A year back, knowing my love for learning languages, one of my school’s Bible teachers suggested I try something wild: teach him the language of the New Testament—an older form of Greek called Koine Greek. Here are five interesting facts I discovered in the journey, both in terms of its raw linguistics and its biblical context.
- Koine Greek, Hindi, English, and Spanish all descend from the same ancient language.
Koine Greek is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European, a hypothesized ancestor of most languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent. This means it shares linguistic roots with not only Modern Greek, but also with languages as diverse as Hindi, English, and Spanish. Proto-Indo-European split into many branches around 5000 years ago, including Proto-German (from which English, German, and Dutch descended), Proto-Italic (from which the Romance languages descended) , and Proto-Hellenic, the ancestor of the Classical Greek, Koine Greek, and eventually Modern Greek.
- There are a surprising amount of cognates if you know where to look.
Classical Greek has been a language of learning for a long time, which gave it enough time to osmosis into the English language. This is specifically the case for scientific vocabulary. Examples include the ego (ἐγώ) in psychology; the mono-, di-, tri- ordinal suffixes in chemistry; and the chromosome in cell biology, which comes from χρῶμα, meaning color and σῶμα meaning “body”. Many English affixes also come from Classical Greek, including “dis-”, “Inter-”, “ex-”, and “hyper-”.
Given that you mostly likely have taken math or physics classes, some of the Greek alphabet may be a familiar face. In Math, the Greek Alphabet shows themselves as the famous constant π (pi), and the summation marker Σ (capital Sigma); in physics, you have λ (lambda) for wavelength and Δ (capital Delta) signifying change.
- There is one word in Lord’s Prayer that no one knows for certain what it means.
There’s a single word in the Lord’s Prayer that has puzzled scholars for centuries: ἐπιούσιος (epiousios), traditionally translated as “daily” in the phrase “Give us this day our daily bread.” This word only appears once, so its precise meaning has been long debated. Different proposals suggest it means “necessary for existence” or “supersubstantial”, but a popular interpretation is “for the coming day”.
- Jesus may have spoken it.
While Jesus likely spoke Aramaic as his primary language, the claim that he also knew some Greek is also possible. Scholars point to the fact that Galilee and surrounding regions were multicultural and multilingual, and Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman Empire.
- Many Greek wordplay are lost in translation.
Translating regular texts is difficult, and translating poems and songs even more so. For example, in the book of Philemon, Paul uses a wordplay that is impossible to translate. The name Onesimus means “useful” or “profitable,” which Paul plays on when he writes, “Formerly he was useless to you, but now he has become useful…” .