mrsonic

are all the greek manuscripts written in the same dialect?

show_no_mercy

They are all written in Koine (Common) Greek. Common Greek includes the period between 300 BCE and 300 CE.

Toto

There are linguistic differences between different parts of the NT, but not significant enough to constitute different dialects. Mark in particular is supposed to be written in "rough" Greek, showing less education or refinement. The Epistle to the Hebrews shows more education.

mrsonic

koine greek is a dead language. which linguistic tools are used to bring it back to life? is it possible that christian dogma ,which developed later, killed the original meaning of a word in koine greek? it is true that grammatical rules in koine greek would differ from greek in later century? what are the difficulties involved in understanding koine greek grammar?

Roger Pearse

I am told that the Atticising movement of the 2nd century affected later Greek, and this affects some of the later manuscripts (=handwritten copies), where Koine gets replaced with Attic idioms. This tendency was present throughout the Byzantine period, right down to 1453 -- indeed one of the early humanists who visited Constantinople before its capture by the Turks records that the emperor and his court spoke Attic Greek.

The other issue which I believe affects manuscripts of the Greek NT was the changes in the Greek language as it made its long journey from the language of Pericles to that of Papadopoulos. Some of the medieval manuscripts display errors where the contemporary Greek usage has replaced the Koine usage. Effectively the text has been partly translated from NT Greek into medieval Greek.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Doug Shaver

I don't know how Christian dogma would have had that effect, but it's hardly a necessary hypothesis in any case. All languages naturally evolve as long as people actually use them. Inevitably, an ancestral version of the language will be unintelligible to users of the descendant version. Whenever that happens, one could say that the original meanings of some words have been killed if those words no longer mean what they used to mean. Numerous examples can be found in English, and the King James Bible is a good place to find some -- not through any fault of Christianity, either.