THE NATURE OF THE GREEK OF THE NEW TESTAMENT - ITS PAST AND PRESENT

Abstract

This study surveys the historical development of the understanding of the nature of New Testament Greek from the 16 th to the 19 th century. It aims at two main controversies, namely the Purist-Hebraist controversy, and the Sacred-Common Greek controversary. The former centres on the issues concerning the purity of the language reflected in the New Testament. Since examples of hebraisms are so common in the new Testament, the Purist who tried their very best to defend the subtleties and elegance of the language on a par with the classical literature, were bound to lose their battle. As a result, the victory of the Hebraists lead to another even more debated issue: the Sacred-Common controversy. The peculiarities of the language reflected in the corpus have prompted some biblical scholars to thinks that NT Greek is so closely linked with the message in the NT, that it is in fact a special means of the Holy Spirit to communicate with mankind. This view has become very popular under the aegis of Rothe’s term, “language of the Holy Ghost’. This view was soon taken over, especially after Deissmann’s discoveries of the papyri, by the opponent view that NT Greek should actually be classified as the koine dialect spoken in Hellenistic times. In the final section, a brief evaluation of the entire situation is given in the light of the present state of the art.