Short Notes on Greek Linguistics of the New Testament

by koot van wyk (DLitt et Phil; ThD)

Kyungpook National University

Sangju Campus

South Korea

conjoint lecturer of Avondale College

Australia

11 October 2009

The New Testament is written in Greek. The Greek is not Classical Greek in any of its forms, it is not Ionic Greek, it is not Hellenistic Greek but koine Greek. And yet, it is not exactly koine Greek either. Even if you get letters, papyri or short notes and inscriptions of koine contemporary with the New Testament, and scholars have, the koine will enlighten many aspects of New Testament Greek, but, it will not be a total picture.

The authors of the New Testament Greek came from different backgrounds and education levels. Paul was very learned but John, James, Peter, Matthew and Mark had to learn the hard way to read and write properly. Luke was also well trained.

Good Greek writers like Paul and Luke did not necessarily qualify them to be good writers per se. There is the element of intellectual make-up but the Holy Spirit can help people in this aspect very well, and He did.

There is also the aspect of Jewish Koine which will include many religious jargon that may not be shared in general koine. That means, that when the author is writing Greek, he is thinking in Hebrew and writing in Greek. Bilingualism is thus necessary for a proper understanding of New Testament Greek. Studies in the past have focussed on the role of Hebrew and Aramaic in the New Testament.

Etymology is a study of the historical meanings of words. Kittel's dictionary is criticized because they think that he is  not sufficient for a proper semantics of words in the New Testament. So Eugene Nida and J. P. Louw started a new approach in which they look at 90 different contexts for words and describe the meaning of a word from the syntactic level. In fact, Louw thinks that the colon or larger unit of sentences connected, carries the meaning, not the individual word itself. As appealing as this idea is, one must remember that there are sometimes hapax legomena and that syntax or colon interpretation will only help and not necessarily solve the problem of the meaning of the word. Louw's insistence that one should look at the text as a whole for an answer as to the meaning of a word, is very wise. However, there is more to it. As we mentioned above, the authors using Jewish Koine was embedded in their thinking with the Old Testament and its phraseology. At times they paraphrased the OT texts and at times the cited it in Greek verbatim. The Old Testament textual context of sentences are also important for an interpretation of a colon and dissecting individual New Testament books from Old Testament thoughts, will not be a correct understanding of New Testament semantics or New Testament syntax.

Ideology is going to play a role. In the prophetic genre (in wisdom, prophecy, poetry, hymns, sermons) even only a part of the whole, it will make a difference if the interpreter is working with a classical preteristic model or a classical historicistic model. The meaning ascribed after such an analysis to a colon in the New Testament may then affect the syntax and individual meaning or semantics of a word. This aspect my be a shortfall of Louw and Nida's approach and it remains to be seen what they did with this crucial decision in interpretation of the prophetic genre.

Rhetorical analysis of the New Testament should be used like salt on food. The koine Greek was used by the Holy Spirit to convey the message to the broadest audience as possible. To make a long list from classical Greek on rhetorical instruments and to see around every corner just a rhetorical device by the author to reach a particular effect, is not to do justice to the text. Mostely the text can be understood in a straightforward manner, in a literal translation.

David Allen Black for example, in his book Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek: A Survey of Basic Concepts and Applications (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1988), 132-136 discussed the role of rhetorical devices: alliteration, anacolution, anaphora, anastrophe, anticlimax, antithesis, aposiopesis, asyndeton, chiasmus, euphemism, hendiadys, hyperbole, irony, litotes, meiosis, metaphor, metonymy, paranomasia, periphrasis, pleonasm, Zeugma under the umbrella of Style and Discourse techniques. He feels it is crucial to keep it in mind in interpretation "as an important component in any theory and practice of biblical interpretation" (Black 1988: 132). We need to point out, that we do not know enough about the daily conversational level of Jewish koine of those days and their ability to use these devices naturally. Did Matthew, Paul, John wrote and rewritten their material four, five times before they threw away the four earlier editions and kept the fifth one with intentional built in rhetorical devices to make it sound better? It was rather a natural way of common talk in those days. There is not a conscious intention to sound better by packing in the text more rhetorical devices. The aesthetics of rhetorical devices were common ways of speaking and writing.

Black's thinking on irony can be mentioned:

In Mark 7:9 Jesus said to the Pharisees, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandments of God". He speaks good about their bad.

Another case did not work so well. In Luke 2:47 the text tells us about Jesus' ability as a youngster to explain the scriptures that they were amazed about His "intelligence and answers". Black calls this hendiadys and reinterpret the rhetorical device as just another way of saying "intelligent answers". This is not correct. How do we know whether they were not impressed by His IQ and the way He answered? By hopping on a rhetorical device of hendiadys one can circumvent actually reality and this is the greatest danger of rhetorical interpretation.

Rhetorical interpretation is the same danger as Origen in his Alexandrian school of interpretation who wanted to allegorize everything in the Old and New Testament. It is a way of avoiding the reality of the literal text by running away with figurative meanings and then escape the consequences expected by the literal text.

People do it with Sabbath texts, with baptism texts, with  the 666 text, with prophetic periods texts, Trinity texts etc.

In conclusion we may pose that the literal translation of the Bible is most important and as salt, one must from time to time keep an eye out for rhetorical devices in interpretation.

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