What is Koine Greek?

Koine Greek is the language in which the New Testament was originally written in the first century AD and from which all modern New Testaments were translated.

Ancient Greece was not one country but a number of different city states, each speaking their own dialect of Greek, that competed for power and influence. In the sixth century BC, the city state of Athens gained military, political, economic and cultural ascendancy in the region, and its dialect, the Attic Greek, became the region's language of culture and sophistication.

When Alexander the Great rolled his army from Macedonia, just north of Greece, to the gates of India in the fourth century BC, his Attic Greek became the language of administration across his empire. When he died, all of his generals who carved up his empire were Macedonians and most of their soldiers who settled in the conquered lands were Macedonians or Greeks, and their Attic Greek became the dominant language, particularly in the Mediterranean region and the Middle East.

Some of the non-essential complexities of Attic Greek, however, were ignored by the region's non-Greeks who learned it. For example, they picked up Attic Greek's differentiation of the singular from the plural, but ignored its dual (two of something), which could easily be covered by the plural. Over time, Attic Greek became replaced as the region's dominant language by a slightly slimmed down, less complicated and more straightforward version of itself that became known as the Koine ("common") Greek.

When the Roman Empire spread across much of the territory that Alexander had conquered, Latin became the language of administration, but Koine Greek remained the language of the masses, and then gave rise to medieval Greek, which eventually gave rise to modern Greek.

In the first century AD Israel, Jesus and His disciples read the Old Testament in Hebrew, spoke to the Jews in Aramaic, and spoke to the gentiles in Koine Greek, in which the New Testament was written to reach both Jews and gentiles.