The Greek of the New Testament.

IntroductionThe New Testament has come down to us in Greek.But what kind of Greek is it?And why was it written in Greek in the first place?The Fourth Gospel informs us that when Jesus was crucified, Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross.It read: "Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews" (John .: Iησο ς Nαζωρα ος βασιλε ς τ ν Iουδα ων).According to John, the sign was written in three languages: βραϊστ , ωµαϊστ , λληνιστ (Jοhn .).The original meaning of βραϊστ is, of course, "in Hebrew," but in the New Testament it, like the expression τ βρα δι διαλ κτ ω (Acts ., ., .), usually stands for "in Aramaic," the home language of the Palestinian Jews and an important lingua franca in the Near East.As a matter of fact, Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel tradition as occasionally speaking Aramaic (cf. below).Pωµαϊστ means "in Latin," the language of the foreign oppressors which never gained a strong foothold in Palestine outside the range of influence of the Roman civil and military administration.This explains the extremely low frequency in the New Testament of Latin loanwords, which are practically confined to the administrative sphere (cf. below).This is no surprise, since Greek was the official language of the Roman presence in the eastern empire, hence the inclusion of a translation of the sign on the cross "in Greek," λληνιστ .The use of Greek as a lingua franca was so widespread that it was a second language for many Palestinian Jews (see also .) and the first, if not the only, language of the Jews of the western diaspora, as can be gathered from the following passage from the Fourth Gospel: µ ε ς τ ν διασπορ ν τ ν Eλλ νων µ λλει πορε εσθαι κα διδ σκειν το ς Eλληνας; "Surely he is not planning to go to the Greek diaspora and teach the Greeks?" (John .).The ethnonym Eλλην is probably used here in the sense of Eλληνιστ ς "Greek-speaking Jew" (see also ..).( Eλλην is twice