That remained so for about 6-7 centuries, with the New Testament scriptures falling squarely in the middle of that time period. It became the lingua franca (a language systematically accepted) in the whole geographical region of interest (Middle East, Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, near-Asia), so was explicit and unambiguous, for the sake of commerce and so on. Koine Greek itself ("koine" means "common" in Greek) was the Greek that was commonized as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great of the Greek Empire in the 4th century BC. So, the "5415" Strong's entries is already a number that is much greater than the number of words that you would actually need to understand the meaning of. Many words are compounds which "fuse" simpler words and morphemes, including ad hoc constructions by the authors. the inflections at the end of the words that define case, tense, person, number, etc.), making it much more specific and explicit than English. In addition, it has a rigid system of declension and verb conjugation (i.e. The Koine Greek is what linguists would describe as a "fusional" "synthetic" language, which largely combines morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning in a language), "synthesizing" words by "fusing" the morphemes together. This shows the simplicity of the Koine Greek New Testament scriptures as compared with all other Greek literature.Ĭombined with the Koine Greek grammar, it is far simpler, more explicit, and more concise than English, with all the English variables, exceptions, and nuances. By contrast, the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, which covers all classical Greek literature, lists 119553 entries. Charles Van der Pool supplemented this with some more, but not many more, to cover the corresponding Koine Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, even though the Old Testament is about four times the size of the New Testament. Yet James Strong's Concordance lists only 5415 Greek words in the New Testament. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, is cited as having 171,476 English words. At about 40 words per page and about 800 pages, I would estimate that my my small, compact, paperback American Heritage Dictionary has about 32,000 English word definitions. If you can manage to learn English, you shouldn't have a problem with Koine Greek, in particular. In fact, Greek is easy, besides the fact that it is just another language. Or, if you are one of those people who think that such a thing would be too complicated, or beyond your mental abilities, let me assure you that Koine Greek is much simpler, less ambiguous, and less loaded with variations, exceptions, and idiosyncrasies than, especially, the English language. Let's start with an attitude check: If you are one of those people who scorns the idea that anybody should have to go into the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek to read and study the Bible, and think that anybody who does so is being over-analytical, presumptuous, or whatever, then you have, in principle, just eliminated all translations of the Bible, because a translation can't even exist without someone going into the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts and translating it! By reading a translation, you therefore implicitly endorse someone diligently digging into every word and phrase of the original language to translate it. It isn't possible in every instance to have a perfect translation sometimes no corresponding word exists in the target language, or the grammar doesn't have a one to one correspondence. More than occasionally, this is very helpful in gaining insight into exactly what the text of the Word of God says, as well as clearing up misunderstandings that come from simple limitations in translation. This is not modern Greek, but Koine Greek, the "common" = "κοινη" Greek language that came about as a result of the massive conquests of the Greek empire under Alexander the Great in 336-323 BC, and remained a common language for roughly another six to seven centuries, until the mid-300's AD. I am writing this article to encourage people to dig into the original Greek text of the New Testament. 2018, added to resource list, additional Smith reference and few minor edits, May 2018, biblewebapp resource reference Sept.
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Wiebe, March 2015, added Android app links to resource list Nov. Encouragement to dig: Koine Greek Articles home page Encouragement to dig: Koine Greek (Garth D.