A GRAMMAR OF
NEW TESTAMENT GREEK
BY
JAMES HOPE MOULTON
M.A. (CANTAB.), D.LIT. (LOND.)
LATE FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE,
GREENWOOD
PROFESSOR OF HELLENISTIC GREEK AND INDO-EUROPEAN
PHILOLOGY IN THE
TUTOR IN NEW TESTAMENT LANGUAGE AND
LITERATURE
VOL. I
PROLEGOMENA
THIRD EDITION
WITH CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS
Digitized by Ted Hildebrandt,
March 2006
1908
IN PIAM MEMORIAM
PATRIS
LABORVM
HERES DEDICO
PREFACE.
THE
call for a second edition of this work within six or seven
months
of its first appearance gives me a welcome opportunity
of
making a good many corrections and additions, without
altering
in any way its general plan. Of the scope of these new
features
I shall have something to say later; at this point I
have
to explain the title-page, from which certain words have
disappeared,
not without great reluctance on my part. The
statement
in the first edition that the book was "based on
W.
F. Moulton's edition of G. B. Winer's Grammar," claimed
for
it connexion with a work which for thirty-five years had
been
in constant use among New Testament students in this
country
and elsewhere. I should hardly have yielded this
statement
for excision, had not the suggestion come from one
whose
motives for retaining it are only less strong than my
own.
Sir John Clark, whose kindness throughout the progress
of
this work it is a special pleasure to acknowledge on such
an
opportunity, advised me that misapprehension was fre-
quently
occurring with those whose knowledge of this book
was
limited to the title. Since the present volume is entirely
new,
and does not in any way follow the lines of its great
predecessor
it seems better to confine the history of the
undertaking
to the Preface, and take sole responsibility. I
have
unhappily no means of divining what judgement either
Winer
or his editor would have passed on my doctrines; and
it
is therefore, perhaps, due to Pietat
that I should drop what
Pietat mainly prompted.
It is now forty years since my
father, to whose memory
this
book is dedicated, was invited by Messrs T. & T. Clark
to
translate and edit G. B. Winer's epoch-making Grammatik
des neutestamentliehen
Spraehidioms.
The proposal originated
with
Bishop Ellicott, afterwards Chairman of the New Testa-
vii
viii PREFACE.
ment
Revision Company, and the last survivor of a band of
workers
who, while the following pages were in the press,
became
united once more. Dr Ellicott had been in corre-
spondence
on biblical matters with the young Assistant Tutor
at
the Wesleyan Theological College,
estimate
of his powers was shown first by the proposal as to
Winer,
and not long after by the Bishop's large use of my
father's
advice in selecting new members of the Revision
Company.
Mr Moulton took his place in the
Chamber
in 1870, the youngest member of the Company;
and
in the same year his edition of Winer appeared. My
brother's
Life of our father (Isbister, 1899) gives an account
of
its reception. It would not be seemly for me to enlarge
on
its merits, and it would be as superfluous as unbecoming.
I
will only allow myself the satisfaction of quoting a few
words
from one who may well be called the greatest New
Testament
scholar this country has seen for generations. In
giving
his
Dr
Hort said (Romans and Ephesians, p.
71):—
Winer's Grammar of the New
Testament, as translated
and enlarged by Dr Moulton, stands
far above every
other for this purpose. It does not
need many minutes
to learn the ready use of the
admirable indices, of
passages and of subjects: and when
the book is con-
sulted in this manner, its extremely
useful contents
become in most cases readily
accessible. Dr Moulton's
references to the notes of the best
recent English com-
mentaries are a helpful addition.
In 1875 Dr Moulton was transferred
to
charged
by his Church with the heavy task of building up
from
the foundation a great Public School. What time a
Head
Master could spare to scholarship was for many years
almost
entirely pledged to the New Testament and Apocrypha
Revision.
Naturally it was not possible to do much to his
Grammar
when the second edition was called for in 1877.
The
third edition, five years later, was even less delayed for
the
incorporation of new matter; and the book stands now,
in
all essential points, just as it first came from its author's
pen.
Meanwhile the conviction was growing that the next
PREFACE.
edition
must be a new book. Winer's own last edition,
though
far from antiquated, was growing decidedly old;
its
jubilee is in fact celebrated by its English descendant
of
to-day. The very thoroughness of Winer's work had made
useless
for the modern student many a disquisition against
grammatical
heresies which no one would now wish to drag
from
the lumber-room. The literature to which Winer
appealed
was largely buried in inaccessible foreign periodicals.
And
as the reputation of his editor grew, men asked for a
more
compact, better arranged, more up-to-date volume, in
which
the ripest and most modern work should no longer be
stowed
away in compressed notes at the foot of the page.
Had
time and strength permitted, Dr Moulton would have
consulted
his most cherished wish by returning to the work
of
his youth and rewriting his Grammar as an independent
book.
But "wisest Fate said No." He chose his junior col-
league,
to whom he had given, at first as his pupil, and
afterwards
during years of University training and colleague-
ship
in teaching, an insight into his methods and principles,
and
at least an eager enthusiasm for the subject to which he
had
devoted his own life. But not a page of the new book
was
written when, in February 1898, "God's finger touched
him,
and he slept."
Since heredity does not suffice to
make a grammarian,
and
there are many roads by which a student of New Testa-
ment
language may come to his task, I must add a word
to
explain in what special directions this book may perhaps
contribute
to the understanding of the inexhaustible subject
with
which it deals. Till four years ago, my own teaching
work
scarcely touched the Greek Testament, classics and com-
parative
philology claiming the major part of my time. But
I
have not felt that this time was ill spent as a prepara-
tion
for the teaching of the New Testament. The study of
the
Science of Language in general, and especially in the field
of
the languages which are nearest of kin to Greek, is well
adapted
to provide points of view from which new light may
be
shed on the words of Scripture. Theologians, adepts in
criticism,
experts in early Christian literature, bring to a task
like
this an equipment to which I can make no pretence.
But
there are other studies, never more active than now,
PREFACE.
which
may help the biblical student in unexpected ways.
The
life-history of the Greek language has been investi-
gated
with minutest care, not only in the age of its glory,
but
also throughout the centuries of its supposed senility
and
decay. Its syntax has been illuminated by the com-
parative
method; and scholars have arisen who have been
willing
to desert the masterpieces of literature and trace the
humble
development of the Hellenistic vernacular down to
its
lineal descendant in the vulgar tongue of the present day.
Biblical
scholars cannot study everything, and there are some
of
them who have never heard of Brugmann and Thumb.
It
may be some service to introduce them to the side-lights
which
comparative philology can provide.
But I hope this book may bring to
the exegete material
yet
more important for his purpose, which might not otherwise
come
his way. The immense stores of illustration which have
been
opened to us by the discoveries of Egyptian papyri, ac-
cessible
to all on their lexical side in the brilliant Bible Studies
of
Deissmann, have not hitherto been systematically treated
in
their bearing on the grammar of New Testament Greek.
The
main purpose of these Prolegomena has
accordingly been
to
provide a sketch of the language of the New Testament as
it
appears to those who have followed Deissmann into a new
field
of research. There are many matters of principle need-
ing
detailed discussion, and much new illustrative material
from
papyri and inscriptions, the presentation of which will, I
hope,
be found helpful and suggestive. In the present volume,
therefore,
I make no attempt at exhaustiveness, and of ten
omit
important subjects on which I have nothing new to say.
By
dint of much labour on the indices, I have tried to provide
a
partial remedy for the manifold inconveniences of form
which
the plan of these pages entails. My reviewers en-
courage
me to hope that I have succeeded in one cherished
ambition,
that of writing a Grammar which can be read.
The
fascination of the Science of Language has possessed me
ever
since in boyhood I read Max Muller's incomparable
Lectures; and I have made it my
aim to communicate what
I
could of this fascination before going on to dry statistics
and
formulae. In the second volume I shall try to present
as
concisely as I can the systematic facts of Hellenistic acci-
PREFACE. xi
dence
and syntax, not in the form of an appendix to a
grammar
of classical Greek, but giving the later language
the
independent dignity which it deserves. Both Winer
himself
and the other older scholars, whom a reviewer thinks
I
have unduly neglected, will naturally bulk more largely
than
they can do in chapters mainly intended to describe
the
most modern work. But the mere citation of authori-
ties,
in a handbook designed for practical utility, must
naturally
be subordinated to the succinct presentation of
results.
There will, I hope, be small danger of my readers'
overlooking
my indebtedness to earlier workers, and least
of
all that to my primary teacher, whose labours it is
my
supreme object to preserve for the benefit of a new
generation.
It remains to perform the pleasant
duty of acknowledging
varied
help which has contributed a large proportion of any-
thing
that may be true or useful in this book. It would be
endless
were I to name teachers, colleagues, and friends in
tracted
debts of those manifold and intangible kinds which
can
only be summarised in the most inadequate way: no
Cantab
who has lived as long within that home of exact
science
and sincere research, will fail to understand what I
fail
to express. Next to the
which
come from teachers and friends whom I have never
seen,
and especially those great German scholars whose labours,
too
little assisted by those of other countries, have established
the
Science of Language on the firm basis it occupies to-day.
In
fields where British scholarship is more on a level with
that
of
of
Greek classical lore, I have also done my best to learn
what
fellow-workers east of the
common
stock. It is to a German professor,
working
upon
the material of which our own Drs Grenfell and
Hunt
have provided so large a proportion, that I owe the
impulse
which has produced the chief novelty of my work.
My
appreciation of the memorable achievement of Dr Deiss-
mann
is expressed in the body of the book; and I must
only
add here my grateful acknowledgement of the many
encouragements
he has given me in my efforts to glean
xii PREFACE.
after
him in the field he has made his own. He has now
crowned
them with the all too generous appreciations of
my
work which he has contributed to the Theologische
Literaturzeitung and the Theologische Rundschau. Another
great
name figures on most of the pages of this book.
The
services that Professor Blass has rendered to New
Testament
study are already almost equal to those he has
rendered
to classical scholarship. I have been frequently
obliged
to record a difference of opinion, though never with-
out
the inward voice whispering "impar
congresses Achilli."
But
the freshness of view which this great Hellenist brings
to
the subject makes him almost as helpful when he fails
to
convince as when he succeeds; and I have learned more
and
more from him, the more earnestly I have studied for
myself.
The name of another brilliant writer on New
Testament
Grammar, Professor Schmiedel, will figure more
constantly
in my second volume than my plan allows it to
do
in this.
The mention of the books which have
been most fre-
quently
used, recalls the need of one or two explanations
before
closing this Preface. The text which is
assumed
throughout
is naturally that of Westcott and Hort. The
principles
on which it is based, and the minute accuracy with
which
they are followed out, seem to allow no alternative to
a
grammatical worker, even if the B type of text were held
to
be only the result of second century revision. But in
frequently
quoting other readings, and especially those which
belong
to what Dr Kenyon conveniently calls the d-text,
I
follow very readily the precedent of Blass. I need not
say
that Mr Geden's Concordance has been in continual
use.
I have not felt bound to enter much into questions
of
"higher criticism." In the case of the Synoptic Gospels,
the
assumption of the "two-source hypothesis" has suggested
a
number of grammaticul points of interest. Grammar helps
to
rivet closer the links which bind together the writings of
Luke,
and those of Paul (though the Pastorals often need
separate
treatment): while the Johannine Gospel and Epistles
similarly
form a single grammatical entity. Whether the
remaining
Books add seven or nine to the tale of separate
authors,
does not concern us here; for the Apocalypse,
PREFACE. xiii
1
Peter and 2 Peter must be treated individually as much
as
Hebrews, whether the traditional authorship be accepted
or
rejected.
Last come the specific acknowledgements
of most generous
and
welcome help received directly in the preparation of this
volume.
I count myself fortunate indeed in that three
scholars
of the first rank in different lines of study have
read
my proofs through, and helped me with invaluable
encouragement
and advice. It is only due to them that I
should
claim the sole responsibility for errors which I may
have
failed to escape, in spite of their watchfulness on my
behalf.
Two of them are old friends with whom I have
taken
counsel for many years. Dr G. G. Findlay has gone
over
my work with minute care, and has saved me from
many
a loose and ambiguous statement, besides giving me the
fruit
of his profound and accurate exegesis, which students
of
his works on
Harris
has brought me fresh lights from other points of
view
and I have been particularly glad of criticism from a
specialist
in Syriac, who speaks with authority on matters
which
take a prominent place in my argument. The third
name
is that of Professor Albert Thumb, of
kindness
of this great scholar, in examining so carefully the
work
of one who is still a]gnoou<menoj t&?
prosw<p&,
cannot
be
adequately acknowledged here. Nearly every page of my
book
owes its debt either to his writings or to the criticisms
and
suggestions with which he has favoured me. At least
twice
he has called my attention to important articles in
English
which I had overlooked and in my illustrations
from
Modern Greek I have felt myself able to venture often
into
fields which might have been full of pitfalls, had I not
been
secure in his expert guidance. Finally, in the necessary
drudgery
of index-making I have had welcome aid at home.
By
drawing up the index of Scripture quotations, my mother
has
done for me what she did for my father nearly forty years
ago.
My brother, the Rev. W. Fiddian Moulton, M.A., has
spared
time from a busy pastor's life to make me the Greek
index.
To all these who have helped me so freely, and to
many
others whose encouragement and counsel has been a
constant
stimulus—I would mention especially my Man-
xiv PREFACE.
—I
tender my heartfelt thanks.
The new features of this edition are necessarily confined
within
narrow range. The Additional Notes are suggested
by
my own reading or by suggestions from various reviewers
and
correspondents, whose kindness I gratefully acknowledge.
A
new lecture by Professor Thumb, and reviews by such
scholars
as Dr Marcus Dods, Dr H. A. A. Kennedy, and Dr
Souter,
have naturally provided more material than I can at
present
use. My special thanks are due to Mr H. Scott, of
Oxton,
two
or three complicated numerical computations in the body
of
the book, and sent me unsolicited some corrections and
additions,
for which the reader will add his gratitude to
mine.
As far as was possible, the numerous additions to the
Indices
have been worked in at their place; but some pages
of
Addenda have been necessary, which will not, I hope,
seriously
inconvenience the reader. The unbroken kindness of
my
reviewers makes it needless for me to reply to criticisms
here.
I am tempted to enlarge upon one or two remarks in the
learned
and helpful Athenaeum review, but
will confine myself
to
a comment on the "awkward results " which the writer
anticipates
from the evidence of the papyri as set forth in my
work.
My Prolegomena, he says, "really
prove that there can
be
no grammar of New Testament Greek, and that the grammar
of
the Greek in the New Testament is one and the same with
the
grammar of the 'common Greek' of the papyri." I agree
with
everything except the "awkwardness" of this result
for
me. To call this book a Grammar of the 'Common'
Greek,
and enlarge it by including phenomena which do
not
happen to be represented in the New Testament, would
certainly
be more scientific. But the practical advantages of
confining
attention to what concerns the grammatical inter-
pretation
of a Book of unique importance, written in a language
which
has absolutely no other literature worthy of the name,
need
hardly be laboured here, and this foreword is already
long
enough. I am as conscious as ever of the shortcomings
of
this book when placed in the succession of, one which has
so
many associations of learning and industry, of caution and
flawless
accuracy. But I hope that its many deficiencies may
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xv
not
prevent it from leading its readers nearer to the meaning
of
the great literature which it strives to interpret. The
new
tool is certain not to be all its maker fondly wished it
to
be; but from a vein so rich in treasure even the poorest
instrument
can hardly fail to bring out nuggets of pure gold.
J. H. M.
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
As
it is not yet three years since this book first appeared,
I
am spared the necessity of introducing very drastic change.
Several
new collections of papyri have been published, and
other
fresh material, of which I should have liked to avail
myself
more fully. But the alterations and additions have
been
limited by my wish not to disturb the pagination.
Within
this limit, however, I have managed to bring in a
large
number of small changes-removing obscurities, correcting
mistakes,
or registering a change of opinion; while, by the use
of
blank spaces, or the cutting down of superfluities, I have
added
very many fresh references. For the convenience of
readers
who possess former editions, I add below1 a note of
the
pages on which changes or additions occur, other than
those
that are quite trifling. No small proportion of my
time
has been given to the Indices. Experience has shown
that
I had planned the Greek Index on too small a scale.
In
the expansion of this Index, as also for the correction of
many
statistics in the body of the book, I have again to
acknowledge
with hearty thanks the generous help of Mr
1 See pp. xii.,
xx.-xxiii., 4, 7, 8, 10, 13-17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 36, 38, 40,
41.
43, 45-50, 52-56, 64, 65, 67-69, 76-81, 86, 87, 93, 95-99, 101, 105, 107,
110,
113-115, 117, 119-121, 123, 125, 129, 130, 134, 135, 144, 145, 150, 156, 159,
161-163,
167, 168, 174, 176-179, 181, 185, 187, 188, 191;193-196, 198, 200, 204,
205,
214, 215, 223-225, 227-231, 234-237, 239-211, 213-249. Pp. 260-265
have
many alterations, Index iii a few. Index ii and the Addenda are new.
xvi NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
H.
Scott. To the kindness of many reviewers and corre-
spondents
I must make a general acknowledgement for the
help
they have given me. One debt of this kind, however,
I
could not omit to mention, due to a learned member of
my
own College, who is working in the same field. The
Accidence
of Mr H. St. J. Thackeray's Septuagint Grammar
is
now happily far advanced towards publication; and I have
had
the privilege of reading it in MS, to my own great
profit.
I only wish I could have succeeded in my endeavour
to
provide ere now for my kind critics an instalment of the
systematic
grammar to which this volume is intended to be
an
introduction. It is small comfort that Prof. Schmiedel
is
still in the middle of the sentence where he left off ten
years
ago. The irreparable loss that Prof. Blass's death
inflicts
on our studies makes me more than ever wishful
that
Dr Schmiedel and his new coadjutor may not keep us
waiting
long.
Some important fields which I might
have entered have
been
pointed out by Prof. S. Dickey, in the Princeton Theological
Review
for Jan. 1908, p. 151. Happily, I need not be
exhaustive
in Prolegomena, though the temptation
to rove
further
is very strong. There is only one topic on which
I
feel it essential to enlarge at present, touching as it does
my
central position, that the New Testament was written
in
the normal Koinh< of the Empire, except for certain parts
where
over-literal translation from Semitic originals affected
its
quality. I must not here defend afresh the general thesis
against
attacks like that of Messrs Conybeare and Stock,
delivered
in advance in their excellent Selections
from the
Septuagint, p. 22 (1905), or Dr Nestle's review of my book in
the
Berliner Philologische Wochenschrift
for December 8, 1906.
There
are many points in this learned and suggestive review
to
which I hope to recur before long. But there is one new
line
essayed by some leading critics of Deissmannism—if
I
may coin a word on an obvious analogy—which claims
a
few words here. In the first additional note appended to
my
second edition (p. 242, below), I referred to the evidence
for
a large Aramaic-speaking Jewish population in
anticipated
the possibility that "Hebraists" might interpret
our
parallels from the papyri as Aramaisms of home growth,
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION. xvii
As
this argument had not yet been advanced, I did not offer
an
answer. But simultaneously Prof. Swete was bringing out
his
monumental Commentary on the Apocalypse; and I
found
on p. cxx that the veteran editor of the LXX was dis-
posed
to take this very line. The late Dr H. A. Redpath also
wrote
to me, referring to an article of his own in the American
Journal of Theology for January 1903, pp.
10 f., which I should
not
have overlooked. With two such authorities to support
this
suggestion, I cannot of course leave the matter as it
stands
in the note referred to. Fuller discussion I must defer,
but
I may point out that our case does not rest on the papyri
alone.
Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that we
have
no right to delete from the list of Hebraisms uses for
which
we can only quote Egyptian parallels, such as the use
of
meta< referred to on p. 246. There will still remain a
multitude
of uses in which we can support the papyri from
vernacular
inscriptions of different countries, without encoun-
tering
any probability of Jewish influence. Take, for example,
the
case of instrumental e]n, where the Hebrew b;
has
naturally
been
recognised by most scholars in the past. I have asserted
(p.
12) that Ptolemaic exx. of e]n maxai<r^ (Tb P 16 al.) rescue
Paul's
e]n r[a<bd& from this category: before their discovery
Dr
Findlay (EGT on 1 Co 4 21) cited Lucian, Dial. Mort.
xxiii.
3. Now let us suppose that the Egyptian official who
wrote
Tb P 16 was unconsciously using an idiom of the
Ghetto,
and that Lucian's Syrian origin—credat
Iudaeus.
was
peeping out in a reminiscence of the nursery. We shall
still
be able to cite examples of the reckless extension
of
e]n
in Hellenistic of other countries; and we shall find
that
the roots of this particular extension go down deep into
classical
uses loquendi: see the quotations in
Kuhner-Gerth
i.
465, and especially note the Homeric e]n o]fqalmoi?si
Fide<sqai (Il. i. 587 al.) and e]n puri> kai<ein (Il. xxiv. 38),
which
are quite near enough to explain the development.
That
some Biblical uses of e]n go beyond even the generous
limits
of Hellenistic usage, neither Deissmann nor I seek to
deny
(see p. 104). But evidence accumulates to forbid my
allowing
Semitisin as a vera causa for the
mass of Biblical
instances
of e]n
in senses which make the Atticist stare and
gasp.
And on the general question I confess myself uncon-
xviii NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
vinced
that Egyptian Greek differs materially from that
current
in the Empire as a whole, or that the large Jewish
population
left their stamp on the language of Greeks or
bilingual
Egyptians in the Delta, any more than the perhaps
equally
large proportion of Jews in
speech
of our
of
argument which I personally believe to be sound, but I do
not
press it here—the dogma of Thumb (see pp. 17 n. and
94
below), that a usage native in Modern Greek is ipso facto
no
Semitism. It has been pressed by Psichari in his valuable
Essai
sur le grec de la Septante (1908). But I have already
overstepped
the limits of a Preface, and will only express
the
earnest hope that the modest results of a laborious
revision
may make this book more helpful to the great
company
of Biblical students whom it is my ambition to
serve.
J.
H. M.
CONTENTS.
------------------
Chap.
Page
I.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 1
II.
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON" GREEK 22
III.
NOTES ON THE ACCIDENCE 42
IV.
SYNTAX: THE NOUN 57
V.
ADJECTIVES, PRONOUNS, PREPOSITIONS 77
VI.
THE VERB: TENSES AND MODES OF ACTION 108
VII.
THE VERB: VOICE 152
VIII.
THE VERB: THE MOODS 164
IX.
THE INFINITIVE AND PARTICIPLE 202
ADDITIONAL NOTES 233
ADDITIONAL NOTES TO THE SECOND EDITION 242
I. INDEX TO QUOTATIONS 250
II. INDEX OF GREEK WORDS AND FORMS 266
III. INDEX OF SUBJECTS 278
ADDENDA TO INDICES 290
ABBREVIATIONS.
-------------------------
ABBREVIATIONS
for the names of Books of Scripture will explain them-
selves.
In the OT and Apocrypha the names of the Books follow the
English
RV (except Ca for Song of Songs), as also do the numbers for
chapter
and verse: the LXX numbering, where it differs, is added within
brackets.
Centuries are denoted iii/13 B.C., ii/A.D., etc., except when an exact date
is
given. Where the date may fall within wider limits, the notation
is
ii/i B.C., iv/v A.D., etc. Where papyri or inscriptions are not dated,
it
may generally be taken that no date is given by the editor.
The abbreviations for papyri and
inscriptions are given in Index I (c)
and
(d), pp. 251 ff. below, with the full titles of the collections quoted.
The ordinary abbreviations for MSS,
Versions, and patristic writers
are
used in textual notes.
Other abbreviations will, it is
hoped, need no explanation: perhaps
MGr
for Modern Greek should be mentioned. It should be observed
that
references are to pages, unless otherwise stated: papyri and inscrip-
tions
are generally cited by number. In all these documents the usual
notation
is followed, and the original spelling preserved.
Abbott
JG= Johannine Grammar, by E. A.
Abbott.
Abbott—see
Index I (e) iii.
AJP=American Journal of
Philology, ed. B. L. Gildersleeve,
1880 ft.
Archiv—see Index I (c).
Audollent—see
Index I (c).
BCH— see Index I (c).
Blass=
Grammar of NT Greek, by F. Blass. Second English edition,
tr. H. St J. Thackeray,
by the addition of pp. 306-333.)
Sometimes the reference is to notes
in Blass's Acta Apostolorum (Gottingen 1895): the context will
make it clear.
Brugmann
Dist.= Die distributiven u. d.
kollektiven Numeralia der idg.
Sprachen, by K. Brugmann. (Abhandl. d. K.
Second edition,
Buttmann=
Grammar of New Testament Greek, by A. Buttmaun.
English edition by J. H. Thayer,
xxi
xxii ABBREVIATIONS.
BZ= Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, ed. K. Krumbacher,
Cauer—see
Index I (c).
CGT=
CR= Classical Review
(London 1887 ff.). Especially reference is made
to the writer's collection of forms
and syntactical examples from the
papyri, in CR xv. 31-38 and 434-442
(Feb. and Dec. 1901), and
xviii. 106-112 and 151-155 (March
and April 1904—to be continued).
CQ = Classical Quarterly.
Dalman
Words= The Words of Jesus, by G.
Dalman. English edition,
tr. D. M. Kay,
Dalman
Gramm.= Grammatik des judisch-palastinischen
Aramaisch, by
G. Dalman,
DB=Dictionary of the
Bible, edited by J. Hastings. 5 vols.,
1898-1904.
Deissmann
BS= Bible Studies, by G. A.
Deissmann. English edition,
including Bibelstudien and Neue
Bibelstudien, tr. A. Grieve,
1901.
Deissmann
In Christo =Die Die neutestamentliche
Formel "in Christo Jesu,"
by G. A. Deissmann,
Delbruck
Grundr.= Grundriss der vergleichenden
Grammatik der
indogermanischen Sprachen, by K.
Brugmann and B. Delbruck:
Dritter Band, Vergleichende Syntax,
by Delbruck, Strassburg 1893-
1900. (References to Brugmann's
part, on phonology and morphology,
are given to his own abridgement, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik,
1904, which has also an abridged
Comparative Syntax.)
Dieterich
Unters.=Untersuchungen zur Geschichte
der griechischen
Sprache, von der hellenistischen
Zeit bis zum 10. Jahrh. n. Chr., by
K. Dieterich,
DLZ= Deutsche
Literaturzeitung,
EB=Encyclopaedia Biblica,
edited by T. K. Cheyne and J. S. Black.
4 vols.,
EGT=Expositor's Greek
Testament, edited by W. Robertson Nicoll.
4 vols. (vol. iv. not yet
published),
Exp B=Expositor's Bible,
edited by W. R. Nicoll. 49 vols.,
1887-1898.
Expos= The Expositor, edited
by W. R. Nicoll. Cited by series, volume,
and page.
Exp T= The Expository Times,
edited by J. Hastings.
Gildersleeve Studies= Studies in Honor of
Professor Gildersleeve,
Gildersleeve
Synt. = Syntax of Classical Greek, by
B. L. Gildersleeve and
C. W. E. Miller. Part i,
Giles
Manual 2=A Short Manual of
Comparative Philology for classical
students, by P. Giles. Second
edition,
W. W. Goodwin. Third edition,
Goodwin
Greek Gram. = A Greek Grammar, by W.
W. Goodwin.
1894.
Grimm-Thayer
=Grimm's Wilke's Clavis Novi Testamenti,
translated and
ABBREVIATIONS. xxiii
enlarged by J. H. Thayer, as "
A Greek-English Lexicon of the New
Testament."
Hatzidakis
= Einleitung in die neugriechische Grammatik, by G. N.
Hatzidakis.
Hawkins
HS= Howe Synopticce, by J. C.
Hawkins.
HR=
A Concordance to the Septuagint, by E. Hatch and H. A. Redpath.
IMA—see Index I (c).
Indog. Forsch.= Indogermanische
Forschungen, edited by K. Brugmann
and. W. Streitberg. Strassburg 1892
Jannaris
HG= A Historical Greek Grammar, by A.
N. Jannaris.
1897.
JBL =Journal of Biblical
Literature.
JHS—see Index I (c).
JTS =Journal of Theological
Studies.
Julicher
Introd.=Introduction to the New
Testament, by A. Julicher.
English edition, tr. by J. P. Ward,
Kalker=Quaestiones
de elocutione Polybiana, by F. Kaelker. In Leipziger
Studien
III.. ii., 1880.
Kuhner
3, or Kuhner-Blass, Kuhner-Gerth =Ausfuhrliche Grammatik der
griechischen Sprache, by R. Kuhner.
Third edition, Elementar-und
Formenlehre, by F. Blass. 2 vols.,
B. Gerth. 2 vols., 1898, 1904.
Kuhring
Praep. = De Praepusitionum Graec. in
chards Aegyptiis usu, by
W. Kuhring.
KZ=Kuhn’s Zeitschrift fur
vergleichende Sprachforschung.
LS=A Greek-English
Lexicon, by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott. Eighth
edition,
Mayser=
Grammatik der gr. Papyri aus der Ptolemilerzeit, by
Meisterhans
3= Grammatik der attischen Inschriften, by K. Meisterhans.
Third edition by E. Schwyzer (see p.
29 n.),
MG=Concordance
to the Greek Testament, by W. F. Moulton and A. S.
Geden.
Milligan-Moulton
Commentary on the Gospel of
and W. F. Moulton.
Mithraslit.—see
Index I (4
Monro
HG= Homeric Grammar, by D. B. Monro.
Second edition,
Nachmanson=Laute
and Formen der Magnetischen Inschriften, by E.
Nachmanson, Upsala 1903.
Ramsay
Paul= Paul the Traveller and Roman
Citizen, by W. M. Ramsay
Third edition,
Ramsay
C. and B.—see Index I (e).
RE 3 = Herzog-Hauck
Realencyclopadie. (In progress.) Leipzig.
REGr=Revue des Etudes grecques.
Reinhold=De
Graecitate Patrum, by H. Reinhold.
xxiv ABBREVIATIONS.
RhM=
Riddell
= A Digest of Platonic Idioms, by J. Riddell (in his edition of
the Apology,
Rutherford
NP= The New Phrynichus, by W. G. Rutherford,
Schanz
Beitr.=Beitrage zur historischen
Syntax der griechischen Sprache,
edited by M. Schanz. Wurtzburg 1882
ff.
Schmid
Attic. = Der Atticismus in seinen
Hauptvertretern von Dionysius
von Halikarnass his auf den zweiten
Philostratus, by W. Schmid.
4 vols. and Register,
Schmidt
Jos.= De Flavii Josephi elocutione,
by W. Schmidt,
Schulze
Gr. Lat. =Graeca Latina, by W.
Schulze,
Schwyzer
Perg.= Grammatik der pergamenischen
Inschrif ten, by E.
Schweizer (see p. 29 n.),
SH=
The Epistle to the Romans, by
Fifth edition,
ThLZ=Theologische
Literaturzeitung, edited by A. Harnack and E.
Schurer,
Thumb
Hellen.= Die griechische Sprache im
Zeitalter des Hellenismus,
by A. Thumb, Strassburg 1901.
Thumb
Handb.= Handbuch der neugriechischen
Volkssprache, by A.
Thumb, Strassburg 1895.
Ti=Novum
Testamentum Graece, by C. Tischendorf. Editio octava
critica maior. 2 vols.,
Gregory, containing Prolegomena,
1894.
Viereck
SG—see Index I (c).
Viteau = Etude sur le grec du Noveau Testament, by J.
Viteau. Vol. i,
Le Verbe:
Syntaxe des Propositions, Paris 1893; vol. ii, Sujet,
Complement
et Attribut, 1896.
Volker = Syntax der griechischen Papyri. I. Der Artikel, by F.
Volker,
Votaw=
The Use of the Infinitive in Biblical Greek, by C. W. Votaw.
Wellh.=Einleitung
in die drei ersten Evangelien, by J. Wellhausen.
WH=
The New Testament in the Original Greek, by B. F. Westcott and
F. J. A. Hort. Vol. i, Text (also
ed. minor); vol. ii, Introduction.
WH
App= Appendix to WH, in vol. ii,
containing Notes on Select
Witk.
= Epistulae Privatae Graecae, ed. S. Witkowski.
WM=
A Treatise on the Grammar of New Testament Greek, regarded as
a sure basis for New Testament
Exegesis, by G. B. Winer. Trans-
lated from the German, with large
additions and full indices, by
W.
F. Moulton. Third edition,
WS=
G. B. Winer's Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Sprachidionis.
Eighth edition, newly edited by P.
W. Schinieclel,
(In progress.)
ZNTW =Zeitschrift fur die
neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, edited by
E. Preuselien.
A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
PROLEGOMENA
-----------------------
CHAPTER
I.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.
New Lights. As recently as 1895, in the opening chapter
of a beginner's manual
of New Testament
Greek,
the present writer defined the language as "Hebraic
Greek,
colloquial Greek, and late Greek." In this definition
the
characteristic features of the dialect were expressed
according
to a formula which was not questioned then by
any
of the leading writers on the subject. It was entirely
approved
by Dr W. F. Moulton, who would undoubtedly at
that
time have followed these familiar lines, had he been able
to
achieve his long cherished purpose of rewriting his English
Winer as an independent work.
It is not without impera-
tive
reason that, in this first instalment of a work in which
I
hoped to be my father's collaborator, I have been com-
pelled
seriously to modify the position he took, in view of
fresh
evidence which came too late for him to examine.
In
the second edition of the manual referred to,1 "common
Greek
" is substituted for the first element in the definition.
The
disappearance of that word "Hebraic" from its pro-
minent
place in our delineation of NT language marks a
change
in our conceptions of the subject nothing less than re-
volutionary.
This is not a revolution in theory alone. It
1 Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek, with a First Reader.
Second
Edition, 1904 (C. H. Kelly—now R. Culley).
2 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
touches
exegesis at innumerable points. It demands large
modifications
in our very latest grammars, and an overhauling
of
our best and most trusted commentaries. To write a new
Grammar,
so soon after the appearance of fresh light which
transforms
in very important respects our whole point of
view,
may seem a premature undertaking. But it must not
be
supposed that we are concerned with a revolutionary
theory
which needs time for readjusting our science to new
conditions.
The development of the Greek language, in the
period
which separates Plato and Demosthenes from our own
days,
has been patiently studied for a generation, and the
main
lines of a scientific history have been thoroughly estab-
lished.
What has happened to our own particular study is
only
the discovery of its unity with the larger science which
has
been maturing steadily all the time. "Biblical Greek"
was
long supposed to lie in a backwater: it
has now been
brought
out into the full stream of progress. It follows that
we
have now fresh material for illustrating our subject, and
a
more certain methodology for the use of material which
we
had already at hand.
"Biblical The isolated position of the Greek found
Greek." in the LXX and the NT has been the problem
dividing grammatical
students of this liter-
ature
for generations past. That the Greek Scriptures, and
the
small body of writings which in language go with
them,
were written in the Koinh<, the "common" or "Hellen-
istic"
Greek1 that superseded the dialects of the classical
period,
was well enough known. But it was most obviously
different
from the literary Koinh< of the period. It could not
be
adequately paralleled from Plutarch or Arrian, and the
Jewish
writers Philo and Josephus2 were no more helpful
than
their "profane" contemporaries. Naturally the pecu-
liarities
of Biblical Greek came to be explained from its own
conditions.
The LXX was in "translation Greek," its syntax
determined
perpetually by that of the original Hebrew.
Much
the same was true of large parts of the NT, where
1 I shall use the terms Hellenistic, Hellenist, and Hellenism throughout for
the
Greek of the later period, which had become coextensive with Western
civilisation.
2 See below, p. 233.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 3
translation
had taken place from an original Aramaic. But
even
where this was not the case, it was argued, the writers
used
Greek as foreigners, Aramaic thought underlying Greek
expression.
Moreover, they were so familiar with the LXX
that
its idiosyncrasies passed largely into their own style,
which
accordingly was charged with Semitisms from two dis-
tinct
sources. Hence this "Judaic" or "Biblical" Greek, this
"language
of the Holy Ghost,"1 found in the sacred writings
and
never profaned by common use. It was a phenomenon
against
which the science of language could raise no a priori
objection.
The Purist, who insisted on finding parallels in
classical
Greek literature for everything in the Greek NT,
found
his task impossible without straining language to the
breaking-point.
His antagonist the Hebraist went absurdly
far
in recognising Semitic influence where none was really
operative.
But when a grammarian of balanced judgement
like
G. B. Winer came to sum up the bygone controversy, he
was
found admitting enough Semitisms to make the Biblical
Greek
essentially an isolated language still.
Greek Papyri: It is just this
isolation which the new
Deissmann. evidence comes in to destroy.a The Greek
papyri of
novel;
but their importance for the historical study of the
language
did not begin to be realised until, within the last
decade
or so, the explorers began to enrich us with an output
of
treasure which has been perpetually fruitful in surprises.
The
attention of the classical world has been busy with the
lost
treatise of Aristotle and the new poets Bacchylides and
Herodas,
while theologians everywhere have eagerly dis-
cussed
new "Sayings of Jesus." But even these last must
yield
in importance to the spoil which has been gathered
from
the wills, official reports, private letters, petitions,
accounts,
and other trivial survivals from the rubbish-heaps
of
antiquity.b They
were studied by a young investigator of
genius,
at that time known only by one small treatise on the
Pauline
formula e]n Xrist&?, which to those who read it now
shows
abundantly the powers that were to achieve such
1 So Cremer, Biblico-Theological Lexicon of NT Greek,
p. iv (E. T.), follow-
ing
Rothe. (Cited by Thumb, Hellenismus
181.1 [a b See p. 242.
4 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
splendid
pioneer work within three or four years. Deiss-
mann's
Bibelstudien appeared in 1895, his Neue Bibelstudien1
in
1897. It is needless to describe how
these lexical researches
in
the papyri and the later inscriptions proved that hundreds
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
spoken Greek, excluded from literature by the nice
canons
of Atticising taste. Professor Deissmann dealt but
briefly
with the grammatical features of this newly-discovered
Greek;
but no one charged with the duty of editing a Gram-
mar
of NT Greek could read his work without seeing that a
systematic
grammatical study in this field was the indis-
pensable
equipment for such a task. In that conviction the
present
writer set himself to the study of the collections
which
have poured with bewildering rapidity from the busy
workshops
of
conspicuous.
The lexical gleanings after Deissmann which
these
researches have produced, almost entirely in documents
published
since his books were written, have enabled me
to
confirm his conclusions from independent investigation.2
A
large part of my grammatical material is collected in a
series
of papers in the Classical Review
(see p. xxi.), to which
I
shall frequently have to make reference in the ensuing
pages
as supplying in detail the evidence for the results here
to
be described.
Vernacular The new
linguistic facts now in evidence
Greek. show with startling clearness that we have
at last
before us the language in which the
apostles
and evangelists wrote. The papyri exhibit in their
writers
a variety of literary education even wider than that
observable
in the NT, and we can match each sacred author
with
documents that in respect of Greek stand on about the
same
plane. The conclusion is that "Biblical" Greek, except
where
it is translation Greek, was simply the vernacular of
daily
life.3 Men who aspired to literary fame wrote in an
1 See p. xxi. above.
2 See Expositor for April 1901, Feb. and Dec.
1903 ; and new series in 1908.
3 Cf Wellhausen (Einl. 9): "In the Gospels, spoken Greek, and indeed
Greek
spoken among the lower classes, makes its entrance into literature."
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 5
artificial
dialect, a would-be revival of the language of
in
her prime, much as educated Greeks of the present day
profess
to do. The NT writers had little idea that they
were
writing literature. 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,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef.
The
very grammar and dictionary cry out against men who
would
allow the Scriptures to appear in any other form than
that
"understanded of the people."
A Universal There is one
very striking fact brought out
Language. by the study of papyri and inscriptions which
preserve for
us the Hellenistic vernacular.
It
was a language without serious dialectic differences,
except
presumably in pronunciation. The history of this
lingua franca must be traced in a
later chapter. Here it
suffices
to point out that in the first centuries of our era
Greek
covered a far larger proportion of the civilised world
than
even English does to-day.a The well-known heroics of
Juvenal (iii. 60 f.)
Non
possum ferre, Quirites,
Graecam Urbem—,
joined
with the Greek "Ei]j
[Eauto<n"
of the Roman Emperor
and
the Greek Epistle to the Romans, serve as obvious evidence
that
a man need have known little Latin to live in
It
was not
That
the Greek then current in almost every part of the Em-
pire
was virtually uniform is at first a startling fact, and to
no
one so startling as to a student of the science of language.
Dialectic
differentiation is the root principle of that science;3
1 Cf A. S. Wilkins, Roman Education 19; SH lii ff,
2 So at least most
critics believe. Dr Sanday, however, prefers
which
suits our point equally well.
3 See, for instance, the writer's
Two Lectures on the Science of Language,
pp.
21-23.
[a See p. 242.
6 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
and
when we know how actively it works within the narrow
limits
of
parently
be suspended in the vast area covered by Hellenistic
Greek.
We shall return to this difficulty later (pp. 19-39)
for
the present we must be content with the fact that any
dialect
variation that did exist is mostly beyond the range
of
our present knowledge to detect. Inscriptions, distributed
over
the whole area, and dated with precision enough to
trace
the slow development of the vernacular as it ad-
vanced
towards Medieval and Modern Greek, present us
with
a grammar which only lacks homogeneity according
as
their authors varied in culture. As we have seen, the
papyri
of
language
seen in the NT, as well as with inscriptions like
those
of
see
how immeasurably important these conditions were for
the
growth of Christianity. The historian marks the fact
that
the Gospel began its career of conquest at the one
period
in the world's annals when civilisation was concen-
trated
under a single ruler. The grammarian adds that
this
was the only period when a single language was under-
stood
throughout the countries which counted for the history
of
that Empire. The historian and the grammarian must of
course
refrain from talking about "
be
suspected of "an apologetic bias" or "an edifying tone,"
and
that is necessarily fatal to any reputation for scientific
attainment.
We will only remark that some old-fashioned
people
are disposed to see in these facts a shmei?on in its
way
as instructive as the Gift of Tongues.
Bilingualism It is needless to observe that except in
the Greek
world, properly so called, Greek
did
not hold a monopoly.
period
of the Greek papyri is very strongly bilingual, the
mixture
of Greek and native names in the same family, and
the
prevalence of double nomenclature, often making it diffi-
cult
to tell the race of an individual A bilingual country
1 It should be noted that
in the papyri we have not to do only with
Egyptians
and Greeks. In Par P 48 (153 B.C.) there is a letter addressed to an
Arab
by two of his brothers. The editor, M. Brunet du Presle, remarks as
follows
on this:—"It is worth our while to notice the rapid diffusion of Greek,
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 7
is
vividly presented to us in the narrative of Ac 14, where
the
apostles preach in Greek and are unable to understand
the
excited populace when they relapse into Lycaonian. What
the
local Greek was like, we may gauge from such specimens
as
the touching Christian epitaph published by Mr Cronin in
JHS; 1902, p. 369 (see Exp T xiv. 430), and dated "little
if
at all later than iii/A.D." We need not develop the evidence
for
other countries: it is more to the point if we look at the
conditions
of a modern bilingual country, such as we have
at
home in the country of
tician
or preacher, visiting a place in the heart of the Princi-
pality,
could be sure of an audience, even if it were assumed that
he
would speak in English. If he did, they would understand
him.
But should he unexpectedly address them in Welsh, we
may
be very sure they would be "the more quiet"; and a
speaker
anxious to conciliate a hostile meeting would gain a
great
initial advantage if he could surprise them with the
sound
of their native tongue.1 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
in
which
indicated a wish to address them. Schurer nods, for
once,
when he calls in Paul's Aramaic speech as a witness of
the
people's ignorance of Greek.2 It does not prove even
the
"inadequate"
knowledge which he gives as the alternative
possibility
for the lower classes, if by "inadequate know-
after
Alexander's conquest, among a mass of people who in all other respects
jealously
preserved their national characteristics under foreign masters. The
papyri
show us Egyptians, Persians, Jews, and here Arabs, who do not appear
to
belong to the upper classes, using the Greek language. We must not be too
exacting
towards them in the matter of style. Nevertheless the letter which
follows
is almost irreproachable in syntax and orthography, which does not
always
happen even with men of Greek birth." If these remarks, published in
1865,
had been followed up as they deserved, Deissmann would have come
too
late. It is strange how little attention was aroused by the great collections
of
papyri at
1 These words were
written before I had read Dr T. K. Abbott's able, but
not
always conclusive, article in his volume of Essays.
On p. 164 he gives an
incident
from bilingual
T.
H. Williams tells me he has often heard Welsh teachers illustrating the
narrative
of Ac 21 40 222 in the same way: cf also A. S. Wilkins, CR ii. 142 f.
(On
Lystra, see p. 233.) 2 Jewish People, II. i. 48 (=3 II. 63).
8 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
ledge"
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.1 We have in fact a state
of things essentially the
same
as in Lystra. But the imperfect knowledge of Greek
which
may be assumed for the masses in
Lystra
is decidedly less probable for
Hellenist
Jews, ignorant of Aramaic, would be found there as
in
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.2
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 their education, like that of the
private
letters among the Egyptian papyri. But it does
not
appear that any of them used Greek as we may some-
times
find cultured foreigners using English, obviously trans-
lating
out of their own language as they go along. Even
the
Greek of the Apocalypse itself 3 does not seem to owe any
1 The evidence for the
use of Greek in
in
his Einl. in das NT, ch. ii. Cf also
Julicher in EB ii. 2007 ff. Mahaffy
(Hellenism, 130 f.) overdoes it when he
says, "Though we may believe that
in
know
that some of his last words upon the cross were in that language, yet
his
public teaching, his discussions with the Pharisees, his talk with Pontius
Pilate,
were certainly carried on in Greek." Dr Nestle misunderstands me
when
he supposes me to endorse in any way Prof. Mahaffy's exaggeration here.
It
would be hard to persuade modern scholars that Christ's public teaching
was
mainly in Greek; and I should not dream of questioning His daily use
of
Aramaic. My own view is that which is authoritatively expressed in the
remarks
of Profs. Driver and Sanday (DB iv.
583a) as to our Lord's occasional
use
of Greek. Cf Ramsay, Pauline Studies
254; CR xx. 465; Mahaffy,
Silver Age 250; Mayor, St James xlii.
2 Dr T. K. Abbott (Essays 170) points out that Justin
Martyr, brought up
near
Sichem early in ii/A.D., depends entirely on the LXX—a circumstance
which
is ignored by Mgr Barnes in his attempt to make a different use of
Justin
(JTS vi. 369). (See further below, p.
233.)
3 On Prof. Swete's
criticism here see my Preface, p. xvii.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 9
Apocalypse. of its blunders to "Hebraism." The author's
uncertain
use of cases is obvious to the most
casual
reader. In any other writer we might be tempted to
spend
time over ta>j luxni<aj in 120, where tw?n
luxniw?n is
clearly
needed: for him it is enough to say that
the
neighbouring
ou!j
may have produced the aberration. We
find
him perpetually indifferent to concord. But the less
educated
papyri give us plentiful parallels from a field where
Semitism
cannot be suspected.1 After all, we do not suspect
Shakspere
of foreign upbringing because he says "between
you
and I."2 Neither
he nor his unconscious imitators in
modern
times would say "between I and you," any more
than
the author of the Apocalypse would have said a]po> o[
ma<rtuj o[ pisto<j (15): it is only that his grammatical sense
is
satisfied when the governing word has affected the case of
one
object.3 We shall find that other peculiarities of the
writer's
Greek are on the same footing. Apart from places
where
he may be definitely translating a Semitic document,
there
is no reason to believe that his grammar would have
been
materially different had he been a native of Oxyrhynchus,
assuming
the extent of Greek education the same.4 Close to
1 See my exx. of nom. in
apposition to noun in another case, and of gender
neglected,
in CR xviii. 151. Cf also below, p.
60. ( ]
an intentional tour
de force.) Note
the same thing in the d-text of 2 Th 18,
]Ihsou? . . . didou<j (D*FG and some Latin authorities).
2 Merchant of
3 There are parallels to
this in correct English. "Drive far away the
disastrous
Keres, they who destroy " (
Greek Religion, p. 163) would not be
mended by substituting them.
4 The grammatical peculiarities
of the book are conveniently summarised
in
a few lines by Julicher, Introd. to NT,
p. 273: for a full account see the in-
troduction
to Bousset's Commentary, in the Meyer series. It may be well to
observe,
a propos of the curious Greek of Rev,
that grammar here must play a
part
in literary criticism. It will not do to appeal to grammar to prove that
the
author is a Jew: as far as that goes, lie might just as well have been a
farmer
of the Fayum. Thought and material must exclusively determine that
question.
But as that point is hardly doubtful, we pass on to a more important
inference
from the is Greek culture of this book. If its date was
95
A.D, the author cannot have written the fourth Gospel only a short time
after.
Either, therefore, we must take the earlier date for Rev, which would
allow
the Apostle to improve his Greek by constant use in a city like
where
his Aramaic would be useless; or we must suppose that someone (say,
the
author of Jn 2124) mended his grammar for him throughout the Gospel.
10 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
the
other end of the scale comes the learned Rabbi of Tarsus.
Paul, Luke, "A Hebrew, the son of Hebrews," he calls
"Hebrews." himself (Phil 35), and Zahn is no doubt
right
in inferring
that he always claimed Aramaic
as
his mother tongue. But he had probably used Greek from
childhood
with entire freedom, and during the main part of
his
life may have had few opportunities of using Aramaic at
all.
It is highly precarious to argue with Zahn from "Abba,
Father"
(Rom 815, Gal 46), 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
tongue
supplies a far more probable account of its liturgi-
cal
use among Gentile Christians.1 Finally, we have the
Gentile
Luke2 and the auctor
ad Hebraeos, both of whom
may
well have known no Aramaic at all: to the former we
must
return presently. Between these extremes the NT
writers
lie; and of them all we may assert with some con-
fidence
that, where translation is not involved, we shall find
hardly
any Greek expression used which would sound strangely
to
speakers of the Koinh< in Gentile lands.
Genuine To what extent then
should we expect
Semitisms. to find the style of Jewish Greek writers
coloured by the
influence of Aramaic or Heb-
rew?
Here our Welsh analogy helps us. Captain Fluellen is
marked
in Shakspere 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 dissociate it from Shakspere's Welsh-
man
we should probably not be struck by it as a bizarre
expression.
But why does Fluellen use it so often? Because
Otherwise,
we must join the Xwri<zontej. Dr Bartlet (in Exp T for Feb. 1905,
p.
206) puts Rev under Vespasian and assigns it to the author of Jn: he thinks
that
Prof. Ramsay's account (Seven Churches,
p. 89) does not leave sufficient
time
for the development of Greek style. We can now quote for the earlier
date
the weightiest of all English authorities: see Hort's posthumous Com-
mentary (with Sanday's half
consent in the Preface).
1 Cf Bp Chase, in Texts and Studies,
the
devout Roman Catholic's "saying Paternoster";
but Paul will not allow
even
one word of prayer in a foreign tongue without adding an instant transla-
tion.
Note that Pader is the Welsh name for
the Lord's Prayer. (See p. 233.)
2 Cf Dalman, Words. 40 f.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 11
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. For the same reason the
modern
Welshman overdoes the word "indeed." In exactly the
same
way the good Attic interjection i]dou< is used by some NT
writers,
with a frequency quite un-Attic, simply because they
were
accustomed to the constant use of an equivalent inter-
jection
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.
Occasionally,
moreover, 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. It must not be forgotten
1 Note that James uses i]dou< 6 times in his short
Epistle, Paul only 9 times
(including
one quotation) in all his writings. In Ac 1-12 it appears 16 times,
in
13-28 only 7; its rarity in the Gentile atmosphere is characteristic. It is
instructive
to note the figures for narrative as against speeches and OT quotations.
Mt
has 33 in narrative, 4 in quotations, 24 in speeches; Mk 0/1/6; Lk 16/1/40;
Ac
(1-12) 4/0/12, Ac (13-28) 1/0/6 ; Jn 0/1/3. Add that Heb has 4 OT quotations
and
no other occurrence, and Rev has no less than 26 occurrences. It is
obvious
that it was natural to Hebrews in speech, and to some of them (not
Mk
or Jn) in narrative. Luke in the Palestinian atmosphere (Lk, Ac 1-12)
employs
it freely, whether reproducing his sources or bringing in a trait of
local
character like Shakspere with Fluellen. Hort (Ecclesia, p. 179) says i]dou<
is
"a phrase which when writing in his own person and sometimes even in
speeches
[Luke] reserves for sudden and as it were providential interpositions."
He
does not appear to include the Gospel, to which the remark is evidently in-
applicable,
and this fact somewhat weakens its application to Ac 1-12. But
with
this reservation we may accept the independent testimony of Hort's instinct
to
our conclusion that Luke when writing without external influences upon
him
would use i]dou?
as a Greek would use it. The same is true of Paul. Let
me
quote in conclusion a curiously close parallel, unfortunately late (iv/v A.D.)
to
Lk 1316: BU 948 (a letter) ginw<skein
e]qe<lw o!ti ei#pen o[ pragmateuth>j o!ti h[ mh<thr
sou a]sqeni?,
ei]dou?, de<ka tri?j mh?nej. (See p. 70.) It weakens the case for
Aramaism
(Wellh. 29).
2 Deissmann, BS 194. Poreu<omai is thus used in 1 Pet 43
al. Cf stoixei?n.
12 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
that
the instrumental e]n in e]n maxai<r^ (Lk 2249) and e]n
r[a<bd&
(1
Co 421) was 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
Grammatical A very
important distinction must be
and Lexical drawn at this point between Semitisms con-
cerning
vocabulary and those which affect
syntax.
The former have occupied us mainly so far, and
they
are the principal subject of Deissmann's work. Gram-
matical Semitisms are a much
more serious matter. We
might
indeed range under this head all sins against native
Greek
style and idiom, such as most NT books will show.
Co-ordination
of clauses with the simple kai<,2 instead of the
use
of participles or subordinate clauses, is a good example.
It
is quite true that a Hebrew would find this style come
natural
to him, and that an Egyptian might be more likely,
in
equal absence of Greek culture, to pile up a series of geni-
tive
absolutes. But in itself the phenomenon proves nothing
more
than would a string of "ands" in an English rustic's
story--elementary
culture, and not the hampering presence
of
a foreign idiom that is being perpetually translated into
its
most literal equivalent. A Semitism which definitely
contravenes
Greek syntax is what we have to watch for.
We
have seen that a]po> ]Ihsou? Xristou? o[ ma<rtuj o[ pisto<j
does
not come into this category. But Rev 213 e]n
tai?j
h[me<raij ]Anti<paj o[ ma<rtuj. . . o{j
a]pekta<nqh
would be a
glaring
example, for it is impossible to conceive of ]Anti<paj
as
an indeclinable. The Hebraist might be supposed to
argue
that the nom. is unchanged became it would be un-
changed
(stat. abs.) in Hebrew. But no one
would seriously
imagine
the text sound: it matters little whether we mend
it
with Lachmann's conjecture ]Anti<pa or with that of the
later
copyists, who repeat ai$j after h[me<raij and drop o!j.
The
typical case of e]ge<neto h#lqe will be discussed
below;
1 Expos. vi. vii. 112; cf CR xviii. 153, and Preface, p.
xvii. above.
2 Cf Hawkins HS 120 f., on the frequency of aai in
Mk. Thumb observes
that
Kai in place of hypotaxis is found in MGr—and in Aristotle (Hellenismus
129):
here even Viteau gives way. So h#rqe kairo>j ki ] a]rrw<sthsen (Abbott 70).
The
simple parataxis of Mk 1525, Jn 435 1155, is
illustrated by the uneducated
document Par P 18, e@ti du<o h[me<raj e@xomen kai> fqa<somen ei]j Phlou<si.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 13
and
in the course of our enquiry we shall dispose of others,
like
h$j to> quga<trion au]th?j (Mk 725), which we now find
occur-
ring
in Greek that is beyond suspicion of Semitic influences.
There remain Semitisms due to
translation, from the
Hebrew
of the OT, or from Aramaic "sources" underlying
parts
of the Synoptists and Acts. The former case covers
Translation all the usages which have been supposed
Greek. to arise from over-literal rendering in the
LXX, the
constant reading of which by Hel-
lenist
Jews has unconsciously affected their Greek. In the
LXX
we may have abnormal Greek produced by the effort of
Greek-speaking
men to translate the already obsolete and
imperfectly
understood Hebrew: when the Hebrew puzzled
them,
they would often take refuge in a barbarous literalness.1
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. How far such foreign idioms
may
get into a language, we may see by examining our own.
We
have a few foreign phrases which have been literally
translated
into English, and have maintained their place
Without
consciousness of their origin: "that goes without
saying,"
or "this gives furiously to think," will serve as
examples.
Many more are retained as conscious quotations,
with
no effort to assimilate them to English idiom. "To return
to
our muttons" illustrates one kind of these barbarisms; but
there
are Biblical phrases taken over in a similar way without
sacrificing
their unidiomatic form. We must notice, however,
that
such phrases are sterile: we have only to imagine
another
verb put for saying in our version of
Cela va sans dire
to
see how it has failed to take root in our syntax.
Hebraism in The general
discussion of this important
Luke. subject may be clinched with an enquiry
into
the diction
of Luke, whose varieties of style in
the
different parts of his work form a particularly interesting
1 My illustration here
from
Introd. 458 f. Better ones may
be seen in Mr Thackeray's "Jer b" (see JTS
ix.
94). He gives me e]sqi<ein th>n tra<pezan in 2 K 1928 al—also in the Greek
additions
to Esther (C28). Was this from some Greek original of Vergil's consumere
mensas, or was it a "Biblical"
phrase perpetuated in the Biblical style?
14 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
and
important problem.1 I
restrict myself to grammatical
Hebraisms
mainly, but it will be useful to recall Dalman's
list
(Words 20 ff.) to see how far Luke is
concerned in it.
He
gives as pure Aramaisms (a) the superfluous a]feo>k or
katalipw<n and h@rcato, as more Aramaic than
Hebrew the
use
of ei#nai
with participle as a narrative tense. Either
Aramaic
or Hebrew will account for (b) the superfluous
e]lqw<n,2 kaqi<saj,
e[stw<j,
and a]nasta<j or e]gerqei<j. Pure
Hebraisms
are (c) the periphrases with pro<swpon, the use of
e]n t&? with infinitive,3 the types a]ko^?
a]kou<sete
and ble<pontej
ble<yete (see below, pp. 75 f.),
and the formulae kai> e]ge<neto,
e]la<lhsen lalw?n and a]pokriqei>j
ei#pen.4 In class (a), we find
Luke
unconcerned with the first case. The third we must
return
to (see pp. 225 ff.): suffice to say now that it has its
1 In assuming the unity
of the two books ad Theophilum, I was
quite
content
to shield myself behind Blass; but Harnack has now stepped in with
decisive
effect. The following pages will supply not a few grammatical points
to
supplement Harnack's stylistic evidence in Litice the Physician.
2 A fair vernacular
parallel in Syll.2 807 (ii/A.D.) kai>
e]sw<qh kai> e]lqw>n dhmosi<%
hu]xari<sthsen
e@mprosqen tou? dh<mou.
3
See Kalker 252, and below, p. 215. Add Par P 63 (ii/B.C.) ti<j ga>r ou!twj
e]sti>n
a]na<lhtoj (?) h} a@litroj e]n t&? logi<zesqai kai> pra<gmatoj diafora>n
eu[rei?n, o{j
ou]d ] au]to> tou? dunh<setai
sunnoei?n;
so utterly wanting in reason" (Mahaffy).
It
is of course the frequency of this
locution that is due to Semitic thought:
cf
what is said of i]dou<, above, p. 11. But see p. 249.
4 See Wellh. 16. To class
(c) I may append a note on ei]j a]pa<nthsin,
which
in Mt 2732 (d-text) and 1 Th 417 takes a genitive.
This is of course a
very
literal translation of txraq;li, which is given by HR as its original in
29
places,
as against 16 with dative. (Variants sunan., u[pant., and others are
often
occurring: I count all places where one of the primary authorities has
ei]j a]p. with gen. or dat. representing ‘’l. In addition there are a
few places
where
the phrase answers to a different original; also 1 ex. with gen. and
3
with dat. from the Apocrypha.) Luke (Ac 28 15) uses it with dat.,
and in
Mt
256 it appears absolutely, as once in LXX (1 Sa 1315).
Now this last may
be
directly paralleled in a Ptolemaic papyrus which certainly has no Semitism
—Tb
P 43 (ii/B.C.) paregenh<qhmen ei]j a]pa<nthsin (a newly arriving
magistrate).
In
BU 362 (215 A.D.) pro>j [a]]
pa<nth[sin
tou?]
h[gemo<noj has
the very gen. we want.
One
of Strack's Ptolemaic inscriptions (Archiv
iii. 129) has i!n ] ei]dh?i h{n e@sxhken
pro>j au]to>n h[ po<lij
eu]xa<riston a]pa<nthsin. It seems that the
special idea of the
word
was the official welcome of a newly arrived dignitary—an idea singularly
in
place in the NT exx. The case after it is entirely consistent with Greek
idiom,
the gen. as in our "to his
inauguration," the dat. as the case governed
by
the verb. If in the LXX the use has been extended, it is only because it
seemed
so literal a translation of the Hebrew. Note that in 1 Th 1.c. the
authorities
of the d-text
read the dat., which is I suspect better Greek. (What
has
been said applies also to ei]j u[pa<nthsin au]t&?, as in Mt 834,
Jn 1213: the two
words
seem synonymous). See also p. 242.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 15
roots
in classical Greek, and is at most only a more liberal use
of
what is correct enough, if less common. But h@rcato raises
an
interesting question. In Lk 38 we find kai>
mh> a@rchsqe
le<gein e]n e[autoi?j. Dalman (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 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 verbally
identical
verse Mt 39 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.1 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,2 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.
This conclusion, which is in harmony with our
general
impressions of his methods of using his sources,
seems
to me much more probable than to suppose that it was
he
who misread Aramaic words in the manner illustrated
by
Nestle on Lk 1141f. (Exp
T xv. 528): we may just as
well
accuse the (oral or written) translation he employed.
Passing on to Dalman's (b) class, in
which Luke is con-
cerned
equally with the other Synoptists, we may observe that
only
a very free translation would drop these pleonasms. In
a
sense they are " meaningless," just as the first verb is in "He
went and did it all the
same," or " He got up and went out,"
or
(purposely to take a parallel from the vernacular) " So he
1 But see
cites
my view without approving it. I cannot resist the conviction that
Harnack
greatly overpresses his doctrine of Luke's stylistic alterations of Q.
2 Luke "probably did
not understand Aramaic," says Julicher, Introd. 359.
So
Dalman, Words 38-41. Harnack (Luke, pp. 102 f.) observes that in ch.
1
and 2 Luke either himself translated from Aramaic sources or very freely
adapted
oral materials to literary form. He prefers the second alternative.
16 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
ups
and says." But however little additional information
they
may add—and for us at least the "stand
praying" is
not
a superfluous touch—they add a distinct nuance
to the
whole
phrase, which Luke was not likely to sacrifice when he
met
it in his translation or heard it from the au]to<ptai whose
story
he was jotting down. The same may be said of the
pleonastic
phrases which begin and end Dalman's list of
"pure
Hebraisms." In this class (c) therefore there remains
only
the construction with kai> e]ge<neto, answering to the
narrative
yhiy;va, which is (strangely enough) almost peculiar to
Luke
in the NT. 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. The
occurrences
of these respectively are for Lk 22/11/5, for
Ac
0/0/17.2 It may be added that the construction occurs
almost
always with a time clause (generally with e]n): in Lk
there
is only one exception, 1622. The phrase was clearly
therefore
temporal originally, like our "It
was in the days
of
. . . that . . ." (This is (c), but we could use the
paratactic
(a) form, or even (b), without transgressing our
idiom.)
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 descrip-
tion
which will suit the Lucan usage everywhere, except
sometimes
in the (c) class (as 1622), the only one of the three
which
has no Hebrew parallel. We must infer that the
LXX
translators used this locution as a just tolerable Greek
which
literally represented the original;3 and that Lk (and
to
a minute extent Mt and Mk) deliberately recalled the
Greek
OT by using the phrase. The (a) form is used else-
where
in the NT twice in Mk and five times in Mt, only
in
the phrase e]ge<neto o!te e]te<lesen ktl. Mt 910 has (b) and
Mk
223 has (c). There are (a) forms with e@stai, Ac 217.21 323,
Bona
926 (all OT citations); and (c) forms with gi<netai Mk 215,
1 Once (Ac 1025),
e]ge<neto tou? ei]selqei?n to>n Pe<tron.
2 Blass cites Ac 45
D for (a), and finds (b) in 57. Certainly the latter sentence
may
be thus construed (see below, p. 70); nor is it a fatal objection that the
construction
is otherwise isolated in Ac. See p. 233.
3 W. F. Moulton (WM 760
n.) gives LXX exx. for the (a) and (b) forms: the
only
approach to the (c) form is 2 Mac 316, i e . . . h#n . . .
o[rw?nta . . . titrw<skesqai.
Here
Mr Thackeray thinks h#n=e@dei, "it was impossible not to . .
."
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 17
e]a>n ge<nhtai Mt 1813, and o!pwj
mh> ge<nhtai Ac
2016. Now
in
what sense is any of this to be called "Hebraism"? It is
obvious
that (b) is a literal translation of the Hebrew, while
it
is at least grammatical as Greek, however unidiomatic.
Its
retention to a limited extent in Lk (with a single
doubtful
case in Ac), and absence elsewhere in NT (except
for
Mt 910, which is affected by the author's love for kai>
i]dou<), are best interpreted as meaning that
in free Greek
it
was rather an experiment, other constructions being
preferred
even by a writer who set himself to copy the
LXX
style. At first sight (a) would seem worse Greek still,
but
we must note that it is apparently known in MGr:1 cf
Pallis's version of Mt 111, kai> sune<bhke, sa>n te<liwse . . .,
e@fuge . . . , etc. We cannot suppose
that this is an inva-
sion
of Biblical Greek, any more than our own idiomatic
"It
happened I was at home that day." What then of (c),
which
is characteristic of Luke, and adopted by him in Ac as
an
exclusive substitute for the other two? It starts from
Greek
vernacular, beyond doubt. The normal Greek sune<bh
still
takes what represents the acc. et inf.:
sune<bh o!ti h#rqe
is
idiomatic in modern Athenian speech, against e@tuxe
na>
e@lq^ which, I am told, is commoner in the
country districts.
But
e]a>n ge<nhtai with inf. was good contemporary vernacular:
see
AP 135, BM 970, and Pap. Catt. (in Achiv 60)—all
ii/A.D.
So was gi<netai (as Mk 215): cf Par P 49 (ii/B.C.)
gi<netai
ga>r
e]ntraph?nai. From this to e]ge<neto is but a step, which
Luke
alone of NT writers seems to have taken:2 the isolated
ex.
in Mk 223 is perhaps a primitive assimilation to Lk 61.3
1 Cf Thumb, Hellenismus 123: "What appears Hebraism or Aramaism in
the
Bible must count as Greek if it shows itself as a natural development in the
MGr
vernacular." Mr Thackeray well compares asyndeta like kalw?j
poih<seij
gra<yeij in the papyri.
2 An interesting suggestion
is made by Prof. B. W. Bacon in Expos.,
April
1905,
p. 174n., who thinks that the "Semitism" may be taken over from the,
"Gospel
according to the Hebrews." The secondary character of this Gospel,
as
judged from the extant fragments, has been sufficiently proved by Dr
Adeney
(Hibbert Journal, pp. 139 ff.); but
this does not prevent our positing
an
earlier and purer form as one of Luke's sources. Bacon's quotation for this
is
after the (a) form: "Factum est
autem, cum ascendisset . . descenclit
. . ."
(No.
4 in Preuschen's collection, Antilegomena,
p. 4). The (a) form occurs in
frag.
2 of the " Ebionite Gospel" (Preuschen, p. 9).
3 Paraporeu<esqai (xALD al) may be a relic of Mk's original text.
18
A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
Conclusions as By this time we
have perhaps dealt suf-
to Semitism. ficiently with the principles involved, and may
leave
details of alleged Semitisms to their
proper
places in the grammar. We have seen that the
problem
is only complicated in the Lucan writings: else-
where
we have either pure vernacular or vernacular tempered
with
"translation Greek." In Luke, the only NT writer
except
the author of Heb to show any conscious attention to
Greek
ideas of style, we find (1) rough Greek translations
from
Aramaic left mainly as they reached him, perhaps
because
their very roughness seemed too characteristic to be
refined
away; and (2) a very limited imitation of the LXX
idiom,
as specially appropriate while the story moves in the
Jewish
world. The conscious adaptation of his own style to
that
of sacred writings long current among his readers reminds
us
of the rule which restricted our nineteenth century Biblical
Revisers
to the English of the Elizabethan age.
On the whole question, Thumb (p.
122) quotes with
approval
Deissmann's dictum that "Semitisms which are in
common
use belong mostly to the technical language of reli-
gion,"
like that of our sermons and Sunday magazines. Such
Semitisms
"alter the scientific description of the language
as
little as did a few Latinisms, or other booty from the
victorious
march of Greek over the world around the Medi-
terranean."1 In summing up thus the
issue of the long strife
over
NT Hebraisms, we fully apprehend the danger of going
too
far. Semitic thought, whose native literary dress was
necessarily
foreign to the Hellenic genius, was bound to
fall
sometimes into un-Hellenic language as well as style.
Moreover,
if Deissmann has brought us a long way, we must
not
forget the complementary researches of Dalman, which
have
opened up a new world of possibilities in the scientific
reconstruction
of Aramaic originals, and have warned us of
the
importance of distinguishing very carefully between
Semitisms
from two widely different sources. What we
can
assert with assurance is that the papyri have finally
destroyed
the figment of a NT Greek which in any
material
respect differed from that spoken by ordinary
1 Art. Hellenistisches Griechisch, in RE 3 vii. p. 633.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 19
people
in daily life throughout the Roman world. If the
natural
objection is raised that there must have been dialectic
variation
where people of very different races, scattered over
an
immense area, were learning the world language, and that
"Jewish-Greek"
is thus made an a priori certainty, we can
meet
the difficulty with a tolerably complete modern parallel.
Our
own language is to-day spoken over a far vaster area;
and
we have only to ask to what extent dialect difference
affects
the modern Weltsprache. We find that
pronuncia-
tion
and vocabulary exhaust between them nearly all the
phenomena
we could catalogue. Englishman, Welshman,
Hindu,
Colonial, granted a tolerable primary education, can
interchange
familiar letters without betraying except in
trifles
the dialect of their daily speech.a This fact should
help
us to realise how few local peculiarities can be expected
to
show themselves at such an interval in a language known
to
us solely from writing. We may add that a highly
educated
speaker of standard English, recognisable by his
intonation
as hailing from
can
no longer thus be recognised when his words are written
down.
The comparison will help us to realise the impression
made
by the traveller Paul. [a
See p. 243.
A special. N. T. There is one
general consideration which
Diction? must detain us a little at the close of
this
introductory chapter. Those who have
studied
some recent work upon Hellenistic Greek, such as
Blass's
brilliant Grammar of NT Greek, will
probably be led
to
feel that modern methods result in a considerable levelling
of
distinctions, grammatical and lexical, on which the exegesis
of
the past has laid great stress. It seems necessary there-
fore
at the outset to put in a plea for caution, lest an
exaggerated
view should be taken of the extent to which
our
new lights alter our conceptions of the NT language and
its
interpretation. We have been showing that the NT
writers
used the language of their time. But that does not
mean
that they had not in a very real sense a language of
their
own. Specific examples in which we feel bound to assert
this
for them will come up from time to time in our inquiry.
In
the light of the papyri and of MGr we are compelled to
give
up some grammatical scruples which figure largely in
20 A
GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
great
commentators like Westcott, and colour many passages
of
the RV. But it does not follow that we must promptly
obliterate
every grammatical distinction that proves to have
been
unfamiliar to the daily conversation of the first century
Egyptian
farmer. We are in no danger now of reviving
Hatch's
idea that phrases which could translate the same
Hebrew
must be equivalent to one another. The papyri have
slain
this very Euclid-like axiom, but they must not enslave us
to
others as dangerous. The NT must still be studied largely
by
light drawn from itself. Books written on the same subject
and
within the same circle must always gather some amount
of
identical style or idiom, a kind of technical terminology,
which
may often preserve a usage of earlier language, obso-
lescent
because not needed in more slovenly colloquial speech
of
the same time. The various conservatisms of our own
religious
dialect, even on the lips of uneducated people, may
serve
as a parallel up to a certain point. The comparative
correctness
and dignity of speech to which an unlettered man
will
rise in prayer, is a very familiar phenomenon, lending
strong
support to the expectation that even a]gra<mmatoi would
instinctively
rise above their usual level of exactness in
expression,
when dealing with such high themes as those
which
fill the NT. We are justified by these considerations
in
examining each NT writer's language first by itself, and
then
in connexion with that of his fellow-contributors to the
sacred
volume; and we may allow ourselves to retain the
original
force of distinctions which were dying or dead in
every-day
parlance, when there is a sufficient body of internal
evidence.
Of course we shall not be tempted to use this
argument
when the whole of our evidence denies a particular
survival
to Hellenistic vernacular: in such a case we could
only
find the locution as a definite literary revival, rarely
possible
in Luke and the writer to the Hebrews, and just
conceivable
in Paul.
Note on It seems hardly
worth while to discuss
Latinisins. in a general way the supposition that Latin
has influenced the Koinh<; of the NT. In the
borrowing
of Latin words of course we can see activity
enough,
and there are even phrases literally translated, like
labei?n to> i[kanon Ac 179; poiei?n to> i[. Mk 1515 (as early as
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. 21
Polybius);
meta> polla>j tau<taj h[me<raj Ac 15, etc. But
grammar
we must regard as another matter, in spite of such
collections
as Buttmann's (see his Index, s.v.
Latinisms) or
Thayer's
(
Prof.
Thumb's judgement (Hellenismus 152 ff.).
Romans writ-
ing
Greek might be expected to have difficulties for example
with
the article1—as I have noticed in the English efforts
of
Japanese boys at school in this country; but even of this
there
seems to be no very decisive proof. And though the
bulk
of the NT comes to us from authors with Roman names,
no
one will care to assert that Latin was the native language
of
Paul2 or Luke or Mark. Apart from lexical matters, we
may
be content with a general negative. "Of
any effective
grammatical
influence [of Latin] upon Greek there can be no
question:
at any rate I know nothing which could be
instanced
to this effect with any probability." So says Dr
Thumb,
and the justification of his decision in each alleged
example
may be safely left till the cases arise. It should
of
course be noted that Prof. Blass (p. 4) is rather more
disposed
to admit Latinisms in syntax. Greek and Latin
were
so constantly in contact throughout the history of the
Koinh<, that the question of Latinisms in Greek
or Graecisms
in
Latin must often turn largely on general impressions of
the
genius of each language.3
1 Foreigners sometimes
did find the article a stumbling block: witness the
long
inscription of Antiochus I of Commagene, OGIS
383 (i/B.C.)—see Ditten-
berger's
notes on p. 596 (vol. i.). We may here quote the lamented epigraphist's
note,
on Syll.2 930 (p. 785), that a
translator from Latin might fall into a
confusion
between ti<j and o!j. In a linguist who can render quo minus by
&$ e@lasson (1. 57), we take such a
mistake as a matter of course; yet we shall see
(p.
93) that its occurrence is very far from convicting a document of Latinising.
2 This does not involve
denying that Paul could speak Latin; see p. 233.
3 How inextricably bound
together were the fortunes of Greek and Latin in
the
centuries following our era, is well shown in W. Schulze's pamphlet, Graeca
enough
to affect the NT, except for some mere trifles. Brugmann (Dist. p. 9),
discussing
the idiom du<o du<o (see below, p. 97), speaks of the theory of
Semitism
and
Thumb's denial of it, and proceeds:
"The truth lies between the two, as
it
does in many similar cases—I am thinking among others of Graecisms in
Latin,
and of Latinisms and Gallicisms in German. A locution already in
existence
in Greek popular language, side by side with other forms (a]na>
du<o,
kata> du<o), received new strength
and wider circulation through the similar
Hebrew
expression as it became known." I welcome such a confirmation of my
thesis
from the acknowledged master of our craft.
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON" GREEK.
A
New Study WE proceed to
examine the nature and
history of
the vernacular Greek itself. This
is
a study which has almost come into existence in the
present
generation. Classical scholars have studied the
Hellenistic
literature for the sake of its matter: its language
was
seldom considered worth noticing, except to chronicle
contemptuously
its deviations from "good Greek." In so
suffering,
perhaps the authors only received the treatment
they
deserved 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 pure study of the vernacular was hardly
possible,
for the Biblical Greek was interpreted on lines of
its
own, and the papyri were mostly reposing in their Egyptian
tombs,
the collections that were published receiving but little
attention.
(Cf above, p. 7 n.) 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, in point of fact, no one ever spoke! It is
left
to foreigners to recognise the value of Pallis's version
for
students who seek to understand NT Greek in the light
of
the continuous development of the language from the age
of
Alexander to our own time. See p. 243.
The Sources. As has been hinted in the preceding
paragraph,
the materials for our present-day
study
of NT Greek are threefold:—(1) the prose literature
22
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON"
GREEK. 23
of
the post-classical period, from Polybius down, and includ-
ing
the LXX; (2) the Koinh< inscriptions, and the Egyptian
non-literary
papyri; (3) modern vernacular Greek, with
especial
reference 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.
We
should premise that we use the name here as a convenient
term
for the spoken dialect of the period under review, using
"literary
Koinh< and similar terms when the dialect of
Polybius,
Josephus, and the rest, is referred to. Whether this
is
the ancient use of the name we need not stay to examine:a
the
curious will find a paper on the subject by Prof.
Jannaris
in CR xvii. 93 ff., which may perhaps
prove that he
and
we have misused the ancient grammarians' phraseology.
Ou]
fronti>j [Ippoklei<d^. [a See p. 243.
Greek and its The history,
geography, and ethnology
Dialects. of
remarkable
phenomena which even the
literature
of the classical period presents. The very school-
boy
in his first two or three years at Greek has to realise
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
several
ways defiant of the Attic grammar to which his own
composition
must conform. And if his studies ultimately
invade
the dialect inscriptions,1 he finds in
Lacedaemon
and
for
which his literature has almost entirely failed to prepare
him.
Yet the Theban who said Fi<ttw
Deu<j
and the
Athenian
with his i@stw Zeu<j lived in towns exactly as far
apart
as Liverpool and
of
dialects within that little country arises partly from racial
1 An extremely convenient
little selection of dialect inscriptions is now
available
in the Teubner series:—Inscriptiones
Graecae ad inlustramdas Dialectos
selectae, by Felix Solmsen. The
book has less than 100 pp., but its contents
might
be relied on to perplex very tolerable scholars! 2 See p. 233.
24
A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
differences.
Upon the indigenous population, represented
best
(it would seem) by the Athenians of history, swept first
from
then,
in post-Homeric days, the Dorian invaders. Dialectic
conditions
were as inevitably complex as they became in our
own
country a thousand years ago, when successive waves
of
Germanic invaders, of different tribes 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
autonomy
which made of
Survival of the Meanwhile, a
steady process was going
Fittest. on which determined finally the character
literary
Greek.
hegemony
of
from
her at Leuktra. But
man
of letters,—Alkman (who was not a Spartan!) will
serve
as the exception that proves the rule; and Pindar,
the
lonely "Theban eagle," knew better than to try poetic
flights
in Boeotian. The intellectual supremacy of
was
beyond challenge long before the political unification of
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 gram-
matical
and lexical elements drawn from the vernacular,
for
which they had too hearty a contempt even to give it
a
name. 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
1 I am assuming as proved
the thesis of Prof. Ridgeway's Early Age
of
Greek
history, religion, and language. 0f course adhuc sub iudice lis est;
and
with Prof. Thumb on the other side I should be sorry to dogmatise.
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON" GREEK. 25
against
the "bad Greek" and "solecisms" of their con-
temporaries,
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
while
the Ionic dialect had largely influenced the some-
what
artificial idiom which the older writers at
used.
It was riot 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.
Literary Koinh<. Such, then, was the
" Common Greek "
of
literature, from which we have still to
derive
our illustrations for the NT 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
recognised.
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 Grenfell and Hunt's papyri—except
where
literary fragments come in,—nor in those to vol. iii
of
the
(I
am naming all the collections that I happen to have by
me.2) We turn to the NT and
find it once, and that is
1 Schwyzer, Die Weltsprachen dess Altertums, p. 15
n., cites as the earliest
extant
prose monument of genuine Attic in literature, the pseudo-Xenophon's
De republica Atheniensi, which dates from
before 413 B. C. 2
In 1905.
26 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
in
Luke's shipwreck narrative, in a phrase which Blass
(Philology 186) suspects 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 investigations. Here it will suffice to refer
to
Blass, p. 5, for an interesting summary of phenomena
which
are practically restricted to the author of Heb, and
to
parts of Luke and Paul, where sundry lexical and
grammatical
elements from the literary dialect invade the
colloquial
style which is elsewhere universal in the NT.1
Modern The writers who
figure in Dr W.
“Attic.” Schmid's well-known book, Der Atticismus,
were not the last to
found a literary lan-
guage
on the artificial resuscitation of the ancient Attic.
Essentially
the same thing is being tried in our time.
"The
purists of to-day," says Thumb (Hellenismus
180),
"are
like the old Atticists to a hair." Their
"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
vindicated
by Athenian undergraduates with bloodshed
if
need be.2 We have nothing to
do with this curious
phenomenon,
except to warn students that before citing MGr
in
illustration of the NT, they must make sure whether
their
source is kaqareu<ousa or o[miloume<nh, book Greek or
spoken
Greek. The former may of course have borrowed
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
1 For literary elements
in NT writers, see especially
Kunstprosa ii. 482 ff. In the
paragraph above referred to, Blass suggests that
in
Ac 2029 Luke misused the literary word a@ficij. If so, he hardly sinned
alone:
cf the citations in Grimm-Thayer, which are at least ambiguous, and add
Jos.
Ant. ii. 18 fin. mh> prodhlw<santej t&?
patri> th>n e]kei?se a@ficin, where departure
seems
certain. See our note sub voce in Expositor vii. vi. 376. The meaning
"my
home-coming" is hardly likely.
2 See Krumbacher's
vigorous polemic, Das Problem d. neugr.
Schriftsprache,
summarised
by the present writer in Exp T. xiv.
550 ff. Hatzidakis replies with
equal
energy in REGr, 1903, pp. 210 ff.,
and further in an ]Apa<nthsij (1905).
HISTORY OF THE
"COMMON" GREEK. 27
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.
First Century We pass on then
to the spoken dialect
Koinh<:
Sources. of the first century
Hellenists, its history
and its
peculiarities. Our sources are, in
order
of importance, (1) non-literary papyri, (2) inscriptions,
(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) Papyri The papyri have one very obvious dis-
advantage,
in that, with the not very import-
ant
exception of
to
one country,
disadvantage
does not practically count. They date from
311
B.C. to vii/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, to be sure, are not to be treated as a unity.
Those
which alone concern us come from the tombs and waste
paper
heaps of Ptolemaic and Roman
has
the same degree of unity as we should see in the contents
of
the sacks of waste paper sent to an English paper-mill
from
a solicitor's office, a farm, a school, a shop, a manse, and
a
house in
considered
separately. Wills, law-reports, contracts, census-
returns,
marriage-settlements, receipts and official orders
largely
ran along stereotyped lines; and, as formula tend
to
be permanent, we have a degree of conservatism in the
language
which is not seen in documents 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 they
are
all the better for the immense differences that betray
1 On these see the
monumental work of
culanensis (Teulmer, 1903); also
E. L. Hicks in CR i. 186.
28 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
themselves
in the education of their writers. The well-worn
epistolary
formulae show variety mostly in their spelling; and
their
value for the student lies primarily in their remarkable
resemblances
to the conventional phraseology which even the
NT
letter-writers were content to use.1 That part of the
letter
which is free from formula 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-school-boy to his father, OP 119
(ii/iii.
A.D.). It would have surprised Theon père,
when he
applied
the well-merited cane, to learn that seventeen centuries
afterwards
there might be scholars who would count his boy's
audacious
missive greater treasure than a new fragment of
Sappho!
But this is by the way. It must not be
inferred
from
our laudation of the ungrammatical papyri that the
NT
writers are at all comparable to these scribes in lack of
education. The indifference to concord, which we noted
in
Rev, 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 investigate.
(2) Inscriptions. Inscriptions come
second to papyri, in
this
connexion, mainly because their very
material
shows that they were meant to last. Their Greek
may
not be of the purest; but we see it, such as it is, in its best
clothes,
while that of the papyri is in corduroys. The special
value
of the Common Greek inscriptions lies in their corroborat-
ing
the papyri, for they practically show that there was but
little
dialectic difference between the Greek of Egypt and that of
of
pronunciation, and we have evidence 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
1 On this point see
Deissmann, BS 21 ff.; J. R. Harris,
in Expos. v. viii.
161;
G. G. Findlay, Thess. (CGT), lxi.;
Robinson, Eph. 275-284.
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON"
GREEK. 29
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 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<. (It has been
followed
up by E. Nachmanson in his Laute und
Formen der
Magnetischen Inschriften (1903), which does the
same work,
section
by section, for the corpus from Magnesia.) Next to
the
papyrus collections, there is no tool the student of the
NT
Koinh< will find so useful as a book of late inscriptions,
such
as Dittenberger's Orientis Graeci
Inscriptiones selectae, or
the
larger part of his Sylloge (ed. 2).
(3) Modern Finally we
have MGr to bring in.2 The
Greek. discovery that the vernacular of to-day goes
back
historically to the Koinh< was made in
1834
by Heilmaier, in a book on the origin of the
"Romaic."
This discovery once established, it
became clear
that
we could work back from MGr to reconstruct the
otherwise
imperfectly known oral Greek of the Hellenistic
age.3 It is however only in the last generation that
the
importance
of this method has been adequately recognised.
We
had not indeed till recently acquired trustworthy materials.
Mullach's
grammar, upon which the editor of Winer had to
depend
for one of the most fruitful innovations of his work,4
started
from wrong premisses as to the relation between the
old
language and the new.5 We have now, in such books
1 He was Schweizer in
1898, when this book was published, but has changed
since,
to our confusion. He has edited Meisterhans' Grammatik der attischem
Inschrifien3, and written the
interesting lecture on Die Weltsprache
named
above.
2 I must enter here a
caveat as to the use of G. F. Abbott's charming little
volume,
Songs of Modern Greece, as a source for scientific purposes. Prof.
Psichari
and Dr Rouse show me that I have trusted it too much.
3 I cite from Kretschmer, Die Entstehung der Koinh<, p. 4.
4 Cf. WM index s. v. "Greek (modern)," p.
824.
5 Cf Krumbacher in KZ xxvii. 488. Krumbacher uses the
epithet "dilet-
tante"
about Mullach, ib. p. 497, but rather
(I fancy) for his theories than his
facts.
After all, Mullach came too early to be blameworthy for his unscientific
position.
30 A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK.
as
Thumb's Handbuch der neugriechischen
Volkssprache and
Hatzidakis's
Einleitung in die neugriechische
Grammatik, the
means
of checking not a few statements about MGr which were
really
based on the artificial Greek of the schools. The per-
petual
references to the NT in the latter work will indicate
forcibly
how many of the developments of modern vernacular
had
their roots in that of two thousand years ago. The
gulf
between the ancient and the modern is bridged by the
material
collected and arranged by Jannaris in his Historical
Greek Grammar. The study of a Gospel
in the vernacular
version
of Pallis1 will at first produce the impression that
the
gulf is very wide indeed; but the strong points of con-
tact
will become very evident in time. Hatzidakis indeed
even
goes so far as to assert that "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."2
The Birth of We are now
ready to enquire how this
the
Koinh<. Common
Greek of the NT rose out of the
classical
language. Some features of its
development
are undoubted, and may be noted first. The
impulse
which produced it lay, beyond question, in the work
of
Alexander the Great. The unification of
necessary
first step in the accomplishment of his dream of
Hellenising
the world which he had marked out for conquest.
To
achieve unity of speech throughout the little country
which
his father's diplomatic and military triumphs had
virtually
conquered for him, was a task too serious for
Alexander
himself to face. But unconsciously he effected
this,
as a by-product of his colossal achievement; and the
next
generation found that not only had a common language
emerged
from the chaos of Hellenic dialects, but a new and
1 [H Ne<a
Diaqh<kh, metafrasme<nh a]po> to>n
]Alec. Pa<llh (
(Pallis
has now translated the Iliad, and
even some of Kant—with striking
success,
in Thumb's opinion, DLZ, 1905, pp.
2084-6.) Unfortunately the
B.F.B.S.
version contains so much of the artificial Greek that it is beyond
the
comprehension of the common people: the
bitter prejudice of the
educated
classes at present has closed the door even to this, much more to
Pallis's
version.
2 REGr, 1903, p. 220.
(See a further note below, pp. 233f.)
HISTORY OF THE "COMMON"
GREEK. 31
nearly
homogeneous world-speech had been created, in which
Persian
and Egyptian might do business together, and
Roman
proconsuls issue their commands to the subjects of a
mightier
empire than Alexander's own. His army was in
itself
a powerful agent in the levelling process which ulti-
mately
destroyed nearly all the Greek dialects. The
Anabasis
of the Ten Thousand Greeks, seventy years before,
had
doubtless produced results of the same kind on a small
scale.
Clearchus the Lacedaemonian, Menon the Thessalian,
Socrates
the Arcadian, Proxenus the Bceotian, and the rest,
would
find it difficult to preserve their native brogue very
long
free from the solvent influences of perpetual association
during
their march; and when Cheirisophus of Sparta and
Xenophon
of Athens had safely brought the host home, it is
not
strange that the historian himself had suffered in the
purity
of his Attic, which has some peculiarities distinctly
foreshadowing
the Koinh<.1 The assimilating process would
go
much further in the camp of Alexander, where, during
prolonged
campaigns, men from all parts of
tent-fellows
and messmates, with no choice but to accom-
modate
their mode of speech in its more individual character-
istics
to the average Greek which was gradually being
evolved
among their comrades. In this process naturally
those
features which were peculiar to a single dialect would
have
the smallest chance of surviving, and those which most
successfully
combined the characteristics of many dialects
would
be surest of a place in the resultant "common speech."
The
army by itself only furnished a nucleus for the new growth.
As
Hellenism swept victoriously into
itself
on all the shores of the eastern
mixture
of nationalities in the new-rising communities de-
manded
a common language as the medium of intercourse,
1 Cf Rutherford, NP 160-174. The same may be said of the
language of
the
lower classes in
from
all parts. So [Xenophon] Constitution, of
have
an individual dialect, and manner of life and fashion of their own; but
the
Athenians have what is compounded from all the Greeks and barbarians."
The
vase-inscriptions abundantly evidence this. (Kretschrner, Entstehung d.
p.
34.) The importance of Xenophon as a forerunner of Hellenism is
well
brought out by Mahaffy, Progress of Hellenism
in Alexander's Empire,
Lecture
i.
32
A GRAMMAR OF NEW TESTAMENT GREEK
and
the Greek of the victorious armies of Alexander was
ready
for the purpose. In the country districts of the
motherland,
the old dialects lived on for generations; but by
this
time
Hellenising
movement to which the world was to owe so
much.
Besides, the dialects which strikingly differed from
the
new Koinh< were spoken by races that mostly lay outside
the
movement. History gives an almost pathetic interest to
an
inscription like that from Larissa (Michel 41—end of
iii/B.C.),
where the citizens record a resolutions from King
Philip
V, and their own consequent resolutions:—
Tageuo<ntoun ]Anagki<ppoi Petqalei<oi k.t.l.,
Fili<ppoi toi? basilei?oj
e[pistola>n a]puste<llantoj po>t
to>j tago>j kai> ta>n
po<lin ta>n
u[pogegramme<nan:
Basileu>j Fi<lippoj
Larisai<wn toi?j tagoi?j kai> th?i po<lei
xai<rein (and so on in normal Koinh<).
Decay of the The old and the new survived thus side
Dialects. by
side into the imperial age; but Christianity
had only a
brief opportunity of speaking in
the
old dialects of
the
dialect live on. To-day scholars recognise a single modern
idiom,
the Zaconian, which does not directly descend from
the
Koinh<. As we might expect,
this is nothing but the
ancient
Laconian, whose broad ā holds its ground still in the
speech of a race impervious to literature and proud