Since I’m stuck in bed today with a cold I thought I would put together a few of my thoughts on a particular question regarding koine Greek. Over and over again as you’re reading text books or web pages on the subject of Koine you will hear an assertion like, “Koine was the ‘common’ language used a lingua franca throughout the Alexandrian empire from the 4th century BC until the 4th century AD.” Such statements always make me pause. I’m willing to concede that Koine was used over such a vast empire during 600 or more years but I simply can’t believe that the language was that common. I think it is fair to assume that koine was at best a second or third language that was only marginally understood and used outside of government and academia. Let’s look at three pieces of evidence: the Aramaic “translations” of the gospels, multilingualism evidenced in the book of Acts, and the multilingualism of modern day post-colonial Africa.
THE ARAMAIC TRANSLATION IN THE GOSPELS
When Jesus brings a little girl back to life, he addresses her in Aramaic (Mark 5:41). When Jesus cries out to God on the cross, he does so in Aramaic (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34). Nicknames for many of the disciples (Cephas, Boanerges, Bartimaeus) as well as place names (Golgotha) are all Aramaic. All these examples, and many more show that despite Koine being a language with vast geographical reach it had not influenced language use in Palestine although it was supposedly a lingua franca of the region for more than 300 years. And that was probably even more the case in places less influenced by the empire than Palestine.
LINGUISTIC MISUNDERSTANDINGS IN THE BOOK OF ACTS
In Acts 2 we see a scene in which ”God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven” had gathered in Jerusalem during Pentecost. If Koine had been an effective means of communicating to this multilingual crowd it would have been used. Instead, “each one heard them speaking in his own language.” I can only assume that when Peter stood to address the crowd that he did so in Koine rather than Aramaic and that the Old Testament citations are from the Septuagint.
In Acts 14, the crowd “shouted in the Lycaonian language” and misunderstood Paul and Barnabas’ words and actions.
MULTI-LINGUALISM IN POST-COLONIAL AFRICA
Although I’ve chosen to discuss Africa, you could just as easily choose South America, China, or any other geo-political unit in which a certain language is claimed to be the official language. In the case of Mozambique, Portuguese has been the “official” language of the country for more than 500 years. After all those years of influence you would think that minority languages would have slowly died out to be replaced by Portuguese. Instead, the influence of Portuguese continues to be very uneven. While you can count on hearing Portuguese spoken on TV and the radio, and used as a lingua franca in the major cities, once you step into any house, neighborhood, church or rural area you will suddenly be confronted with a completely different language. Portuguese is so weak that the government has instituted plans to teach primary school in local languages and transition to Portuguese in later grades.
SO, HOW COMMON WAS KOINE?
It appears to me that Koine was far from common. I think it is reasonable to assume that the use of Koine Greek was similar to the use of English in Kenya today, or Spanish in Mexico. The range of such a trade language tends to be wide but its actual use is very uneven. Therefore claims that Koine was the language of the common people in New Testament times are false. And I think a strong case could be made for the assertion that the Greek of the New Testament was a literary Greek. Of course there were certainly areas of the Greek empire where Greek was spoken as a mother tongue but even in those areas the language was divided into sub-dialects each with its own idiosyncracies which probably differed greatly from Koine. Everywhere that the New Testament writings were distributed it was necessary to have them interpreted and explained in the local language. Koine was so influential that in almost any synagogue or house meeting someone would be able to understand the Greek and translate it for those gathered into the language they understood best.
HOW COMMON SHOULD THE LANGUAGE OF BIBLE TRANSLATIONS BE?
There is a common argument (pardon the pun) that our translations should sound like “street language” because Koine was the language of the street. I think I’ve shown that this argument is questionable. While I am in favor of translations being understandable I don’t think that what we should strive for is “everyday language.” Rather we need literary translations that seek to remain faithful to the richness of the original text while allowing pastors and teachers to interpret this language into the local idiom of the congregation. A crucial element in this is the Holy Spirit who “leads us into all truth.” I think there will always be a role for the skillful trained interpreter of the Scriptures who can “rightly divide the word of truth.” For example, when I am teaching my children from the Scriptures I have to “re-translate” almost any Scripture passage so that they can understand it. Then I must explain difficult words and ideas and finally help them to apply this passage to their own lives. As much translators would like to be able to make the Scriptures, “accurate, clear and natural” some explanation is always going to be required.
Well, I wrote this as much to challenge some of my own assumptions as to provoke you the reader. What kinds of reactions do you have to this post? Is the language of the Bible common or divine? Should our translations be “street language” or “majestic language?” I look forward to hearing your ideas.
Thank you, David, for these interesting thoughts. I hope your cold is only a cold, not a symptom of TB or something, and that you soon recover.
You may well be right that Koiné Greek was not as widely spoken as some have assumed. But I think it was almost certainly the mother tongue of some, especially those of Greek origin or who chose to follow Greek culture. But no doubt local languages were also widespread in many areas and knowledge of Greek was patchy. I suspect that Spanish in Mexico may be a better model than Portuguese in Mozambique – after all, Spanish is the mother tongue of a quite high proportion of Mexicans, from what I understand.
But even if Koiné was not widely used as a mother tongue, that does not imply that “the Greek of the New Testament was a literary Greek“. I doubt if the spoken Portuguese of some people in Mozambique could be considered a literary language. Perhaps it is more a semi-speaker language. No doubt when Mozambicans try to write Portuguese, they don’t always try to use a high literary style. But perhaps they do mix in syntax and loan words from their local languages. So in this respect also Koiné would be like Portuguese as used in Mozambique, or Spanish as used in Mexico.
My hypothesis has always been the opposite of what I’m arguing in this post. But I’ve just started “doing the math” as they say and when you consider the linguistic diversity as well as geographical span of the Roman empire at that time it just defies logic that Koine was really a language that most people could have been comfortable expressing complex ideas in. On the continuum I would have to guess that it was more similar to Mozambique than Mexico, but I don’t have any hard data to show that as being the case.
Certainly quite a lot of work has been done on bilingualism in the Hellenistic world. Maybe parts of that world were like Mozambique, but certainly not all of it. There were clearly mother tongue Greek speakers in Greece, and almost certainly in Greek colonies scattered all over the eastern Roman Empire, where Greek was at least the lingua franca. I have seen papers suggesting that even in Rome Greek was the most widely spoken language in the mid first century AD – before a revival of Latin under the Flavians.
As Koiné was the language of Greece as well as of the rest of the eastern empire, it cannot be argued that it was not used as a mother tongue.
On the situation in Judea and Galilee, as an example for the whole region, see the article by Randall Buth Language Use in the First Century: Spoken Hebrew in a Trilingual Society in the Time of Jesus, in Journal of Translation and Textlinguistics Vol. 5 No. 4 (1992): 298–312 (presumably available to you, David, on Translator’s Workplace). There is a bibliography here of other works, although there is more here on Hebrew and Aramaic than on Greek.
Hi David,
Hope you are feeling better.
Thanks for writing. This is a very interesting topic. I feel somewhat the same as far as the “commonness” of Koine Greek. In a lot of ways I almost feel like Koine Greek was better at expressing things than English being that it is filled with a lot of words with very specific meanings (I am no Greek scholar, I have just started studying Greek, so I don’t really know, it is just an impression).
In translation I just think it is a really hard thing to make the translation “higher” than the source. If I actually know the source and target language, I just think that is a really hard thing to do. My only experience in this is with Khmer, the language in Cambodia where I live and minister. I do quite a bit of translation here (I have only been here three years though, so I am very inexperienced), but I really just think it is a hard thing to bring something up that was really low.
I guess the only example I can think of is in Khmer when you speak the “market” style of the language you don’t have to use a lot of words. So a phrase translated literally word for word (and in the same word order) would come out something like: “I want buy fruit”
Now to translate that into English, you would need to add things in order to make it sound correct, which might be considered making it “higher” than the original – but not in an extreme sense because the addition of the words in an English translation only help to make the translation more understandable, not harder to understand.
For the most part, I think summarizing in translation is much easier to do than brining a translation to be higher than its source.
I think Koine Greek is a language that is very capable of expressing itself – not something that would come out of the mouth of some gangster off the street.
I think just by the amount of vocabulary in the Greek texts of the New Testament that might be a clue as to how “high” the language really is.
Here in Cambodia, the language is for the most part really “low” because of war and a loss of all the educated people during Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge – so when someone writes, their vocabulary is really limited and comes across as “low” when I read it. But I do not think that is the case with the Greek New Testament. When someone reads it in the original, I don’t think the first thing that would come to their mind is, “wow this is really simple and quite low”.
But then again, I don’t know for sure.
Have a good day,
Nathan
sungkhum,
It is good to differentiate between “register” which is changing the language based on the situation/audience, and “prestige” which is an intuitive socio-linguistic status assigned to the way that people (usually others) speak. I suspect that street-Khmer is a fully formed language with a rich vocabulary and consistent grammar. Its register is “informal” and its prestige is probably “low.”
My assertion in this post is that the register of the Bible texts is quite formal. What we might wish to further assert is that language register of translations should be high as well since an informal register tends to have low prestige.
By the way, my close friend Ken Huff serves in Cambodia. Also, I like your new avatar. Rather enigmatic.
Hi David,
It really is a small world. I play basketball with Ken just about every week. He is a really great guy, I am glad to have had the privilege to get to know him some.
I have never heard of “register” or “prestige” but thanks for telling me about them – I really am new to linguistics – much to learn!
I believe you have labeled the “street” Khmer correctly.
Although at first it seems Khmer is a “simple” language, it is nothing of the sort – there is a huge vocabulary that can be used (and as you have stated, the grammar is consistent, though at times very hard to understand in what way, being that I am so new to the language)- but for the most part (partially because of the war, partially because of the lack of education) I believe “spoken” Khmer is very informal. Though I think that is changing. When government officials speak or those in education, the register is “very formal” and the prestige is “very high”
There are “formal” writings as well, mainly religious (Buddhist) and when I pick up one of those books to read, I basically cannot understand a word (I can get the gist, but I am far from a clear understanding).
But even Cambodians who have not been educated in the religious writings also have a hard time understanding them (though their understanding surpasses mine greatly). A lot of that is because the words that have a “formal” register come from Paly (from India) and so they are hard to understand, being that they are not Khmer, but just transliterated. Very old words and a lot of them.
-Nathan
Oh yeah, my avatar – it is “a” with the first letter of the Khmer alphabet (pronounced kind of like “kaw”).
sungkhum,
Please greet Ken for me. He and I come from the same home church in Albany, Oregon. Careful, he’s a wicked spades player.
You’ve brought up an interesting point about register. The relative formality of a speech act can be used as a weapon. In Mozambique, when a person speaks very formal Portuguese they are in essence showing their social and educational superiority. If you can’t reply in the same over-elaborate highly affected speech you are left in a disadvantageous position. The same is true for Khmer and even English. Have you noticed the register of the Better Bibles Blog? It is not formal but it is pretty intellectual. So people tend to throw around big words like “register” and “perlocutionary force.”
What does this mean for our Bible translations? If the register of a translation is “majestic” the reader will tend to respect that translation more since it “sounds weighty” which is something people very often like in their translations. On the other hand this formal register can be a detriment if you are trying to create a sense of intimacy between the text and the reader.
You have just the right attitude toward the “big words.” Just ask and someone will be happy to explain them.
Linguists sometimes also speak of an “code-switching” which describes the way people adjust their language in order to identify with different social groups.
As a practicing linguist, and one who is fairly familiar with language contact issues, (I teach about this stuff at Berkeley after all), I’d say that there are two mistakes in viewing the situation here.
1) Americans tend to see monolingualism as the norm.
2) Even when we admit bilingualism, we think that there is one really dominant language and the other is something people limp along in.
These facts simply don’t add up to the reality of most of the world. Even in this age of massive linguistic leveling, it’s quite likely that half of the world’s population is (at least) bilingual — and by that I mean that they are fully competent in more than one language. Yes, in Africa the colonial languages are part of the mix, especially for the upper classes, but this ignores, for example, those places in the Sahel where people speak 3, 4, or 5 languages all very well — and none of them colonial. Or in various Bantu regions where people speak several varieties of Bantu, generally a trade language, Lingala, Swahili, or the like, and one or more local varieties, and then maybe also a colonial language, if they have enough education.
Looking at the history and the text internal evidence regarding Palestine in the Roman era, there are better contemporary analogs than Africa or Mexico/Latin America.
Aramaic had been a trade language over a very wide area of the Middle East for a very long time. Greek was a more recent overlay, but it had been in place for 300 years. We know there were monolingual Greek speakers around in numbers in Egypt and there were plenty of Hellenistic Jews in Palestine (that’s why they appointed the first deacons).
While I can’t at the moment think of a contemporary place where two trade languages are in the kind of competition that Greek and Aramaic were in Roman Palestine, I can think of plenty of places where even the uneducated speak the politically dominant language competently — and remember Jesus had a one-on-one with Pilate, who I can all but guarantee did not speak Aramaic. I take this prima facie evidence that just about everyone had a basic competence in Greek, and the language of John was not something he learned later.
To see modern cases of wide-spread advanced competence in a culturally influential second language, we need only look at Holland or Scandinavia. English is so widely spoken in these countries, that it can be a chore to learn Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. Say one thing wrong and the clerk in the store switches to English. It’s even getting to be that way in Germany.
Finally, there are interesting things about how polyglots choose which language they speak in particular circumstances. The fact that the writers of the NT chose Greek speaks volumes.
Richard,
Thanks for moving this debate forward with your comments. As far as multilingualism, I don’t have any data but a lot of anecdotal evidence and personal experience. People’s self-assessment of their abilities in a second or third language always seems to be skewed in my estimation. You can tell me that you are fluent in English and Vietnamese and several other languages but I seriously doubt how fluent a person is in any language except their mother tongue. Of course, this could just be confirmation of your second point that Americans think bilinguals only “limp along” in a second language. I’m fairly fluent in Portuguese and the Bantu language, Nyungwe, but I know that my abilities in those languages are a far cry from what I can do with my “heart language.” My Mozambican colleagues are far from modest when it comes to boasting of the various languages that they speak. But I very seldom find a speaker who is “fluent” in Portuguese.
Perhaps some data one way or another would help swing opinion on this point.
Anybody have data on:
1. Bilingualism in the Roman world?
2. The reach of koine outside urban centers?
3. Fluency of polyglots in the Sahel?
Just a quickie. There is plenty of evidence that there was lots of bilingualism in the Roman world. That’s basically how so much of what was Celtic speaking Europe ended up speaking Romance. Plautus has lines in his plays in Punic, so the general Roman audience must have had some non-trivial knowledge of their enemy’s (Semitic) language. The Romans idolized Greek culture and had Greek tutors for their children, so anyone Roman with any sort of education also spoke Greek. (OK, maybe only foreign service 3-4, but still …)
And as for knowledge of Greek in Palestine outside of the cities, there’s still the evidence that Jesus, from backwater Nazareth, talked directly to Pilate. And Peter was the apostle to Rome (more likely speaking Greek than Latin). And John ended up on Patmos. And lastly that their disciples that wrote down their stories of Jesus did so in Greek.
If it’s expected that you need to speak a second language growing up, you just do. It may not be the best version, but it’s there and functional. That’s the way it is with English in Holland and Skandanavia. (And it’s getting to be that way in Germany and Austria.)
BTW, there are hard, and probably fairly reliable numbers for bilingual fluency for some languages in the Ethnologue. Anyone with 3-4 fluency would count as sufficiently competent for most purposes. Translations into minority languages are made for heart reasons. Much lower competencies suffice for business, government, and even friendship. (I know, my German is about 3-4 and I’ve fully participated in church and even preached. Mine isn’t pretty German, but it works.)
As for Bantu speakers in Mozambique, I’ll bet they are a lot better at the varieties of Bantu than they are at Portuguese. To the extent that good Portuguese is a kind of commodity limiting access to power and wealth, it is not a surprise that there’s a lot of merely aspiring Portuguese speakers. But the situation isn’t at all parallel to Roman Palestine. Hebrew was the power language for the Jews, the one that gave you access to cultural power. Latin was the power language for the Romans. Both used Greek to do business with one another. While the language of land was Aramaic, there were plenty of native Greek speakers around, like Paul, who clearly spoke all three languages well. (I don’t have any evidence about his Latin. Being a Roman citizen in the Eastern part of the empire didn’t necessarily mean you spoke Latin.)
Does this satisfy you?
Richard,
Thanks for adding these new insights. I certainly understand the situation better. Since I’m working in the field of producing mother-tongue translations, this is a subject that has immediate application, or at least provides food for thought. My organization has always been of the opinion that everyone deserves the Scriptures in their heart-language, a condition that was never met in the first century. This could be used as support for the argument that essentially the gospel is available right now for all who need it (at least in a trade or regional language).
I’m not sure that isn’t a “fallacious argument.” There is a similar argument going around regarding literacy vs. orality. The argument is something like, “Most people in the first century accessed the Scriptures orally, so we should expect that to be an effective means of communicating in cultures that primarily use oral communication.
Thanks and yes, I’m satisfied.
http://replicawatches.forumppl.com
Thanks for the article. A really interesting read. Keep in touch.