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LAURENCE CARDWELL, S.J. HE recent discoveries in Egypt have turned the eyes of Europe to that country in which, owing to the accident of a climate of extreme dryness, the writings and personal belongings of men of ancient days have been preserved till our own times. The result has been that the life and customs of ages long past are revealed to us with unparalleled clearness and detail. But it is not only on the lives of the Pharaohs and their times that modern discoveries in Egypt have thrown new light. In the field of New Testament study a change scarcely less momentous has been wrought by the new materials unearthed from the sands of Egypt. Under the skilful guidance of Drs. Grenfell and Hunt the rubbish heaps of Roman Egypt have been made to yield up unsuspected treasures, which have made the names of Oxyrhynchus, Fayûm, Hibbeh, and Tebtunis household words to all biblical scholars. The quantity of material gathered from these and other sources has become so vast that it can only slowly be examined and discussed. To realize the change brought about by these discoveries we must remember that, almost to the end of the nineteenth century, the Greek of the Holy Scriptures—the Septuagint and the New Testament—was regarded as something unique and isolated. It differs so greatly from the Greek-whether of classical or of Hellenistic times-with which we were familiar that it was regarded as a special form of Greek, peculiar to the Bible. We even find it called by scholars 'the language of the Holy Ghost.' Thus biblical Greek was in a position of complete isolation, and it is due almost entirely to the discovery of the Greek papyri of 1 Cremer, Lexicon of New Testament Greek, Eng. trans., p. iv. FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XXII-SEPTEMBER, 1923 Egypt that this isolation is now a thing of the past. The language in which the New Testament was written has been discovered, and it turns out to be exactly what it might have been-but was not-suspected to be, the spoken language of the ordinary people amongst whom the Apostles lived and worked. The Greek of the Bible is the spoken Koine, the universal language of the East for many centuries before and after New Testament times. As Dr. Moulton well said: The papyri have finally destroyed the figment of a New Testament Greek, which in any material respect differed from that spoken by ordinary people in daily life throughout the Roman world.'1 The origin of this widespread use of Greek throughout the East can be attributed with considerable probability to the military expeditions of Alexander and the consequent impulse given to Greek commerce throughout the great cities of the East. In this way, Greek gradually became the international language of diplomacy and trade, much as English has come to be spoken throughout a great part of the modern world. Outside Greece itself the people would be bilingual, like the Welsh of to-day, using their native tongue amongst themselves, but transacting all business in Greek. This bilingualism had one very important result. There is always a strong tendency in national languages-a tendency very marked in Greek-for dialects to develop and survive; but this tendency is almost entirely absent in the superimposed international language. The latter is independent of local variation-at least when written and it keeps the same form wherever it is used. This explains what is, at first sight, a striking feature of the Greek revealed by the discoveries in Egypt; when we place it alongside the Greek of the New Testament and that of the records discovered elsewhere, we find that the Greek of the papyri, unlike the classical Greek, with its numerous dialects, is marked by the absence of local dialects. Of this striking uniformity Dr. Moulton writes: 'The Hellenistic vernacular was a language without serious dialectic 1 Grammar of New Testament Greek, ed. 2, i. p. 18. 1 differences, especially in pronunciation'; 'the papyri of Upper Egypt tally in their grammar with the language seen in the New Testament, as well as with inscriptions like those of Pergamum and Magnesia.' This spoken Koinē (i.e., common or international language) was the language of trade, social intercourse, and worship throughout the Greek-speaking world for many centuries, and thus we see that the Holy Scriptures were made public in a language that would be understood throughout the whole of the civilized world. The spoken Koine must be distinguished from the literary Koine of the Hellenists, such as Plutarch, Philo, or Josephus, just as in modern Greek the artificial 'purist' Greek must be distinguished from the homiloumenē, or spoken language. The latter still retains a great similarity to the spoken Koine of the early centuries, of which it is, indeed, the lineal descendant. The outstanding feature of this spoken Koinē is that it has no literature apart from the Bible. When the people I who spoke this lingua franca wrote for publication they endeavoured, with greater or less success, to imitate the classic Greek of Athens, and the result was the literary Koine or Hellenistic Greek. It is only in the intimate pages of private correspondence and the memoranda of officials and business men that we find Greek written as it was spoken throughout the Mediterranean world. The value of these documents for the interpretation and illumination of obscure words and phrases in the New Testament can hardly be exaggerated. In the prophetic words -uttered as far back as 1863-of Dr. Lightfoot, the great biblical scholar: 'If we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help or the understanding of the language of the New Testanent generally.' To-day great quantities of such docuhents have been unearthed, and the prophecy is being imply fulfilled. Fired by the hope of discovering early Christian documents, Drs. Grenfell and Hunt set to work 1 Grammar of New Testament Greek, pp. 5, 6. 1 Quoted by Moulton, ibid. p. 242. in 1896 to explore the site of Oxyrhynchus, a place of considerable importance in the early days of Christianity in Egypt. Their search was rewarded by the finding of several Christian documents of high antiquity; but of greater importance for our present purpose was the discovery of immense numbers of letters and other documents relating to the daily life of the writers. As to their contents, Deissmann writes: The papyri are almost invariably non-literary in character. For instance, they include legal documents o all possible kinds : leases, bills and receipts... wills, decrees minutes of judicial proceedings, tax papers in grea numbers. Then there are letters and notes, schoolboys exercise books, magical texts, etc. As regards their contents, these non-literary documents are as many-sided as life itself.'1 Of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, fifteen volume have been published, and these, together with similar pub lications relating to other collections, form a mass of materia by means of which it is now, for the first time, possible t study the Greek of the Bible in its natural surroundings. Besides the papyri there are two other sources of in formation-inscriptions and ostraka-and it will be con venient to say a word about each in turn. The inscription form the most widespread, but also the least valuable the sources for the study of the spoken Koine. They a collected from all parts of the East, notably from As Minor. Generally speaking, a certain note of artificialit and formalism about them makes them less useful as guid to the usages of popular speech. The style has often be polished up and fixed in the stereotyped formulas of t monumental mason. At the opposite extreme to these formal records stone, meant for the public eye, come the ostraka-t humblest form of written record that civilized man 1 produced. For they are nothing more than broken p sherds the very symbol of valueless rubbish-used writing material. Most people have heard of the Athen judgment of ostracism—the legal method of removing 1 Light from the Ancient East, p. 29. |