t Cf. T. Eckinger, Die Orlnoorophie latein. Worter in grieck. Inschriften, Munich, 1893; Wessely, ' Die lat. Elemente in del Grazitat der Papyri,' in Wiener Stv.dien, xxiv. [19u2] 99 If., xxv. [1903] 40 ff. ; D. Magie, De Romanorum iuris puUici sacrique vocahidis sollemnibiis in groecum sermonein conversis, Leipzig, 1905 ; and especiallj- L. Hahn, Rom vnd Romanismus im gricchisch-romiscken Onteii, Leipzig, 1906 (revie\ved by Thumb, Indogerm. Forsch. Anzeiger, xxii. [1907-OS] 39 ff.), also 'Zuni Sprachenkampf im romischen Eeich,' in Philologus, Suppl. x. (1907).
556 HELLENISTIC & BIBLICAL GKEEK HELLENISTIC & BIBLICAL GKEEK
mine the existence of a number of such local varia- tions. Thus the Greek-si^eaking Egyptians and Asiatics could not keep the e and i sounds * distinct (a phenomenon which, however, had nothing to do with itacism), and confounded tenues, media;, and aspirates, probably substituting tenues, or un- voiced mediae, for the last two groups. The r; had a close and an open sound, the latter probably in the East, as may be inferred from the pronuncia- tion of 9? as e in the modern dialect of Ponfcus ; w was pronounced as i, u and ^l (iu), though it is im- possible to define the local limits of the variations. Similarly, the intrusion of an inter-vocalic 7 (as in KXaiyu [=/c\aiw] found in a papyrus of the 2nd cent. B.C.) was merely local, as is shown by Modern Greek ; while the sound-change of \ into p as in dd€p(f>6s = d8£\(p6s, and the substitution of a single for a duplicated consonant, cannot have been universal in the Koine, since the X is still retained in the East (Cappadocia and Pontus), and the double letter in the south-east (Cyprus, Rhodes, etc.), of the Modern Greek area. Finally, the retention and omission of final v must each have had their own local distribution. As regards inflexions, we may draw attention to the Egyptian declension in -as, -5.T0S as compared with the Ionic -as, -ados (im- parisyllabic nouns of this class are not found in the NT). Further, forms like yiyovav on the one hand, and iwrjXdacn on the other, as also ijKOoaav and the like, indicate that, as in Modern Greek, different regions of the Koine levelled the personal endings in different ways. As yet, however, the clearest evidence that by the end of the ancient jieriod the Koine had already split up into actual dialects, in which lay the germs of the dialects of to-day, is found in the imprecation-tablets of Cyprus (3rd. cent. A.D.), the language of which shows traces of both the ancient and the modern dialect of that island. t
But while recent investigation has thus succeeded in proving the existence of local varieties of the Koine, it must refuse to recognize the so-called varieties whose existence has been maintained from ancient times, viz. the Alexandrian and Macedonian dialects. What was regarded, alike in ancient and in modern times, as characteristic of these dialects is found to have belonged to no special region, but to the common Hellenistic language. Not even the stock example ipawdca ( = ipevfdu) can be claimed for the Alexandrian dia- lect— let alone Alexandrian Jewish-Greek — as that phonetic form has been traced, e.g., in the Koine of Thera.
8. Biblical Greek as a local variety of the Koine. — We now come to the question how Biblical Greek is related to these local idioms. It is not possible to describe the Greek Bible as the monu- ment of a distinct dialect of the Koine, and still less as the monument of an Alexandrian or Pales- tinian Jewish-Greek, or of a special ' Christian Greek.' Of the existence of an Alexandrian Jewish- Greek there is no real evidence at all, as was first explicitly proved by Deissmann (see Lit. ). Psichari (see Lit.), who has recently investigated the prob- lem, could find no support for tiie theory that in particular the translators of the OT spoke a Jewisli Greek, and so occasionally introduced Hebraisms into their version. The language of the LXX is in reality a ' translation-Greek,' and cannot there- fore be adduced as proving the existence of a Jewish variety of the colloquial Koine ; nor is all our wider knowledge of the Greek spoken in Palestine, wiiether derived from direct or indirect sources, sufhcient to warrant us in speaking of it as a distinct tyjje ; at most it may be described as
* Vowels (a, e, i, etc.) as in German.
t Cf. Thumb, Nttte Jahrbiicher fiir das klass. Altertum, xvii. [1906] 257.
the Syrian Koine. Biblical Greek, moreover, is by no means identical with what we have been able to establish regarding the Greek of the Pales- tinian Jews, for the i^articular change of meaning which certain Greek words underwent in Rabbini- cal usage does not appear in those words as used in Biblical Greek ; thus, e.g., Xeirovpyia in the Rabbinical literature means ' service rendered ' ; in the Bible (as in Greek generally), 'religious service.'
It is a controversy some centuries old whether the language of the Bible bears a ' Hebrew ' colour- ing or not ; the so-called ' Purists ' sought to demon- strate the classical, the Hebraists the hebraizing, character of Biblical Greek. The theory of the ' specific quality ' of NT Gr. acquired a certain theological importance in virtue of the pointed ex- pression which it received at the hands of R. Rothe, viz. that the NT speaks in the language of the Holy Ghost, who 'framed for Himself a quite distinct religious idiom by transforming the linguistic elements which lay ready for Him, as also the already existent concepts, into a medium appro- priate to Him.' * The research of the last fifteen years has shown more and more conclusively that the question in debate was wrongly put, since neither classical Greek nor a sujjposed Jewish Greek is to be regarded as the foundation of Biblical Greek. To Deissmann (see Lit. ) is due the merit of having brought clear principles to bear upon the subject, inasmuch as he showed that Biblical Greek cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon, and assigned it a place in the general process of a great natural development of language. First of all, as regards the so-called Hebraisms, or, more accur- ately, Semitisms, the examples usually adduced are either simply fallacious or else indecisive. Leaving out of account the pedantic and barbarous litei'ality in translations of certain parts of the OT (as e.g. the tr. of Aquila, who renders -nn, the sign of the Heb. accusative, by crvv), we must admit that the syntax of the LXX has not been modified by the original in any undue degree ; thus even the construction irpoaTidivai with the infinitive (Heb. 'b igvi with inf.) cannot be regarded as non- Greek.t Detailed investigation shows that the translators were quite able to keep themselves free from bondage to their original, and that they strove with success to rejiresent the Hebrew form of expression by an excellent Greek diction (cf. Johannessohn, in Lit.). In the NT, again, evi- dences of a Hebrew gi-ound-colour have proved even less cogent, as is now increasingly recognized. The statement of B. Weiss that the Fourth Gospel has a ' hebraisierender Grundton ' has been recently challenged by Wellhausen (Das Evangelhmi Johan- nis, Berlin, 1908). In point of fact, the more thoroughly we work through the papyri, the smaller grows 1:he number of alleged Hebraisms ; we need cite only the constructions iv /xaxalpri and ^v T(p dvdfjiaTi. That modes of expression which really occur in Greek, though but rarely, or only in special circumstances, should be found more frequently in Biblical Greek when they happen to coincide with Hebrew usage (as e.g. looij) need occasion no sur- prise ; it is natural enough in translations or repro- ductions from foreign languages.^ Even the voca- tive 6 6e6s, the use of which in Biblical Greek is explained by Wackernagel§ as an imitation of Hebrew, may be brought under this general law, since 6 deds occurs as a vocative — though with a different shade of meaning — also in Greek ; while the predicative els, and such expressions as KpiTjjt