NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 159

NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

J P LOUW
ABSTRACT
The Greek of the New Testament has been variously explained
throughout the centuries with significant implications for
hermeneutics due to different definitions of its nature,
and the application of different linguistic methodologies.
Though modern insights have not fully replaced old convic­
tions, the 70s saw a gradual acceptance of general linguis­
tic principles, while the 80s may be called a time of
awakening. Hopefully the 90s will see a renewal moving be­
yond traditional grammar towards a full-fledged semantic
approach.

The study of ancient Greek dates back to the early Greek philosophers and
grammarians, whose observations were rooted in the belief that there is a
logical connection between language and grammar, in fact, a consistent
pattern applicable to any and all languages. When Latin gradually super­
seded Greek as a world language, these ideas continued to be accepted and
Classical philology, the science of reading and commenting on Greek and
Latin texts, set the pace and established the principles for language stu­
dies in general, especially for the period following the Renaissance.
Thus, at the time of the Reformation in the 16th century, when the first
Greek New Testaments were produced, Classical philology was the yardstick
for all language studies - a set of rules and constructions based on the
supposedly best authors of the Classical period.
The Greek text of the New Testament published by Desiderius Erasmus in
1516 contained notes to explain certain grammatical peculiarities of the
Greek text, judged to be quite inferior and often ‘incorrect’ in terms of
Classical Greek. Theodor Beza’s Annotationes, published in 1556, defended
the so-called Hebrew-Greek ‘excellence’ of the New Testament and intro­
duced a controversy that has continued even to the present time, as can be
seen in Nigel Turner’s article ‘The literary character of New Testament
Greek’ (1974). The principal differences of opinion were between the
purists who tried to prove that New Testament Gfeek can match the elegance
of Classical authors and the Hebraists who insisted that it is ‘Jewish
Greek’. These divergent opinions, along with popular ideas of earlier cen­
turies about the differences between New Testament Greek and Classical
Greek, led people to regard the divergence from Classical Greek as proof
of the work of the Holy Spirit. Later Adolf Deissmann, who was totally at
the other end of the linguistic spectrum, insisted that New Testament
Greek was on a par with the everyday language, the so-called Koine. These
matters have been adequately discussed by Simon Wong in Scriptura (1990)
and he has also pointed out how the idea of New Testament Greek being a
unique language was continually stressed. Since the Reformation these dis­
cussions were instrumental in gradually creating a general conviction that

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160 NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

New Testament Greek is something apart and therefore in our time not real­
ly a matter for concern to Classical and Hellenistic Greek scholars. It is
only something for theologians to worry about as they write their comment­
aries. This idea was reinforced by those theologians who accepted the
challenge and wrote the grammars and the lexicons. And so, with a few ex­
ceptions, New Testament Greek remained almost completely the concern of
theology and never came into its own by being studied as Greek writings.
It was scarcely ever a subject for study in any Classics department.
Before focusing our attention on what has happened in the 20th century,
it is important for us to understand another reason for the very slow pro­
gress made in the study of New Testament Greek, namely the fact that gram­
matical investigations were largely superseded by work in lexicography.
Winer’s monumental grammar of New Testament Greek, first published in
1822, took the position in its Introduction that Hebraisms were pervasive
in the grammar and that New Testament Greek should be regarded as a branch
of Hebrew studies. This remarkable development was also observed by Gert
Kruger (1975), who showed that in the 17th and 18th centuries New Tes­
tament Greek was often taught in European universities by the professor of
Hebrew. A grammar published in 1815 by P H Haab in Tubingen was called He-
braisch-griechische Grammatik zum Gebrauch filr das Neue Testament. Is it a
mere coincidence that Nigel Turner’s fourth volume on style (1976), which
completes Moulton’s Grammar of New Testament Greek, treats style almost
exclusively in terms of Semitisms?
The renewal in Classical Greek studies, introduced by Gottfried Hermann
at the beginning of the 19th century in his book on Greek grammar (De
emendanda ratione grammaticae Graecae, 1801), revitalised the ancient
logical (or ‘rational’ or ‘philosophical’) approach to language. George
Winer, who preferred to take a position somewhere between the purists and
the Hebraists, was strongly attracted to Hermann’s views and in 1822 he
published his New Testament grammar (mentioned in the previous paragraph)
within this school of thought. Winer’s grammar soon became the handbook
for practically all subsequent treatments of New Testament Greek. In the
Introduction to his grammar Winer explicitly states that, as a result of
the fact that Biblical scholars adhered so strongly to the conviction that
New Testament Greek was Hebraistic and therefore believed that it could
not be subjected to philosophical investigation, they separated themselves
entirely from Classical philologists. Furthermore, he insisted that Hebrew
itself should be subjected to ‘rational treatment’. This contention intro­
duced a somewhat new school of thought, but in fact this viewpoint was not
essentially different from the principles employed by the ancient Greek
grammarians, since both reasoned that there should be a logical connection
between words and meanings, and that grammar reflects a consistent pattern
applicable to all human languages.
The present state of the art in New Testament Greek studies is such
that while quite new insights are pursued and quite new schools of thought
have emerged, much of the earlier way of dealing with New Testament Greek
has remained. Consequently one cannot adequately understand and evaluate
present developments without proper insight into the underlying presuppo­
NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 161

sitions of Winer’s grammar, which went through eight editions between 1822
and 1894/95, and was the grammar of the 19th century. The Blass-Debrunner
grammar of the 20th century (1896-1976, 14 editions) continued the same
philological approach, although modern linguistics was born in 1916 when
Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique generate appeared. Even the
1976 revision of Blass-Debrunner by Rehkopf is amazingly still innocent of
linguistics (see G D Kilpatrick’s review of the Rehkopf edition in The
Classical Review 28, 1978, p99).
The present state of New Testament Greek is still intricately linked
with Winer’s approach and it is only in the past decade that considerable
changes have occurred. These changes are, however, still in the process of
being accepted, while older philological concepts still prevail in nume­
rous publications, even to the present time. One should not assume that
all of the philological and/or Semitic approaches to New Testament Greek
are to be discarded. It is more a matter of narrowing their relevance and
it is for this reason that we must resume our discussion of Winer.
Winer explained that he meant ‘rational investigation’ to be the proper
method for grammatical investigations. In the Introduction to his grammar
he insists that he does not construct a priori the laws and rules of lang­
uage, but that a historical survey of the language is the means by which
the causes of individual phenomena can be discovered. Accordingly, the
grammarian must trace the course of thought underlying each New Testament
writer’s thinking by noting every transition from one meaning of a word to
another, from the fundamental signification of every particle to each of
its secondary meanings. In essence Winer goes back to the philosophical
approach of the ancient Greeks. Plato’s Cratylus laid the foundation for
these convictions.
One of the most far-reaching implications of this presupposition — in
vogue since the early Greeks and even up to the 20th century — is that
there must be one basic meaning of each word or grammatical construction
that will highlight and explain all of the various usages. This so-called
etymological approach was the prevailing philosophy of grammar for almost
fourteen centuries. By the end of the 19th century the historical approach
still dominated thinking, although not on philosophical grounds, but on
the grounds of the history of each item. The oldest known or reconstructed
stage of the language became the yardstick, and Greek and Latin roots pro­
vided the historical setting. Then, in the latter part of the 19th centu­
ry, languages began to be diligently compared to one another. Sir William
Jones’s speech in 1786, which drew attention to the value of Sanskrit in
language studies, is often said to have opened the way. Jones’s contention
that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, as well as the Germanic, Celtic and Per­
sian languages must have a common background, prompted others to proceed
along these same lines. Thus the comparative study of languages was born,
yet within an overshadowing historical approach. In such a mode New Testa­
ment Greek was also pursued within a historical-comparative framework. A T
Robertson’s monumental grammar of close to 1500 pages first appeared in
1914 (although it was started in 1886) and emphasised this historical ap­
proach by even calling itself A grammar of the Greek New Testament in the
162 NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

light of historical research.

Through all these centuries the basic unit of linguistic analysis was
the word (especially in terms of its origin and development) in order to
determine a type of Grundbedeutung from which all usages could be explain­
ed. The same applied to nominal cases, verbal aspects and sentence con­
structions. Usage, as the mode of description of parallel forms and con­
structions, dominated the linguistic scene, since this was the essence of
philology. Even a cursory examination of the leading New Testament gram­
mars from the last part of the 19th and the first part of the 20th century
(e g Winer’s and Blass-Debrunner’s Grammatik, as well as Moulton’s Grammar
of New Testament Greek) shows this general contention which Robertson made
explicit in the title, as referred to above.
This historical approach to grammar is still quite popular.
Springhetti’s Introductio historica-grammatica in Graecitatem Novi Testa-
menti (1966) is mainly a listing of usages similar to M Zerwick’s
Graecitas Biblica, first edition 1944. One can easily enlarge upon the
grammars published in the 20th century. They all seem very similar in ap­
proach to the grammars of Winer and Blass-Debrunner. The well-known gram­
mars by Radermacher (1925), Abel (1927), Chamberlain (1941), Dana-Mantey
(1957), Jay (1958), Moule (1959) and Greenlee (1963) are all the same in
set-up and approach. Accordingly, it is no wonder that Lars Rydbeck
(1974/75), in an article with the striking title ‘What happened to New
Testament Greek Grammar after Albert Debrunner?’ deplores the fact that
research into post-classical Greek, in particular New Testament Greek, has
almost come to a standstill. Rydbeck offers three reasons for this state
of affairs: the lack of a so-called ‘classical education’, an artificial
antithesis between theological and grammatical interpretations of the New
Testament and, finally, an assumption that everything in New Testament
Greek scholarship has been done already. This final lament is perhaps the
most crucial of the three, since various grammars after Debrunner all
merely repeat what has been said and what is already known. Consequently,
it stands to reason that people would think that we have all the facts.
Without new methodologies and a new theory of language no one could expect
to offer anything different.
If one looks at the grammars on New Testament Greek that appeared since
the 1960s, it is remarkable that one of the first grammars with a modern
linguistic orientation is that of Goetchius, The language of the New Tes­
tament (1965), in which he applies linguistic terminology to his descrip­
tion of the phonology and morphology of New Testament Greek. At that time
it was quite a bold venture. One would have expected that Margaret Thrall
in Greek particles in the New Testament (1962) would at least have exhibi­
ted some acquaintance with linguistics. Though her book is an excellent
descriptive exposition of the usages of particles, she remains fully with­
in a philological framework, with, however, some critical awareness of the
weakness of the traditional philosophical approach, especially in regular­
ly pointing out that a basic meaning for the various particles represents
a false approach to the problems of semantic analysis.
It is hardly thinkable that Biblical scholars and Greek grammarians in
NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 163

the first half of the 20th century could be totally unaware of the new ap­
proach to language introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916. Saussure’s
insistence that a synchronic structural approach to language should be
primary and that consequently the historical-comparative method should be
supplemental to determining the meaning in a text, was so revolutionary
that it took at least half a century to be accepted. Linguists such as
Jespersen, Bloomfield, Ullmann, Gray and many others were apparently
totally unknown to New Testament Greek scholars.
One might think that these linguists were generalists and, as such, far
removed from New Testament studies. However, the situation in Classical
Greek was not much different. The monumental Griechische Grammatik by
Eduard Schwyzer (first published in 1938, but continued and enlarged for
many decades) likewise shows no acquaintance with anything outside of
Greek studies. Even when Chomsky’s Transformational generative grammar
(1957, 1965) and other structural approaches such as sociolinguistics and
the study of meaning within a semiotic framework (to mention only two)
began to dominate the linguistic scene, Greek studies (whether in the New
Testament or in any other area) continued the philological approach. It is
no wonder that James Barr’s publications in the early 1960s, despite
favourable reactions from linguists, had little or no influence, except
for some lip service, even as Moises Silva contends in his Foreword to
David Black’s Linguistics for students of New Testament Greek (1988).
Silva also rightly maintains that even during the 1970s significant works
employing modern linguistics in Biblical scholarship were few and far be­
tween. Nevertheless, the 1970s may be regarded as a time of pondering the
value of linguistics for New Testament exegesis. Nida was an important
voice at the time. His article in the Journal of Biblical Literature in
1972 on the implications of contemporary linguistics for Biblical scholar­
ship provided an important stimulus. As early as 1969 he and Charles Taber
published their Theory and practice of translation, which became one of
the strongest means for awakening many New Testament scholars to the rele­
vance of modern linguistics. Similarly, Bertha Siertsema’s article with
the significant title ‘Language and world view (Semantics for theolo­
gians)’ in The Bible Translator (1969) endorses the criticism James Barr
launched at Bohman’s distinction between Hebrew and Greek thought as re­
flected in their languages.
Perhaps no one else had such a profound influence on New Testament
Greek as Nida. His Componential analysis of meaning (1975) and his Explo­
ring semantic structures (1975), in which a number of his significant pub­
lications in various journals were reworked, opened the minds of many New
Testament scholars and set the scene for what happened in the 1980s. Silva
also pointed out that the 1980s had seen a genuine awakening to the rele­
vant contribution that linguistics can make to Biblical exegesis. This is
certainly true, yet the present state of New Testament Greek grammar
should not be assumed to be one of total awakening. It is rather a mixed
bag. While publications (articles, monographs, books) with a modern ling­
uistic approach are no longer rare, commentaries and publications on Bib­
lical theology reflect only a superficial acquaintance, if any, with mod­
164 NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

ern linguistics.
The 1970s not only opened up new horisons, but also preserved old con­
victions. In a Festschrift to honour F W Gingrich as a lexicographer, Otto
Piper (1972) wrote a chapter on the unfinished task of lexicography. Yet
he says that with Bauer’s Worterbuch and the publications edited by Kittel
on key theological terms, the task of New Testament lexicography ‘has now
been solved forever’ (pl76). What task was then still ‘unfinished’? He
mentions such features as the relation between knowledge and action, the
historical character of language, and theological matters pertaining to
the nature of God. This is still fully in line with concepts strongly cri­
ticised by Barr. What is even more astonishing is Piper’s plea for etymo­
logy (p203). This is but one example, but it indicates a trend. New ideas
are accepted slowly.
One can justifiably contend that the 1960s and early 1970s still regar­
ded a general philological approach as practically the only methodology.
Perhaps one of the main reasons for such a state of affairs lay in the
f act that those scholars who were aware of the prof ound changes in
linguistics probably did not consider it feasible to venture into a new
grammar for New Testament Greek before modern linguistics had developed
more fully. And so they remained quiet. Those who were not sympathetic to
or even unaware of such developments regarded Moulton, Robertson and
Blass-Debrunner as the standard grammars to which little or nothing could
be added. Therefore, even up to the 1980s, all New Testament Greek gram­
mars that did appear were ‘beginners’ grammars’, offering nothing new ex­
cept for presenting some new teaching methods. That is to say, the focus
was not on the content as such, but rather on the presentation of the ac­
cepted content. Even a superficial glance at grammars such as the follow­
ing will illustrate this point: An introductory grammar of New Testament
Greek with exercises (1965) by A W Argyle, and A beginner's New Testament
Greek grammar (1979) by S Kubo. Some were updated reprints of earlier edi­
tions, but others merely continued the trend, such as Beginners' grammar
of the Greek New Testament by W Davis, New Testament Greek: an introducto­
ry grammar by E G Jay, Einfuhrung in das neutestamentliche Griechisch by L
Lentz, Lehrbuch des neutestamentliche Griechisch by J Warns, and Satzlehre
des neutestamentlicher Griechisch by G Steyer. Some grammars proposed spe­
cific new teaching approaches, such as Teaching New Testament Greek, a
psycholinguistic approach by C A Allen and Handbook of New Testament Greek
by W S Lasor, which followed an inductive method by using Acts as the text
and teaching the grammar as items came along in the process of reading the
text. This trend continued despite remarkable advances made in
linguistics. A notable example is Nigel Turner’s Grammatical insights into
the New Testament, with no reference whatsoever to anything but philology.
The same applies to his edition of volume III Syntax of Moulton’s Grammar
of New Testament Greek.
Another trend, which has not yet been mentioned, since it is more re­
stricted in scope, but in fact a part of the philological approach, is to
treat New Testament Greek as Semitic Greek, using the LXX to explain
various features of New Testament Greek, for example, Semitische Syntax in
NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 165

Neuen Testament (1968) by K Beyer, and Essays in Biblical Greek: studies

on the value and use of the Septuagint (1970) by E Hatch. These publica­
tions, as well as a number of others, were in a way merely a revival of
strong positions at the beginning of the 20th century.
New linguistic insights, however, have gradually begun to be accepted.
In 1978 Learn to read the Greek New Testament by W Powers applied linguis­
tic principles to various aspects of grammar, though more descriptively.
However, though his definitions became much better linguistically and the
more precise terminology from modern linguistics enhanced this grammar,
almost all of his ‘innovations’ were in the area of phonology and morpho­
logy.Some stimulus was given by the Society of Biblical Literature in
publishing D D Schmidt’s Hellenistic Greek grammar and Noam Chomsky
(1981). Although this was a commendable effort, the formalising of des­
criptions according to the symbols and notation of transformational-
generative grammar made it a difficult book to cope with and to reveal the
relevance of linguistics. In proving the relevance of linguistics, an ear­
lier publication, namely David Kiefer’s New Testament Greek for Bible stu­
dents, 3 vols (1975), substantiated the fruits of linguistics and made
these available to Bible students. Since it is a publication for begin­
ners, the level is elementary, even though the approach is quite modern
and scientific, perhaps even better than Theodore Muller’s New Testament
Greek: a case grammar approach (1978), in which he tried to incorporate
insights from generative-transformational grammar, as well as case grammar
as more relevant means of explaining New Testament Greek. Though case
grammar is explicitly mentioned in the title, not too much of it is found
in the actual core of the book.
Developments illustrating changes in approaches to New Testament Greek
are currently more often found in journal articles than in full-scale
books. An important article by Richard Erickson (1983), based on his doc­
toral dissertation, shows how theology has always been closely linked to
the Bible and yet how the text of the Bible must be regarded as a language
text. Together with Erhardt Guttgemanns, he pleads for a complete integra­
tion of theology and linguistics. Guttgemans has done much to expose the
lack of linguistics, especially in German theology. His writings, however,
have had more influence in countries other than Germany.
Most articles on more restricted grammatical issues show the need for
proper methodology. Traditional grammar is largely descriptive and often
provides little more than names assigned to constructions.
The plight of New Testament Greek grammar is mainly due to a lack of
proper methodology and a satisfactory linguistic theory. To rectify this
situation is the purpose of most recent doctoral theses, e g P W Brennan,
The structure of Koine Greek narrative (1984), dealing with the discourse
patterns of narrative prose, and J E Botha, A study in Johannine style:
history, theory, practice (1989), in which speech acts are treated for the
first time as part of style. Studies such as these all contribute to a new
theory of New Testament Greek; in fact, they provide a new frame of refe­
rence that will eventually constitute the infrastructure for a new
grammar.
166 NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

Simon Wong has recently submitted a thesis on Case frames in the Paul­
ine Epistles (1990). Semantic cases as a means of establishing sentence
meaning is a new application of case theory, whereby syntax and semantics
are joined in analysing utterances. Case theory defines the roles which
entities play in events. These roles are the primary elements in determin­
ing what an utterance means. Many additional examples may be quoted from
dissertation abstracts. They all prove that the process is ongoing. New
Testament Greek has not come to a standstill.
These new approaches are not, however, very numerous, as can be readily
seen by checking New Testament Abstracts, although recent volumes do show
some increase. The sections dealing with matters of language are mainly
those marked philology (sic) and translation. In comparison with literary
studies, exegesis and theology, these are, naturally, small areas. Yet
they do show some activity in grammatical studies. Some are philological,
perhaps the majority, while studies with a modern linguistic orientation
are starting to appear. Perhaps the articles in The Bible Translator and
in Notes on Translation show a much larger acceptance of modern linguis­
tics since these journals are directed primarily at translators, who have
to cope with meaning. The title of Erickson’s article, referred to above,
namely ‘Linguistics and Biblical language: a wide-open field’, illustrates
the point.
Advances in linguistic studies of New Testament Greek are more often
than not to be found in works other than grammars, e g Marshall’s New Tes­
tament interpretation: essays on principles and methods (1977) and especi­
ally Thiselton’s article ‘Semantics and New Testament interpretation’.
Note also Biblical interpretation, principles, and practices by Kearly et
al (1986), in which articles by L Crouch on word studies and C D Osborn on
interpreting Greek syntax are notable. In the South African context, Fika
van Rensburg’s Grammatikos (1984)is more of a grammar and a welcome
treatment of New Testament Greek from a functional point of view as it
incorporates numerous features of linguistics.
Two areas of linguistics, namely discourse analysis and style/rhetoric,
have received almost no attention in any grammar of the Greek New Testa­
ment. As a matter of fact, we are just beginning to see something of this
in David Black’s commendable book, which has already been referred to.
However, his treatment of rhetoric is confined to figures of speech and he
advises the reader to consult Style and discourse (1983) by Nida et al for
more information. The same applies to his section on ‘Analyzing discour­
se’, in which he refers to Louw’s Semantics of New Testament Greek. Never­
theless, these aspects are being acknowledged and will hopefully gain more
acceptance in the future. It is perhaps still part of the old tradition to
restrict grammars largely to morphology and syntax. In David Black’s book,
however, semantics comprises a full chapter, which is in itself a hearten­
ing event.
Louw’s Semantics of New Testament Greek (1982) was the first to employ
the insights of linguistics as a semantic explication of the grammar and
style of New Testament Greek. It took seriously the contention expressed
in Wallace Chafe’s book Meaning and the structure of language (1970) that
NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 167

semantics is the crucial component of language. In Louw’s volume, the

paragraph became the basic unit of analysis and the methodology moved the
focus from there to sentences and then to words.
The following year (1983) a very valuable book Biblical words and their
meaning: an introduction to lexical semantics by Moises Silva was publish­
ed. Silva gives a lengthy account of how meaning has been treated within a
historical framework and he then provides the reader with an excellent ex­
position of descriptive semantics in the framework of modern linguistics.
These books, as well as Style and discourse (1983), mentioned above,
and Lexicography and translation (1985), in which a number of scholars
(Wendland, Nida, van Wyk, Liibbe, Vorster and Louw) prepared the way for
the new Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament based on semantic
domains (1988), may all be regarded as preliminaries to a new grammar of
New Testament Greek that must emerge in the near future. In all these
publications a totally new view of Greek is proposed within a framework of
modern linguistics by taking into consideration important insights from
discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, sociosemiotics, f unctional theories
of meaning and speech acts.
A notable application of new linguistic insights applied to New Testa­
ment Greek is Exegetical fallacies (1984) by D A Carson, in which pitfalls
resulting from philological approaches are discussed. This has also been a
valuable tool for sharpening the skills of exegetes and introducing new
approaches. The most recent grammar (1988) by David Black, Linguistics for
students of New Testament Greek (already mentioned), is also a welcome
publication. It treats phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics from a
linguistic point of view and adds a chapter on valuable insights from his­
torical-comparative grammar. This is important, since one should not dis­
card what is valuable in older studies merely because other methodologies
have been developed.
A very delightfully written book applying modern linguistics to bibli­
cal study and rendering it useful for understanding the meaning of a New
Testament text is Linguistics and Biblical interpretation (1989) by Peter
Cotterell and Max Turner. The book is up to date with modern insights and
is aimed at providing the student with a clear and readable introduction
to lexical semantics, as well as to the semantics of sentences, along with
a good introduction to discourse analysis.
In the above survey the term New Testament Greek has been used through­
out. Strictly speaking, however, there is no such thing as New Testament
Greek. This statement, in itself, is part of a new development in apprais­
ing so-called New Testament Greek. The name as such has generally been
understood as referring to a particular form of Greek. Especially since
the Reformation in the 16th century the type of Greek found in the New
Testament was regarded and analysed as a special, even unified, branch of
Greek. This probably occurred because of the theological perspective that
the writings grouped as ‘The New Testament’ comprised one book by one pri­
mary author.
When Desiderius Erasmus criticised the grammatical ‘impurities’ of the
Greek New Testament as compared with Classical Greek, he met with strong
168 NEW TESTAMENT GREEK - THE PRESENT STATE OF THE ART

opposition — not on the grounds of a linguistic argument as to why Clas­

sical Greek (in fact, Attic Greek) should be normative, but because of the
theological doctrine of verbal inspiration. Thus the stage was set for an
unquestioned assumption that New Testament Greek was a distinctive and
unified type of Greek. A number of assessments of New Testament Greek re­
flected in such names as ‘Hebraistic Greek,’ ‘Sacred Greek’ (often called
‘Holy Ghost Greek’), or even ‘Common Greek’ were made in the 19th cen­
tury. These were largely the result of Adolph Deissmann’s endeavours,
which for the first time related the Greek as found in the New Testament
to the ordinary speech of the day. All of these names reflect the view
that the Greek in the New Testament is distinctive and more or less homo­
geneous. Some even went so far as to think that New Testament Greek is
typically Koine Greek, or even worse, to identify Koine Greek with New
Testament Greek. At present one often hears people say at conferences or
in private conversations that none of the above evaluations is really va­
lid.
The expression ‘Koine Greek’ is better understood as a cover term for
various forms of Greek used in everyday speech in many parts of the
ancient world during the Hellenistic era. Greek as a world language was
then in a sense comparable to English today, a language known and used in
most parts of the world, a koine language. Yet, there is no such thing as
Koine English. Similarly, one should not talk of New Testament Greek as
being Koine Greek. Rather one should talk of various forms and styles of
Greek within the area of Hellenistic Greek, ranging from fairly highbrow,
as for example in 1 Peter and Jude, to quite colloquial in Mark and even
substandard in Revelation. What we, therefore, have in the New Testament
is one variety among several varieties of Greek as used in the Hellenistic
period.
Since, however, the expression ‘New Testament Greek’ is quite con­
venient, it may very well prevail even though the understanding of the ex­
pression is certainly on the brink of change. This may have a profound in­
fluence on further developments in grammar and exegesis, especially in
cautioning analysts against using a grammatical or stylistic peculiarity
in John to explain features of other writings in the New Testament. The
Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament based on semantic domains, pu­
blished in 1988, already distinguishes clearly between meanings of the
same Greek term in different books of the New Testament.
What has been said is not an exhaustive account, since this presenta­
tion does not permit a detailed exposition. However, the above outline is
believed to illustrate the main features of the present state of the art.
Unfortunately, it may still be summarised as a mixed bag. While many arti­
cles, monographs and dissertations clearly show a total break with tradi­
tional grammar, old views are by no means totally absent. We have perhaps
passed from the old to the new in the 1980s. The next decade will, hope­
fully, see a new interest in linguistic approaches to New Testament Greek
grammar.
What now lies ahead is to tackle specific issues in building up a data
base for a new grammar. Such a grammar must be semantic in orientation and
NEOTESTAMENTICA 24(2) 1990 169

must explain the f unctions of the morphological and syntactical

categories. These functions, however, must not be explained in isolation,
but rather by comparing different linguistic items that can be used to
represent the same function. This type of functional approach is absolute­
ly necessary in order to break new ground. For example, for the purpose of
describing the semantics of verbal aspects, very little is contributed to
our understanding of the meaning of aspect by re-evaluating the tense sys­
tem of Greek only because the tense system has traditionally been said to
mark different verbal aspects. We must first of all define what we under­
stand by aspect, that is, what type of linguistic feature it is. This will
lead us to its function in language. Then we will have to determine how
languages can express this particular function, e g the duration of an
event. If we find that linguistic items such as lexical markers, contextu­
al situations, componential features and speech perspectives mark durative
aspect, then we have to determine how verbal tenses function in respect to
other markers of aspect. The question to be solved is then whether verbal
tenses are really markers of aspect. This methodology is in line with sty­
listics and provides us with a complete picture. It will surely lead to
new insights.
Since language is a code by which semantic information is transmitted,
a functional approach is imperative if we are to map the semantic content
of an utterance. This is but one small item, but it shows how looking at
language from new angles can add numerous insights to our understanding,
especially in determining meaning. The 1990s will probably be a time of
justifying the way in which we determine meaning. This is a tremendous
challenge. Nothing that remains static can survive. Life implies moving
on. This philosophy should be our yardstick in looking for a new grammar
of New Testament Greek. The old one has become obsolete. This we have
learned in the 1980s.

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