Koine Greek (, ), also variously known as Hellenistic Greek, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the common supra-regional form of Greek spoken and written during the Hellenistic period, the Roman Empire, and the early Byzantine Empire. It evolved from the spread of Greek following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, and served as the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East during the following centuries. It was based mainly on Attic and related Ionic speech forms, with various admixtures brought about through dialect levelling with other varieties.
Koine Greek included styles ranging from conservative literary forms to the spoken vernaculars of the time. As the dominant language of the Byzantine Empire, it developed further into Medieval Greek, which informed Modern Greek.
Literary Koine was the medium of much post-classical Greek literary and scholarly writing, such as the works of Plutarch and Polybius. Koine is also the language of the Septuagint (the 3rd century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), the Christian New Testament, and of most early Christian theological writing by the Church Fathers. In this context, Koine Greek is also known as "Biblical", "New Testament", "ecclesiastical", or "patristic" Greek. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his private thoughts in Koine Greek in a work that is now known as Meditations. Koine Greek continues to be used as the liturgical language of services in the Greek Orthodox Church and in some Greek Catholic churches. "A proposal to introduce Modern Greek into the Divine Liturgy was rejected in 2002"
Name The English-language name Koine is derived from the Koine Greek term (), meaning "the common dialect". The Greek word () itself means "common". The word is pronounced , , or in US English and in UK English. The pronunciation of the word koine itself gradually changed from (close to the Classical Attic pronunciation ) to (close to the Modern Greek ). In Modern Greek, the language is referred to as , "Hellenistic Koiné", in the sense of "Hellenistic supraregional language".
Ancient scholars used the term koine in several distinct senses. In the 2nd century, scholars such as Apollonius Dyscolus and Aelius Herodianus maintained the term koine to refer to the Proto-Greek language, while others used it to refer to any vernacular form of Greek speech which differed somewhat from the literary language.Andriotis, Nikolaos P. History of the Greek Language.
When Koine Greek became a language of literature by the 1st century BC, some people distinguished two forms: written as the literary post-classical form (which should not be confused with Atticism) and the vernacular. Others chose to refer to Koine as "the dialect of Alexandria" or "Alexandrian dialect" (), or even the universal dialect of its time. Modern classicists have often used the former sense.
Origins and history Koine Greek arose as a common dialect within the armies of Alexander the Great. Under the leadership of Macedon, their newly formed common variety was spoken from the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt to the Seleucid Empire of Mesopotamia. It replaced existing ancient Greek dialects with an everyday form that people anywhere could understand. Though elements of Koine Greek took shape in Classical Greece, the post-Classical period of Greek is defined as beginning with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, when cultures under Greek sway in turn began to influence the language.
In its eastern provinces, the Roman Empire communicated almost exclusively in Greek, even in areas where Greek was not the dominant spoken language. Local elites and communities, including those in Asia Minor, Arabia, Judaea, Syria, and Egypt, used Greek in inscriptions, documents, and official announcements.
The passage into the next period, known as Medieval Greek, is sometimes dated from the foundation of Constantinople by Constantine the Great in 330 AD, but often only from the end of late antiquity. The post-Classical period of Greek thus refers to the creation and evolution of Koine Greek throughout the entire Hellenistic and Roman eras of history until the start of the Middle Ages.
The linguistic roots of the Common Greek dialect had been unclear since ancient times. During the Hellenistic period, most scholars thought of Koine as the result of the mixture of the four main Ancient Greek dialects, "" (the composition of the Four). This view was supported in the early twentieth century by Paul Kretschmer in his book Die Entstehung der Koine (1901), while Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Antoine Meillet, based on the intense Ionic elements of the Koine – instead of and instead of (; ) – considered Koine to be a simplified form of Ionic.
The view accepted by most scholars today was given by the Greek linguist Georgios Hatzidakis, who showed that despite the "composition of the Four", the "stable nucleus" of Koine Greek is Attic. In other words, Koine Greek can be regarded as Attic with the admixture of elements especially from Ionic, but also from other dialects. The degree of importance of the non-Attic linguistic elements on Koine can vary depending on the region of the Hellenistic world.
In that respect, the varieties of Koine spoken in the Ionian colonies of Anatolia (e.g. Pontus, cf. Pontic Greek) would have more intense Ionic characteristics than others and those of Laconia and Cyprus would preserve some Doric and Arcadocypriot characteristics, respectively. The literary Koine of the Hellenistic age resembles Attic in such a degree that it is often mentioned as Attic Koine.
Sources The first scholars who studied Koine, both in Alexandrian and early modern times, were classicists whose prototype had been the literary Attic Greek of the Classical period and frowned upon any other variety of Ancient Greek. Koine Greek was therefore considered a decayed form of Greek which was not worthy of attention.
The reconsideration on the historical and linguistic importance of Koine Greek began only in the early 19th century, where renowned scholars conducted a series of studies on the evolution of Koine throughout the entire Hellenistic period and Roman Empire. The sources used on the studies of Koine have been numerous and of unequal reliability. The most significant ones are the inscriptions of the post-Classical periods and the papyri, for being two kinds of texts which have authentic content and can be studied directly.
Other significant sources are the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) and the Greek New Testament. The teaching of these texts was aimed at the most common people, and for that reason, they use the most popular language of the era.
Other sources can be based on random findings such as inscriptions on vases written by popular painters, mistakes made by Atticists due to their imperfect knowledge of Attic Greek or even some surviving Greco-Latin glossaries of the Roman period,. e.g.:
Finally, a very important source of information on the ancient Koine is the modern Greek language with all its dialects and its own Koine form, which have preserved some of the ancient language's oral linguistic details which the written tradition has lost. For example, Pontic and Cappadocian Greek preserved the ancient pronunciation of as ε ( for standard Modern Greek etc.), while the Tsakonian language preserved the long α instead of η ( etc.) and the other local characteristics of Doric Greek.
Dialects from the southern part of the Greek-speaking regions (Dodecanese, Cyprus, etc.), preserve the pronunciation of the double similar consonants (), while others pronounce in many words υ as ου or preserve ancient double forms ( etc.). Linguistic phenomena like the above imply that those characteristics survived within Koine, which in turn had countless variations in the Greek-speaking world.
Types
Biblical Koine Biblical Koine refers to the varieties of Koine Greek used in Bible translations into Greek and related texts. Its main sources are: The Septuagint, a 3rd-century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and texts not included in the Hebrew Bible; The Greek New Testament, composed originally in Greek.
Septuagint Greek
There has been some debate to what degree Biblical Greek represents the mainstream of contemporary spoken Koine and to what extent it contains specifically Semitic substratum features. These could have been induced either through the practice of translating closely from Biblical Hebrew or Aramaic originals, or through the influence of the regional non-standard Greek spoken by originally Aramaic-speaking Hellenized Jews.
Some of the features discussed in this context are the Septuagint's normative absence of the particles and , and the use of to denote "it came to pass". Some features of Biblical Greek which are thought to have originally been non-standard elements eventually found their way into the main of the Greek language.
H. St. J. Thackeray, in A Grammar of the Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint (1909), wrote that only the five books of the Pentateuch, parts of the Book of Joshua and the Book of Isaiah may be considered "good Koine". One issue debated by scholars is whether and how much the translation of the Pentateuch influenced the rest of the Septuagint, including the translation of Isaiah.
Another point that scholars have debated is the use of as a translation for the Hebrew . Old Testament scholar James Barr has been critical of etymological arguments that refers to "the community called by God to constitute his People". Kyriakoula Papademetriou explains:
New Testament Greek
The authors of the New Testament follow the Septuagint translations for over half their quotations from the Old Testament.
The "historical present" tense is a term used for present tense verbs that are used in some narrative sections of the New Testament to describe events that are in the past with respect to the speaker. This is seen more in works attributed to Mark and John than Luke. It is used 151 times in the Gospel of Mark in passages where a reader might expect a past tense verb. Scholars have presented various explanations for this; in the early 20th century some scholars argued that the use of the historical present tense in Mark was due to the influence of Aramaic, but this theory fell out of favor in the 1960s. Another group of scholars believed the historical present tense was used to heighten the dramatic effect, and this interpretation was favored in the New American Bible translation. In Volume II of the 1929 edition of A Grammar of the New Testament, W.F. Howard argues that the heavy use of the historical present in Herodotus and Thucydides, compared with the relatively infrequent usage by Polybius and Xenophon was evidence that heavy use of this verb tense is a feature of vernacular Koine, but other scholars have argued that the historical present can be a literary form to "denote semantic shifts to more prominent material."
Patristic Greek The term patristic Greek is sometimes used for the Greek written by the Greek Church Fathers, the Early Christian theologians in late antiquity. Christian writers in the earliest time tended to use a simple register of Koiné, relatively close to the spoken language of their time, following the model of the Bible. After the 4th century, when Christianity became the state church of the Roman Empire, more learned registers of Koiné also came to be used.Horrocks (1997: ch.5.11.)
Differences between Attic and Koine Greek Koine period Greek differs from Classical Greek in many ways: grammar, word formation, vocabulary and phonology (sound system).A concise survey of the major differences between Attic and Koine Greek can be found in Reece, Steve, "Teaching Koine Greek in a Classics Department", Classical Journal 93.4 (1998) 417–429.
Differences in grammar