Koine (New Testament) Greek and Modern Greek

The word κοινή means “common”. Ancient grammarians used ἡ κοινή for ordinary Greek, as opposed to the local dialects. In Classical times, each Greek region used its own dialect, even for official business. Koine became a form of Greek shared far beyond any one region.

It began with Athens. By the 4th century BC, Attic, the dialect of Athens, was widely used outside the city. Philip II of Macedon adopted it for diplomacy and government. His son Alexander's conquests then carried it to Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. As it spread, it changed and became simpler. Attic said θάλαττα for the sea, while Koine used θάλασσα, the form known from Ionic, which is still the Greek word today.

Dates for Koine vary from one book to another: roughly from the late 4th century BC to the 5th or 6th century AD.

The New Testament was written in Koine. Scholars disagree about the dates of individual books, but the earliest, the letters of Paul, are usually placed around AD 50–60, and most of the others in the following decades. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, is also a major Koine text.

Some central New Testament words are still in daily use, with a new or narrower meaning:

• ἐκκλησία (Matthew 16:18) was the citizens' assembly in Classical Athens. The Christian meaning is Hellenistic, and today εκκλησία is the word for a church.
• εὐαγγέλιον (Mark 1:1) first meant a reward for bringing good news, and then the good news itself. Today, ευαγγέλιο is a Gospel.
• ἀγάπη (1 Corinthians 13:13) is dated by the Triantafyllidis dictionary to the Hellenistic period, and αγάπη is what Greeks say for love today.

Everyday words. Several modern words go back to small “diminutive” forms found in the New Testament. In John 6:9 a boy has five loaves, ἄρτους, and two fish, ὀψάρια. Ὀψάριον, a diminutive of ὄψον, “cooked food”, gave ψάρι, which replaced the older ἰχθύς in everyday speech. John 21 uses both words. Ψωμίον (John 13:26) was only a morsel: it did not mean “bread” until the medieval ψωμί. Παιδίον (Mark 5:39) gave παιδί, and ὠτίον (Matthew 26:51) gave αυτί, ear.

Grammar. Mark 6:25 has Θέλω ἵνα, “I want that…”, followed by a verb, δῷς, “you give”. Later, ἵνα wore down to να, and Greeks today say θέλω να μου δώσεις. The infinitive slowly gave way to such clauses. The dative disappeared for good by about the 10th century.

Sound. In Hellenistic and Roman times, η came to sound like ι, vowel length was lost and the musical pitch accent became a stress accent. The exact dates are still debated.

The Divine Liturgy is the Orthodox Church's main service, and it includes readings from the Epistles and the Gospels. The tradition in Greece has been to read them in the original Koine, with today's pronunciation. Writers often call the whole service “Koine”, although many of its prayers and hymns were composed later, in Byzantine times. How much worshippers follow is debated, and we found no reliable figures.

Translation has long been a sensitive issue. In 1901, Alexandros Pallis's translation of the Gospels into everyday Demotic Greek appeared in the newspaper Akropolis, after another translation, made at the initiative of Queen Olga, had been published earlier that year. The Gospel riots followed in Athens, and eight people died on 8 November (Old Style). In 2004, the Holy Synod approved a pilot scheme in Athens that repeated New Testament readings in Modern Greek, out of concern that young people could not follow them. In 2010, it was reported to have condemned a Modern Greek liturgy in the diocese of Nicopolis. It is not clear how far the Athens scheme spread, so practice may differ between parishes.