VTG Notes Pages xi and xii

This is a study of the ^a Lexicon work directly transcribed from: Vocabulary of the Greek Testament by James Hope Moulton and George Milligan, Published by Hodder And Stoughton, Limited London, 1914-1929

*Notes in [brackets] are my edit notes —Jim Hughes.

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^a  Dictionary, esp one of an ancient language such as Greek or Hebrew

C17: New Latin, from Greek lexikon , n use of lexikos  relating to words, from Greek lexis  word, from legein  to speak

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Page xi:

"New Testament Greek." [Research of the non-Biblical Egyptian papyri found in the early 1860s] 

—It is with this aspect of the papyri that we are primarily concerned. Alike in Vocabulary and Grammar the language of the New Testament exhibits striking dissimilarities from Classical Greek ; and in consequence it has been regarded as standing by itself as " New Testament Greek." In general it had been hastily classed as "Judaic" or "Hebraic" Greek; its writers being Jews (with the probable exception of St. Luke), and therefore using a language other than their own, a language filled with reminiscences of the translation-Greek of the ^a Septuagint on which they had been nurtured. ¹ But true as this may be, it does not go far to explain the real character of the Greek which meets us in the New Testament writings.

For a convincing explanation we have in the first instance to thank the German scholar, Adolf Deissmann, now Professor of New Testament Exegesis in the University of Berlin. While still a pastor at Marburg, Dr. (then Mr.) Deissmann happened one day to be turning over in the University Library at Heidelberg a new section of a volume containing transcripts from the collection of Greek Papyri at Berlin. And, as he read, he was suddenly struck by the likeness of the language of these papyri to the language of the Greek New Testament. Further study deepened in his mind the extent of this likeness, and he realized that he held in his hand the real key to the old problem. [of translating Greek New Testament language]

So far from the Greek of the New Testament being a language by itself, or even, as one German scholar called it, " a language of the Holy Ghost," ²  its main feature was that it was the ordinary vernacular Greek of the period, not the language of contemporary literature, which was often influenced by an attempt to imitate the great authors of classical times, but the language of everyday life, as it was spoken and written by the ordinary men and women of the day, or, as it is often described, the Koivuh vor Common Greek, of the great Graeco-Roman world. That, then, is Deissmann's general conclusion, which quickly found an enthusiastic . . .

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^a The oldest Greek version of the Old Testament, traditionally said to have been translated by 70 or 72 Jewish scholars at the request of Ptolemy II: most scholars believe that only the Pentateuch was completed in the early part of the 3rd century B.C. and that the remaining books were translated in the next two centuries.

¹ Cf. W. F. Howard's Appendix " Semitisms in the New Testament" in Grammar of New Testament Greek by J. H. Moulton and W. F. Howard (Edinburgh, 1929), Vol. II, p. 411 ff.

² R. Rothe, Zur Dogmatik (Gotha, 1863), p. 238: "We can indeed with good right speak of a language of the Holy Ghost. For in the Bible it is manifest to our eyes how the Divine Spirit at work in revelation always takes the language of the particular people chosen to be the recipient, and makes of it a characteristic religious variety by transforming existing linguistic elements and existing conceptions into a shape peculiarly appropriate to that Spirit. This process is shown most clearly by the Greek of the New Testament" (quoted by Deissmann, The Philology of the Greek Bible (London, 1908), p. 42 f.).

Page xii:

and brilliant advocate in this country in the person of Dr. J. H. Moulton. And though the zeal of the first discoverers of the new light [these papyri] may have sometimes led them to go rather far in ignoring the ^a Semitisms, on the one hand, and the literary culture of the New Testament writers, on the other, their main conclusion has found general acceptance, and we have come to realize with a definiteness unknown before that the book intended for the people was written in the people's own tongue. Themselves sprung from the common people, the disciples of One Whom the common people heard gladly, its writers, in their turn, wrote in the common tongue to be " understanded of the people."

In the Prolegomena to his translation of Winer's well-known Grammar of New Testament Greek, published in 1859, Professor Masson, at one time Professor in the University of Athens, writes:

—the New Testament may be considered as exhibiting the only genuine facsimile of the colloquial diction employed by unsophisticated Grecian gentlemen of the first century, who spoke without ^b pedantry— as idiwtai ('private persons'), and not as sofistai ('adepts')" (p. vii. f.).¹

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^a a word or idiom peculiar to, derived from, or characteristic of a Semitic language, especially of hebrew.

^b the habit or an instance of being a pedant, esp in the display of useless knowledge or minute observance of petty rules or details.

¹ Cf. J. Rendel Harris, Exp T, xxv. p. 54 f., and notes by the present writer in ib. xxxi.

p. 421, and xxxii. p. 231 f.

A second statement to much the same effect will be found in the article "Greek Language (Biblical)," contributed by Mr. (afterwards Principal Sir James) Donaldson to the third edition of Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, edited by Dr. W. Lindsay Alexander (Edinburgh, 1876). In Vol. ii. p. 170, the writer states :

Now it seems to us that the language used by the Septuagint and N(ew) T(estament) writers was the language used in common conversation, learned by them, not through books, but most likely in childhood from household talk, or, if not, through subsequent oral instruction.

*If this be the case, then the Septuagint is the first translation which was made for the great masses of the people in their own language, and the N(ew) T(estament) writers are the first to appeal to men through the common vulgar language intelligible to all who spoke Greek.

The common Greek thus used is indeed considerably modified by the circumstances of the writers, but these modifications no more turn the Greek into a peculiar dialect than do Americanisms or Scotticisms turn the English of Americans and Scotsmen into peculiar dialects of English. ²

*[Yellow highlight & italics mine] WOW!!!!!!

² James Donaldson: I owe the reference to a note by W. L. Lorimer in Exp T, xxxii. p. 330, where attention is also drawn to the position taken up by Salmasius in his Funus linguae Hellenisticae and his DeHellenislica Commentarius, both published in 1643.