[B-Greek] question about chickens in the NT

Jonathan Robie jonathan.robie at datadirect.com
Tue Mar 23 07:06:23 EST 2004


Since modern chickens are the result of a long history of intentional 
breeding, I assume that no chicken in the NT time would be quite like a 
chicken today. But chickens had been domesticated for a very long time 
in China and India before the time of Christ, and had been imported at 
least into Egypt by 1 BC. I assume that these were domseticated 
chickens, but I did not quickly find much information on domesticated 
chickens of the time. I tried a web search for ancient chickens, and 
came up with species from many places, including the ancient near east. 
So google is your friend, and it may take some time.

I didn't go to the library, but the following book may be worth a look:

The Complete Chicken: An Entertaining History of Chickens
Author: Pam Percy
Publisher: Voyageur Press; (September 2002)
ISBN: 0896585573

It does seem to be at the light, entertaining, lay level.

As far as I know, there is only one reference that identifies a 
particular species of chicken in the New Testament - the OUDE HEN of 
John 1.3, which was apparently created without the Logos ;->

Jonathan



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