the
seventh A.D. The monuments of the earliest
period are
fairly abundant, and they give us specimens of the
spoken
Koinh< from a time when the
dialect was still a novelty.
The
papyri are not of course to be treated as a unity.
Those
which alone concern us are simply the waste paper of
Ptolemaic
and Roman
degree of unity as we should see in the sacks of
waste paper brought to an English paper-mill from a
solicitor's office, a farm, a school, a shop, a
manse, and a
house in
considered separately. Old wills, law reports,
contracts,
census returns, marriage settlements, receipts, and
official
orders largely ran along stereotyped lines and as formulæ
tend to be permanent we have a degree of
conservatism in
the language which is not seen in documents which
are
free from these trammels. Petitions, contain this
element
in greater or less extent, but naturally show more
freedom
in the recitation of the particular grievances for
which
redress is claimed. Private letters are our most
valuable
sources, and are of course all the better for
the immense
differences that show themselves in the education of
their
writers. The well worn epistolary formulæ show variety
mostly in their spelling, and their value for the
student lies
primarily in their remarkable resemblances to the conven-
tional phraseology which even
the letter-writers of the New
Testament were content to use. The
part of the letter which
contains the point is perhaps most instructive
when its
grammar is weakest, for it shows which way the
language
was tending. Few papyri are more suggestive than
the
letter of the lower-schoolboy to his father (0.P. 119,
second
224 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
or third century), already referred to in my
papers here
more than once. It would have surprised
paterfamilias,
when he applied the well merited cane, to learn that
seven-
teen centuries afterwards there would be scholars
who would
count that audacious missive greater treasure than a
new
fragment of Sappho! But
this is by the way. It must
not be inferred from this laudation of the
ungrammatical
papyri that the N.T. writers are at all comparable in
lack
of education. The indifference to concord which we
noted
in the Apocalypse is almost isolated in this connexion. But
the illiterates show us by their exaggerations the
tendencies
which the better schooled writers keep in restraint.
With
writings from farmers and from Emperors, and
every class
between, we can form a kind of “grammatometer” by
which to estimate how the language stands in the
development of any particular use we may wish to inves-
tigate.
Inscriptions come second to papyri mainly
because their
very material shows that they were meant to last.
The
Greek
may not be of the purest, but such as it is we see it
in its best clothes, while that of the papyri is
in corduroys.
The
special value of the common Greek inscriptions lies in
their corroborating the papyri, and practically
showing that
there was but little dialectic difference between the
Greek of
bably be varieties of pronunciation,
and we have already
seen that districts differed in their preferences
among sundry
equivalent locutions, but a speaker of Greek would
be
understood without the slightest difficulty
wherever he
went throughout the immense area over which the Greek
world-speech reigned. With the
caveat already implied,
that inscription-Greek may contain literary elements
which
are absent from an unstudied private letter, we may
use
without misgiving the immense and ever-growing
collections
of later Greek epigraphy. How much may be made of
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW TESTAMENT
GREEK. 225
them is well seen in the Preisschrift of Dr. E. Schwyzer,1
Grammatik der Pergamenischen Inschriften, an invaluable
guide to the accidence of the Koinh<.
Finally we have modern
Greek to bring in. Dr. Albert
Thumb's
Handbuch der neugriechischen, Volkssprache
gives
us now the material for checking statements about
modern
Greek,
which are often based upon the artificial Greek of
the schools. The great work of Hatzidakis, Einleitung in,
die neugriechische Grammatik, with its perpetual
references
to the New Testament, shows forcibly how many of
the
developments of the modern
vernacular had their roots in
the Koinh<
of two
thousand years ago. The gulf between the
ancient and the modern vernacular is bridged by
the
material collected and arranged by Professor Jannaris in
his Historical
Greek Grammar. It will soon be realized
that the illiterate papyri of the early Christian
centuries are
far nearer to the common speech of
than to that of
the educated colloquial Greek in which
illustration constantly in the
popular dialects of to-day.
We
may leave for the present the enforcing of this thesis,
which will come out in practice at every step of our
inquiry.
James
Hope Moulton.
1 He was Schweizer in 1898, when this book was published, but has
changed since, to our confusion. He has edited Meisterhans' Grammar
of
the Attic Inscriptions, and written the interesting lecture on Die Weltsprache,
named above.
2 Cf. Hatzidakis
in Rev. d. Et.
gr. 1903, p. 220, who says, “The language
generally spoken to-day in the towns differs less
from the common
language of Polybius
than this last differs from the language of Homer.”
(To be continued.)