How Greek Works

Alexander the Great conquered the eastern Mediterranean before he was thirty, and the empire he left behind needed one language to do business in. What emerged was a simplified, flattened, enormously useful form of Greek that everybody from Egypt to Syria could use. Its name is simply the Greek word for “common”: koine. Three hundred years later a Galilean fisherman and a Pharisee from Tarsus could both write a letter that a Roman soldier and a Greek merchant would each understand. That is the practical answer to why the New Testament is in Greek — it was the language that would travel.

For a long time scholars thought New Testament Greek was something special, a sacred dialect unlike anything else, since it did not match the polished literary Greek of the classical authors. Then, beginning in the 1890s, archaeologists started pulling wastepaper out of Egyptian rubbish heaps — private letters, tax receipts, shopping lists, a soldier writing home for money. The Greek in the rubbish was the Greek of the New Testament. Adolf Deissmann made the case, and it changed the field permanently: the New Testament is not written in a holy dialect. It is written in the language of ordinary people, which is a far more interesting fact about it.

And it did not arrive empty. For two centuries before Christ, Greek-speaking Jews had already been translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek — the version called the Septuagint — and in doing so they had to find Greek words to carry Hebrew ideas. That translation is the bridge. When the New Testament says doxafor glory, the word had already been bent by the Septuagint to carry the Hebrew sense of weight and splendour rather than the ordinary Greek sense of an opinion. Most of the New Testament's quotations of the Old Testament come from this Greek version, not from the Hebrew.

Greek has a word for “the” and no word for “a.” It appears about twenty thousand times in the New Testament, which makes it far and away the most common word in the book — and unlike English, Greek can put it in front of almost anything: a name, an infinitive, a whole clause. So the interesting question is rarely “why is the article there?” It is usually “why is it notthere?”

The most discussed sentence in the New Testament turns on exactly that.

In the Greek, the second clause has the article before God: theGod, the Father, the one the Word was with. The third clause does not — and it also puts “God” first in the sentence, ahead of the verb. John wrote: θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος — literally “God was the Word.”

Two things follow, and both matter. First, John did notwrite “the God was the Word,” which would have made the Word and the Father the same person and collapsed the distinction the previous clause just drew. Second, the missing article does not make it “a god.” In Greek, a noun standing before the verb in this construction regularly drops the article while remaining fully definite or — more to the point here — fully qualitative: it is describing what the Word is by nature. That is the standard grammatical finding, and it is why nearly every English translation reads “the Word was God.”

In English, word order carries the grammar. “The dog bit the man” and “the man bit the dog” use the same words and mean opposite things, because English tells you who did what by where the words sit. Greek does not need word order for that job — the ending on each noun already says whether it is the subject or the object. Which means the writer can put the words in any order he likes, purely for effect.

The general principle is simple enough to use: what comes first is usually what is loudest. John 1:1c puts “God” at the front of its clause, and the whole weight of the sentence lands there. Hebrews opens with a cascade of clauses that hold the subject back. Paul routinely fronts the word he is about to argue from.

English translators have almost no way to reproduce this. They can add an italic, or a “yes, even”, or nothing at all. Most often they do nothing, because English word order is not theirs to spend. So when a commentary tells you a word is emphatic in the Greek, this is usually the observation being made — and it is a modest, checkable one.

Greek builds new words by bolting old ones together, and it does it constantly — a preposition on the front of a verb, two nouns fused, a prefix stacked on a prefix. English does a little of this (understand, overcome, foreknowledge), Greek does it everywhere, and the New Testament writers use it freely.

It genuinely helps to see the parts. The word for church is built from “out” and “called”; the word Jesus uses for the Spirit is built from “alongside” and “called”; the word for fellowship comes from the word for “common.”

And here is the trap, because this is where it is set. A compound word means what speakers use it to mean, not what its parts add up to. By New Testament times ekklesiawas the ordinary Greek word for any assembly — a town meeting in Acts 19 is called one, and nobody in it had been called out of anything. “The called-out ones” is a sermon built from the pieces, not a report of what the word did. Test it in English: a butterfly is not a fly made of butter, and a pineapple involves neither.