[B-Greek] Inexpensive pocket-sized Greek NTs

Randy Leedy Rleedy at bju.edu
Thu Nov 18 12:55:58 EST 2010


Suni Kothari wrote

>>>Thank you very much. One more question, if that is OK.

Would a modern Greek speaker/reader read a version of the GNT in Modern Greek or would the version they use be the Koine?
<<<
While I am by no means an expert, since I don't see any replies to this message, I'll pass along what I think I know and let others more knowledgeable confirm or else correct as necessary. It runs in my mind that the first NT in modern Greek was produced in the mid-19th century (a Google search did not produce relevant hits near the top of the list for me to confirm or correct that recollection). Through most of the 20th century, the KOINE was readable by educated Greeks. I had a classmate in the early 1980s from Cyprus who said that the KOINE sounded to his people something like he judged the Shakespeare or the KJV to sound to English speakers at that time. I gather, though, that things have changed greatly since the adoption of the Demotic (non-literary) Greek as the national standard in Greece (was that in 1960?). When I work with something in modern Greek, I must use a different dictionary for the older Katharevousa than I use for the current Demotic (or whatever they actually call it now). Not that EVERYTHING is different, but so much is different that I am generally unable to come to terms with one kind of text if I use the other kind of dictionary. Also, anecdotally, during the tour in Greece that I took this past summer, a friend asked the helper on the tour bus if he read the Bible much. He said that the priest read the Bible at church, "But I don't understand it. It's not really Greek." He is educated well enough that he gets by in English (as most of the younger generation in Greece seems to be able to do), but the KOINE NT is so foreign to him that he does not recognize it as genuine Greek. So, based on this bit of anecdotal evidence along with a bit of first-hand experience, I gather that, in its current state, the nationally spoken language of Greece is different enough that a modern reader younger than 40 or so would have difficulty with the KOINE. One further point: the New Testament distributed in Greece by the Gideons is modern, not KOINE.
 
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University Seminary
Greenville, SC
RLeedy at bju.edu 




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