Background & Principles Regarding the Koine Greek Language

In the central and southern part of Greece there were three city states who were fighting the gain ascendancy over the entire peninsula. This fighting had been going on for several hundred years; the three were Athens, Thebes, and Sparta.

Athens was eliminated from the contest after taking an early lead by Sparta in the Pelopennesian Wars. Finally Sparta went down to Thebes when a genius becomes ruler of Thebes by the name of Epaminondas.

Now in the key battle when the Thebians become the dominant power in southern Greece there was a man observing the battle who became very interested in the tactics of the Thebian army. His name was Philip. His father was the ruler of a group of mountain people who lived in the north. He was in the Thebian city because he was a hostage. His father had a tendency to come down out of the hills and raid in southern Greece. And in order to make the father behave, the boy was taken into custody for a while. During this time the boy observed many of the unusual things that the Thebians had developed under Epaminondas. And among other things he was quite fascinated by a battle called Leuctra in which a smaller Thebian army was able to defeat a larger Spartan army.

As a result of this battle, the hostage went home because the Thebians were now in a good position in their own area. And when he went home, he had new ideas running around in his mind. He was delayed by several things, one — he decided he had better get married first and he went next door to another kingdom of northern Greece in the mountains called Epirus. Here he married a redheaded woman by the name of Olympia. Then he started to put some of these ideas in effect and this man became known to history as Philip II when he became ruler of Macedonia.

Philip II also had a son by Olympia named Alexander, and Philip decided that his son would follow in his footsteps and reap some of the benefits of his genius. Therefore he gave him the best tutor of the age which was Aristotle. Aristotle instilled in Alexander the concept of categories, the importance of solution by logic, the importance of observation, solution by calling on the various categories of learning and knowledge. At the same time Alexander developed a very strong body and the combination was to make him the most unusual man of his age and one of the greatest men of history.

When Alexander was 18 years of age his father went down and whipped all of the Greeks, but his victory was very temporary because someone decided that Philip was going to be too tough a man to handle, and so the Greeks, while defeated in battle, won a victory by poisoning Philip II. Of course, little did they realise that by getting rid of the father they had to accept the son, for the son immediately came to the throne. We still have the record of his first speech.

He pulled his mountain men together and said, “My father found you wearing animal skins in the rocks of Macedonia. My father pulled you down out of your caves and out of your rocks.” And he pointed to some of them, “Even some of you had some sheep and my father took the animal skins off of you and gave you the tunic of a soldier.”

“My father gave you order. My father gave you discipline. My father gave you cities. My father made it possible for you who were craven cowards in the caves of Macedonia to go out and defeat the barbarians around you. And you will notice since my father gave you these things, the Thracians no longer come in to bother you. The people of Epirus do not come in to raid.” And he went on to list the various barbarians who in the past had scourged this area.

“Now,” he said, “I’m going to start where my father finished. My father gave you something in your homeland; I’m going to make the world your homeland.” And this is exactly what he did.

So he went down and whipped all the Greeks in the south. And then instead of calling himself the conqueror, he called himself the champion of Greece which was a very wise choice of words because immediately everyone was sold on him, not because he was tough and had a great army, but because he promised great things for anyone who was a Greek.

And immediately he started to weld together an army. He said ‘we’re going back to whip the Persians. Remember the Persians had invaded Greece a number of times in the past, two times specifically reaching the Greek homeland, a number of times in Ionia across the Agaean Sea.

So consequently he pulled this army together and started to work. Immediately he found that he had some problems, problems of administration. The biggest problem seemed to be how to say right face, left face, forward march and all the rest of it, and say it once instead of four times. Every drill sergeant in the Macedonian army had to say right face and left face and forward march, and so on, in Ionic, in Doric which was the language of the Spartans, he had to say it in the language of the Thebians — Aeolic, and then he had to say it in the language of the Macedonians.

Now they were all Greeks, but they all spoke different dialects. These Greek languages were very, very different. For example, the Doric language was a series of grunts and gutturals (for some 500 years) because all they had in their language was a few commands and made known a few needs, and therefore they didn’t have much of a language.

And then by contrast the Ionic language, the Attic Greek, was a very beautiful literary language. The language in between was the language of the Thebians. Therefore it became necessary to take these languages, mix them up in a pot, and come out with a common language so that all Greeks and all parts of Greece could understand it.

Up to this time it had never been necessary because Greece is a peninsula with many hills and many valleys and not very good communication. But because of fusing together a great Greek army it became necessary to have good communication among the men, and therefore Alexander in his genius began to develop a common language for the Greeks.

We call this simply Koine, which is the Greek word for common. And he took some of the beauties out of the Attic Greek, he removed some of the literary and he took the Doric Greek and removed the grunts and the groans and he put it together with the mountain dialect of the Macedonians, and he came out with a language which had one great factor: it was the type of language designed for one purpose — so that anyone who used this language could mean only one thing. Apparently Alexander had great contempt for double talk. He wanted people to understand exactly what he said. He did not want a language which would be subjected to two or three interpretations.

So he invented a language, he started a language which evolved over a period of 300 years and became the most scientific, exact language in the history of communication. And the Koine Greek which Alexander started is the language of the New Testament.

When Alexander started working on this language, he was in the peninsula of Greece and he took the language with him because he took his army with him. When he was 20 years old he invaded the empire of Persia. He fought three great battles and in five years he had completely conquered Persia and, in fact, most of the Persian empire.

Then he spent five more years conquering other areas. He went into India, he went into Bactria; he even went to the edge of Mongolia, and wherever he went he was successful and he conquered. The main thing that kept him from conquering the whole of India was that his troops were worn out and refused to go any further.

As a matter of fact, during this eleven years of conquest, he moved so rapidly that out of the original 35,000 men who started, only about half survived with him. The rest got tired and wanted to settle down. They’d say, “I’m too tired to go any further; I’m going to stay here. This looks like it’s a nice place to stay.” And so these soldiers who were tired and exhausted were retired and in this way Alexander started about 75 cities throughout the world.

And then, of course, a little of Alexander ribbed off on them, a little of the administration, so they would organise their city. These 75 Greek cities throughout the world were so well organised and had such excellent administration that most of them thrived and grew and were fused with the orientals.

Alexander had a policy wherever he went. You had to speak Alexander’s language. While he was a genius and had terrific linguistic ability, he didn’t bother to learn other languages. It was one of the quirks of a conqueror — I won’t learn yours. The result was because he had conquered everything, everyone had to learn his language. As a result, by the time Alexander died as the age of 32 from dipsomania, everyone throughout the world spoke Greek.

Where before people had been monolingual, now they were bilingual or trilingual, but included in their linguistic ability was the language compiled by Alexander. Not the beautiful literary language of Attica, nor the language of the Dorians (the Spartans) but a beautiful, concise, clear scientific language which became known as Koine, common.

Now the original language of the new Testament is not some super-duper literary language. It was the language of the man in the street. It was a language whereby anyone would understand what was being said. It was a language which was developed with the concept of making it subject to one interpretation and it became the language of the world. While the Romans conquered Greece when they were conquering everything else, they did not conquer Greek culture. The Romans conquered the Greeks but Greek culture conquered the Romans. And Greek culture meant this new language and during 100-150 years under the Romans this language underwent some additional changes in keeping with the orderly concepts of the Romans. While Latin was the language of the Romans, Greek was the language of the world during the Roman empire.

In the time of our Lord Jesus Christ in Palestine nearly everyone was trilingual. Now the Galileans were unilingual, they spoke Aramaic. But the people of southern Palestine, the Judeans, were very well educated and they spoke at least three languages, the Latin of the Roman conquerors, the Aramaic (which was the Hebrew of their day), and they all spoke Greek.

It is no accident that the original language of the New Testament scriptures should be Koine Greek because this is the language of exact expression and because in the canon of the New Testament we have the highest concepts of doctrine that the world has ever known or ever will know. We have the most lucid concepts of God and everything that God wants us to know — so much so that 1 Corinthians 2:16 says, “We have the mind of Christ.” This is the language of the New Testament. And every word in the language of the New Testament is so developed that you can take a word, you can give it a suffix, you can give it a prefix, a compound; a double compound word by adding a suffix, a preposition, a basic noun and then adding some suffixes to that and you have a word which will take a paragraph of English to explain.

Every verb in the Koine Greek has a fourfold navigational fix, so we know absolutely where we are at all times in this language. For example, we know that every verb in this particular language has a tense and these tenses explain the relationship of the verb to time. We have, for example, in the English language a past, a present and a future tense. And this is about as far as we go in relationship with time. But the Greeks went way beyond this — they had some very fine variations. Time to them was broken into a series of different concepts.

Every time you have an aorist tense in the Greek you have two concepts. Visualise a line on which one side is eternity. (The Greek language is the best language in the world for expression of eternity) On the other side of this is time. Here is the time line. The simple aorist tense would be a point of time in which something happened. But, you could also take a series of parallel points of time and gather them into one ball of wax. For you could take this point of time and divorce it from time and perpetuate it forever, or you could refer to a point of time in eternity past.

If you are familiar with a point of time in eternity past, that is Ephesians 1:4 where He chose us in eternity past. In Acts 16:31 you have a point of time divorced from time and perpetuated forever. You are familiar with a simple point of time, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” But that point of time is perpetuated forever, “thou shalt be saved,” i.e. you shall be saved once and for all. In other words, the day in which you believe in Jesus Christ, that point in time is taken out of time and perpetuated forever. And occasionally you hear the romantic statement, “I wish that this moment could go on forever.” Now while it can’t in reality in the English language, the Greeks had a way of preserving that moment and they could preserve it by putting it into the aorist tense. And that point of time could be taken out of time and would be perpetuated forever and ever and ever. That is what it means when it says, “thou shalt be saved.” And this is just one tense.

Now they also have the concept of aktionsart which is the opposite of punctilliar action. This is something that moves along habitually. This is something that moves along habitually. This is something that continues and they had many ways of expressing that. Linear aktionsart is present time. In past time something happened in the past but now has results that continue is a combination of the two in the perfect tense. This is just one of four ways to determine the meaning of a verb in the Greek.

The Greeks also had something else, they had mood in every verb. Every verb had a mood. There are four moods. The first is the indicative. This is something that really happened. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” That is aorist indicative. You really are saved when you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. The subjunctive mood is the mood of potential. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won’t .The imperative mood is the ,mood of command. And a very interesting mood in the Greek is the aorist optative, which expresses a wish. So again you have a second fix on every verb form in the Greek.

Then, of course, the third fix is voice which expresses relationship of the subject to the verb. And you hear me say occasionally, active voice, the subject produces the action of the main verb. For example, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.” That is active voice because you yourself do the believing. The passive voice — the subject receives the action of the main verb. And in the middle voice which is rather unique, the subject is either benefited by the action of the verb or the subject acts upon itself which we call in the English, reflexive. So you have three ways to identify a verb.

Then there is a fourth. The etymology — meaning of a word. We now have an almost complete etymology on all of the significant words of the New Testament. We have been able to trace their etymology and how they were used. So this is just the verb.

The noun itself has many ways of determining it and there is no doubt of the vocabulary of the Greek noun because they had active or passive endings, or causative endings; this is in the realm of suffixes. The compounds that came from prefixes, they could put a preposition with a noun and give it an additional meaning and significance, and they had other things they could put in front of it as well. So sometimes in the New Testament you will find a noun which is made up of three words and it becomes a very significant and interesting word.

The little word “if” has four concepts in the Greek. If and it is true — 1st class condition; if and it is not true — 2nd class condition; if, maybe it is true, maybe it isn’t — 3rd class condition; if, I wish it were, but it isn’t — 4th class condition. And all of these conditional clauses are found in the Greek.

And then you find the word “that” often used in the English. It is used either as a result clause or a purpose clause in the Greek.

Then you find aorist participles where the action of the aorist participle precedes the action of the main verb. Also you find infinitives; they express purpose.

All this adds up to something. It adds up to the fact that in the original language of the New Testament there CAN BE FOR ONE PASSAGE, ONE INTERPRETATION! Now there may be several applications. And people often confuse application and interpretation to where they think a passage means two different things. One man may give the interpretation, the other man gives the application and immediately people are all shook up. They say, “Here are two spiritual giants, one believes A, one believes B, and these two are so different, how do we get A and B together?” We’re all confused, we’re all mixed up.”

Well, A went to the right Seminary and got a shovel there and as a result he is able to interpret the passage. B just has to drift along by reading Christian magazines and listening to other people because B didn’t go to the right Seminary, he went to another seminary where he got Apologetics and confusion, and therefore he sometimes gives an application and very rarely gives an interpretation because he doesn’t have the tools to analyse . And what appears to be two spiritual giants (and they may or may not be) giving opposite interpretations, one isn’t even interpreting the Word of God at all. So really there is no confusion, except for those who are uninitiated.

But we must begin now with our subject, how we got our Bible, with 2 Peter 1:12. It is important that we begin here for a very definite reason. The Bible you hold in your hand is the most important document in the world to you. It is the source of information in regard to eternal salvation. And while eternal salvation is as simple as ‘believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,’ it can become very complex with its many beautiful facets as we study and absorb these things.

Also, the Bible contains information with regard to the believer in time — the wonderful divine operating assets. The Bible also gives us a complete set of details in regard to the future, so that the person who masters the Word of God as a believer (and only a believer can) is in a position to have peace and happiness in time, he has no qualms in regard to the future; he is always oriented; he is always productive; he is useful; he is successful, regardless of what he does in life. And, of course, if you understand from the Word of God that every believer has a ministry, every believer is a servant of the Lord, and whether you serve him in business or in the household or in the barracks or wherever it happens to be, every believer serves the Lord.

The Bible is the only source of divine viewpoint and Peter was about to die when he wrote the passage we are considering, 2 Peter 1:12. He is about to check out of this world and he has learned a great many valuable lessons in life. And when a man comes to the end of his life he always wants to pass on what he considers the most important thing of life. For example, Joseph before he passed on gave what he considered the most important information. He said, “Don’t bury me in Egypt,” because you are not going to stay there. And even though the Jews stayed there another 400 years, they were never discouraged. That is, the believers (the believing remnant) were never discouraged, never gave up, because they had the promises of God uttered from the lips of Joseph just before he died. When a man is ready to die, he usually gets around to the important things in life. And Peter is just about to die, but before he does he wants to leave behind something that is very important. And he does. The heritage of the Word of God.