A Greek New Testament

Alexander the Great's conquests spread Greek far beyond the world of the classical city-states, and the language that traveled with his armies and administrators was not the literary Attic Greek of Athenian drama and philosophy but a simplified, widely intelligible form called koine, meaning common. By the first century AD, koine functioned as the shared language of trade, administration and everyday communication across the eastern Mediterranean, spoken as a second language by millions who had never seen Greece and never would.

This is the direct, practical reason the New Testament exists in Greek rather than in Hebrew or Aramaic. Its writers were, with rare exceptions, addressing communities scattered across cities where koine was the one language a Jewish, a Roman, and a native Anatolian or Greek reader could all be expected to understand. Writing in Hebrew would have reached a shrinking circle of religious specialists; writing in Aramaic would have reached Jewish and some Near Eastern communities but shut out the Gentile world the church was actively trying to reach. Koine Greek was the only realistic vehicle for a message its writers wanted heard everywhere at once.

None of this means the New Testament is written in a debased or careless form of Greek. Its authors range from the workmanlike, Semitic-flavored Greek of Mark and Revelation to the more polished, literary prose of Luke and Hebrews, and all of it is intelligible, functional koine, the same register of language found in contemporary letters, receipts and inscriptions recovered from Egypt and across the Roman world.

Long before the New Testament was written, the Hebrew Scriptures themselves had already been translated into Greek, in a project traditionally associated with Alexandria beginning under the early Ptolemies. The Letter of Aristeas gives a legendary account of seventy-two translators, six from each tribe, who worked together, compared their results and agreed a single Greek text of the Law of Moses in seventy-two days; later retellings, beginning with Philo, grew the story into a miracle in which each translator worked alone and all produced identical versions. From that tradition the translation gets its common name, the Septuagint, from the Latin word for seventy, often abbreviated LXX. The legend's details are almost certainly embellished, but the underlying fact, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced for use among Greek-speaking Jewish communities, especially in Egypt, over the third and second centuries BC, is not in dispute.

By the first century AD, the Septuagint was the Bible many diaspora Jews actually read, since Greek, not Hebrew, was their native or dominant language. When the New Testament's writers quote the Old Testament, the majority of those quotations follow the Septuagint's wording rather than offering an independent translation from the Hebrew, which is exactly what should be expected of writers composing in Greek for audiences who, in many cases, knew their Scriptures in Greek and would not have recognized a fresh, unfamiliar rendering as quoting Scripture at all.

This matters for a simple, practical reason before it matters for any harder theological one: a great deal of what can look, to a modern reader comparing an English Old Testament and an English New Testament side by side, like a loose or inaccurate quotation is often nothing more than the New Testament faithfully quoting an already-existing, already-authoritative Greek translation that phrased the original a little differently than a direct Hebrew-to-English rendering would.

Beneath the Greek text stands another, spoken layer. The great majority of scholars hold that Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew and long established as the common tongue of the Near East since the Babylonian and Persian periods, was Jesus's everyday spoken language in Galilee and Judea. Mark preserves several moments of Jesus's actual speech before translating them for his Greek readers: 'Talitha koum' (the BSB's spelling) to the dead girl in 5:41, 'Ephphatha' to a deaf man in 7:34, and the anguished cry from the cross, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani,' in 15:34. Each time, Mark supplies the Greek meaning immediately afterward, showing plainly that his own audience could not be assumed to understand the original words.

Hebrew had not disappeared; it remained the language of Scripture, formal prayer and much religious scholarship, and some recent evidence, including certain Dead Sea Scrolls and later rabbinic literature, suggests Hebrew may also have continued as a living, spoken language in some circles longer than once assumed. Greek, meanwhile, functioned as the language of trade, administration and communication with the wider world, evident in the trilingual notice over Jesus's own cross in John 19:20, naming Hebrew, Latin, and Greek together in a single, small, deliberate act of Roman bureaucracy. John's word Hebraisti, which the BSB renders 'Hebrew' in its text and which its footnote at verse 13 allows may mean 'in Aramaic,' is itself a small reminder of how closely the two languages were tied in speech.

A first-century Galilean of Jesus's social position most likely moved among at least two of these three languages daily, and probably understood something of the third. That layered, multilingual world sits directly behind the New Testament's own composition: a message first spoken largely in Aramaic, rooted in a Scripture read and prayed in Hebrew, reaching later readers everywhere through the medium of Greek.

The clearest case worth learning well involves Psalm 40. Translated from the Hebrew, verse 6 reads, in the BSB, 'but my ears You have opened,' a striking Hebrew idiom, literally closer to 'ears You have dug for me' (the lesson's own rendering of the Hebrew verb karah, to dig), picturing attentive obedience. Hebrews 10:5 quotes this same verse in a Greek form, which reads instead, 'but a body You prepared for Me,' and the BSB footnote at Psalm 40:6 records exactly this, 'Hebrew; some LXX manuscripts but a body You prepared for me.' The wording 'some LXX manuscripts' matters: the Greek manuscripts of the Psalm are not unanimous about 'body,' so the lesson speaks of a Greek form of the verse, not of one fixed Septuagint text. The author of Hebrews builds a specific argument about Christ's bodily incarnation directly on that Greek wording. This is a genuine, visible difference between the Hebrew tradition and the Greek translation the New Testament author is using, not a copying error or a mistranslation invented for this lesson; both readings are well attested in their respective textual traditions, and Hebrews is simply quoting the Bible it had, in the language it was written in.

A second example appears at the Jerusalem council in Acts 15:16-17, where James quotes Amos 9:11-12 to support admitting Gentiles without circumcision. The Hebrew of Amos 9:12, translated in the BSB, reads, 'that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations that bear My name,' while the Greek form, which Acts quotes, reads in Acts 15:17, 'so that the remnant of men may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who are called by My name.' The BSB footnote at Amos 9:12 sets the two side by side, giving the Septuagint as 'that the remnant of men, and all the nations that bear My name, may earnestly seek Me; cited in Acts 15:16-18.' Scholars commonly trace part of this difference to the consonantal closeness of two Hebrew words, Edom and adam, mankind, and of two similar-looking verbs, to possess and to seek, though there is genuine debate over whether the Septuagint reflects a distinct underlying Hebrew text or a deliberate interpretive choice by its translators. Worth noting alongside this: a Dead Sea Scrolls text called 4Q174, or Florilegium, independently reads this same passage about the fallen tent of David in a future, messianic sense, showing that a reading along these lines already existed in Jewish interpretation before the Jerusalem council ever met.

A third, more subtle case is Isaiah 7:14, quoted in Matthew 1:23. Here the BSB itself, translating the Hebrew directly, already prints 'the virgin' in its text, matching Matthew's use of the Greek parthenos, so there is no plain contradiction visible in the BSB at this point. That is itself a translators' choice: the BSB's footnote reads 'Or young woman,' and some other English Bibles, the NRSV for one, print the words young woman in the text, as a student can see by comparing translations on Bible Hub. The BSB also capitalises 'Him' in 'will call Him Immanuel,' a typographical reading of the child as Christ, which the Hebrew, having no capitals, does not itself show; its own footnote adds that the Hebrew literally has 'she will call His name Immanuel.' The subtlety lies one level down, and the lexical evidence points in more than one direction. The Hebrew word almah is used of a young woman of marriageable age and does not, by itself, state virginity; the other Hebrew word, betulah, is often taken to be the more specific term, and the BSB renders it 'virgin' in places such as Leviticus 21:14, where the priest is to marry 'a virgin from his own people' and not a widow or divorced woman, and in Deuteronomy 22:19. Those who hold that Isaiah's word already implies virginity add that Rebekah is called a betulah in Genesis 24:16 ('a virgin who had not had relations with any man') and then an almah in verse 43, where the BSB has 'maiden,' so the same girl is called by both words, and that an unmarried young woman in that society would be presumed a virgin. Against this, Gordon Wenham and others argue that betulah does not by itself state virginity either. Wenham's own case rests chiefly on Deuteronomy 22:13-21, which he reads as a charge about pregnancy before marriage rather than a test of physical virginity; they also point out that Genesis 24:16 has to add the clause 'who had not had relations with any man,' which would be redundant if the word already said so, and Joel 1:8 (BSB 'Wail like a virgin dressed in sackcloth, grieving for the husband of her youth') uses betulah of a woman mourning a husband. The Greek word parthenos normally, though not invariably, denotes a virgin, and the Septuagint's translators chose it for Isaiah 7:14, which Matthew then follows. Serious, faithful scholars read the whole matter in more than one way, some holding that almah in context already implied virginity strongly enough for the Septuagint and Matthew to draw it out rather than invent it, others holding that the Septuagint's translators and Matthew after them are drawing a fuller theological sense out of a word whose everyday range was broader, and others again that Isaiah's sign has a nearer fulfilment in his own day which Matthew then reads in a further light. What should not be said is that Matthew is caught misquoting an unambiguous Hebrew original; nor should it be said that the Hebrew plainly settles the question in either direction. A student can test each argument in the verses cited, in the BSB, before choosing.

None of these examples means the New Testament is quoting scripture carelessly. In every case, the writer is quoting a real, existing, respected Greek text, the Bible of most of his first readers, rather than fabricating a translation. What it does mean is that a modern reader comparing an Old Testament quotation with its New Testament use is often watching two legitimate ancient textual traditions, Hebrew and Greek, sit side by side rather than watching one simply correct the other.