[B-Greek] Newbie Question

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Nov 23 07:01:37 EST 2003


At 12:57 AM +0200 11/23/03, Debbora wrote:
>I am very new to the study of Greek.  At the moment I am enrolled in local
>College course in Modern Greek, and my goal is to learn Church Greek as
>well.  I'm sure that this list will help me in that goal.
>
>I would like to know whether the Greek of the Old Testament [Septuagint]
>is the same Greek as that of the New Testament.  What about the Greek used
>by the early Church Fathers and in the Liturgy of the Greek Orthodox
>Church - how do they compare to the Greek of the OT and NT?
>
>Thank you in advance for your patience and explanations.

The Greek of the LXX is indeed essentially the same as that of the GNT,
although it should be noted that there is considerable range of usage in
both corpora of documents, inasmuch as the documents derive from different
geographical areas and over a considerable time period during which the
Greek language was in process of change and was being written in styles
ranging from "street" language to literary language of writers who had been
well-schooled. In the second century and beyond the Greek of the Church
Fathers is very much impacted by the "Atticist" movement in the schools
that taught serious writers to imitate the grammar and usage of 5th and 4th
century Athens rather than that of more recent writers; that's why, for
instance, Clement of Alexandria is much more difficult to read than any
text in the Greek NT itself.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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