The Language of the New Testament. It does not take a student long to discover that in reading the Greek of the New Testament he has not before him the diction of the prose clas sics with which he had become familiar. Not only, generally speaking, is there greater sim plicity of structure, but there are peculiarities of idiom and forms of expression which at once demand attention. The whole atmosphere is changed.
There were Greek colonists in Egypt before Alexander came to it, but it was his arrival and his policy that put Greek into the foremost place and made it the language of intercourse. But it was not the pure Greek of the classics that Alexander brought to Egypt. A living language can never be insensible to its environment, and Macedonians, Egyptians, Jews and Romans, meet ing in the market place, were not there to indulge in fine phrases. They were there to be under stood, and they took hold of the plainest Greek they could find, and also turned some of their own words and idioms into Greek forms. Add the resultant modifications to that which already existed in the predominating type of Greek of the court and official life, viz., the Macedonian, and you have the kind of Greek which was char acteristic of Alexandria, and perhaps also in some degree of other cities under the sway of Alex ander's policy.
If we have rightly conceived of the position and importance of this city, it is not difficult to see how it became a new center for the dif fusion of this speech. But important as this modi fied speech is, for it appears in the New Testa ment, it is not the chief point of interest in the inquiry into the development of language here. The Jews of the city were as important a factor in its commercial life as they have been ever since, where they have had an equal chance, and commerce brought them into close contact with the Greek. It was, therefore, with this later Greek that they had to do, and they gradually took it up as their own speech, coloring it, of course, largely with Hebrew idiom. It is this peculiar kind of Hebraistic Greek that appears in the Septuagint and in a less degree in the New Testament.
Surrounded as they were by Greek life and cus toms, and compelled to use the common medium of intercourse, it is not strange that the Jews forgot their own tongue, and the most plausible reason for the Greek version itself was this very need of the sacred books in a tongue that they could understand.
In two particulars, the Septuagint, the prepara tion of which ranged over perhaps a period of a hundred years, is supposed to have influenced the vocabulary of the New Testament. These two particulars are the range of vocabulary, and its significance. It would be natural to suppose that the Greek version which came into immediate and widespread use in the dispersion would have had the effect of stereotyping the speech of the Jews. That it was thus widely used, the quotations from it in the New Testament seem to show, as do also the allusions to it and reminiscences of it found all through the epistles.
If we leave out proper names and their de rivatives there are 4,829 words in the New Testa ment vocabulary ; of these, 3,85o are found in Greek previous to Aristotle (322 B. C.), that is, in the period of classic Greek. That leaves about gso post-Aristotelian words in the New Testa ment ; of these, 314 are found in the Septuagint.
As about one-half of this latter number occurs in the writings of the "common dialect we have about iso which are peculiar to the Septuagint and the New Testament." About thirty per cent of the total number of Biblical words in the New Testament occur in the Septuagint.
These figures must change the usual conception of the relation of the Septuagint to the New Testa ment as far as range of vocabulary is concerned. Much might be said in relation to the influence of the Hebrew idiom upon the Greek, and it is beyond question that this was, in a measure, stereotyped by the There is a much greater advance in vocabulary than in diction in the New Testament, though the Greek of the Acts, of James and of the Epistle to the Hebrews at tains a high level of pure expression.
To be sure the writers of the New Testament were themselves Jews, and the influence of their mother tongue, the Aramaic, is evident, but be yond, and in addition to this, they carry over the familiar idioms of the Hebraistic Greek of the Old Testament.