Is there not an argument to be made for God’s existence from the Biblical text itself-not the content or style but the vehicle which delivered it to us, the language? Is it worth asking that, if God elected to reveal Himself to us in its pages, why He chose Koine Greek over Aramaic or Latin? Since the discovery of New Testament manuscripts in Latin, Syriac and Coptic more emphasis has been given to the contribution these texts make to our overall understanding of the message of the New Testament. If these translations carry great importance to scholars, why Koine Greek?
If we maintain that the language itself was under a divine mandate, the occasional word which we cannot translate or the later alterations made by copyists become unimportant, else we would have to assume God directed the writing of the text originally but then gave it to the mind of man to tamper with—something no Christian could bring themselves to believe. Textual variants are understandable because they are the result of copying before there was a printing press. Even theological notes scribbled into the text cannot alter its meaning. The language, we might argue, is more robust and durable than a few obvious changes textual critics have found.
What about the translations? Translations as important as they are—since we don’t speak Koine—are compiled by exegetical grammarians, whose main goal is to give meaning to the words and ideas in our spoken language. Consequently, the exact emphasis and meaning of a Koine word or concept may be lost because our language cannot offer a word for word correspondence. Aside from the clear inspiration we receive and the change in our hearts and lives we experience in reading our Bible in our native language, there may be no other reason to claim that God is its author. ..or is there?
Beware, the theory of inspiration that every word is inspired [2 Timothy 3:16] is being discarded in modern times by a scholarship that focuses primarily on the historical development of the style of the message and not the message itself.
We ask, “Why Koine Greek?” because, perhaps, the choice of language also supports God’s authorship of our Bible! Perhaps, there is something hidden in the language that “earnestly contends for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” [Jude 3].
- No other documents have been found written in Koine other than our Bible. J. B. Lightfoot is reported to have said: “…if we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the understanding of the language of the New Testament generally.” Dr. Caragounis admits that “We do not have any substantial documents of spoken or written Koine by Greeks from the time of the New Testament.” There was a scholastic interest in returning to the Classical Greek [called new-platonism]. Koine as the language of the commoner was not favored by the intellectuals [“the wise”] as a style. In fact style meant more in the schools of rhetoric and higher education than content. No one cared if you deceived your listener as long as you said it in “good” [not Koine] greek.
- A study of the Passive and Perfect verb forms suggest that there was in their historical development a significance during Koine that did not exist before or after this period in the language. The passive came out of a middle form [not represented in English] that suggested an enhanced meaning. Not only did the action of the verb happen to the subject but now, unlike Hebrew and the middle forms, the subject is said to be in no way responsible for the action [John 9:2]. (I suggest that the message of God’s grace might have something to do with this development.) The middle form, which developed out of the similar Hebrew idea, has the meaning of the active with the addition of ‘to’ or ‘for’ oneself. It comes to mean a passive idea, Professor Gesenius informed us, speaking of the Hebrew, “in consequence of a looseness of thought.” The perfect has disappeared in modern Greek other than in a paraphrastic form or in using a simple past tense. Both the passive and the perfect ideas are encapsulated in Ephesians 2:8 “saved [perfect passive] by grace through faith.” There is, thanks to Koine, no theological ambiguity here!
- It is also well know that Koine came about as a merging of 7 dialects in the Greek language which after this period broke up again back into its several dialects. Koine was preserved forever only in the Sacred Christian Text! Dr. Caragounis tells us that this capacity of the Greek language to divide up into dialects and then to reunite and assert itself … ”is unparalleled in the history of language.” Also on the family tree of languages Greek is alone on its branch. Dr. Caragounis told us, “The Vedic-Sanskrit language gave rise to a number of Hindi languages and dialects. While in Europe, the second oldest language, Latin, broke up into the Romance languages…. Greek, on the other hand, never gave birth to any daughter languages.”
We might contend that these points taken together are the very definition of “sacred” for God seem to chose Koine for His purpose and then preserve it from any profane use afterward. … something worth reflecting on.
