Koine Greek: The Common Language Behind the New Testament

Koine Greek, meaning common Greek, is the simplified, widely spoken form of Greek that emerged following Alexander the Great's conquests in the fourth century BCE, spreading Greek as a lingua franca across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East and gradually leveling many of the more complex grammatical distinctions and regional dialect variation found in earlier Classical Greek, the Attic-based literary standard of fifth-century BCE Athens.

Koine Greek belongs to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European family, and its status as the common trade and administrative language of the Hellenistic and later Roman eastern Mediterranean world made it the natural language of composition for the entire New Testament and for the Septuagint, the pre-Christian Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced for Greek-speaking Jewish communities in Alexandria and elsewhere, a translation whose existence gave early Christianity, itself emerging from a Greek-speaking as well as Aramaic-speaking Jewish milieu, a ready-made Greek Old Testament to cite and build upon. Koine Greek's relative grammatical simplicity compared to Classical Greek made the New Testament accessible to a socially broad ancient readership rather than only the classically educated elite.