The Language of the New Testament

If you were to ask the man on the street which language the New Testament was written in, he probably wouldn’t know. But if he were to venture an educated guess, he might reason that since Jesus and his earliest followers were all Jews and Hebrew was the language of the Israelites in the Old Testament, the New Testament was probably written in Hebrew.

He would be wrong on two counts.

First, by the time of Jesus, the Jews in Palestine were no longer speaking Hebrew. They were speaking Aramaic, a Semitic language that originated among the Arameans in the ancient region of Syria. Hebrew had become a classical language, studied by the highly educated scribes and rabbis, and reserved for use in religious contexts.

Second, he would be wrong in assuming that the New Testament was written in the language of the Jews. As it turns out, the New Testament was written in Koine (or ‘common’) Greek.

But how is it that the sacred books of a religion that proclaims the divinity of a Jewish Messiah came to be written in a language foreign to the Jews?

To answer this question, we have to look at the history of the Near East in the last three centuries before Christ.

In the middle of the 4th century BC, Alexander of Macedon (b. 356 BC), remembered today as Alexander the Great, lead an army out of northern Greece, across the Hellespont and into Asia Minor, intent on prosecuting a war of vengeance against the Persian Empire. The Greeks harbored resentment against the Persians for having invaded Greece twice in the 5th century BC (in 492 and again in 480), and Alexander harbored the personal ambition of proving himself to be the new Achilles.

In 333 BC, Alexander defeated the Persian King Darius at the Battle of Issus. Two years later, he defeated him again, this time decisively, at the Battle of Gaugamela, making himself, effectively, the ruler of the known world. By the time of his death in 323 BC, he had established an empire that ranged from Greece in the West to Egypt in the South and all the way to the northwestern border of India in the East.

After his death, his generals divided his empire among themselves. Their descendants ruled the Greek homeland, Egypt and the Near East for the next three centuries. The last of them—Cleopatra, last queen of Egypt, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, and descendant of Alexander’s general, Ptolemy—committed suicide in 30 BC after being captured by Octavian, who would become the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, just three years later.

Under the rule of these Hellenistic monarchs, Greek became the lingua franca—the language of government, business and culture, the language of the educated elite—of the whole Near East, and it remained so for the next ten centuries. Even after the Roman conquest, it continued to be the common language of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Romans being famously enamored of all things Greek. It wasn’t until Islamic conquerors started to chip away at the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century AD, that Arabic began to supplant Greek as the dominant language in the region.

So, in the mid-1st century AD, when the books that would become the New Testament were being written, an educated, literate Christian living in Jerusalem or Antioch or Alexandria, who wanted to communicate his message of hope to other literate individuals in his own and in other cities across the Eastern Roman Empire, would naturally choose to do so in Greek.