Parallel Texts in Matthew, Mark & Luke
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NT Greek
The oldest mss. of the gospels are those composed in koiné ("common") Greek, the efficient colloquial form of the Athenian ("Attic") dialectic that evolved as the everyday medium of inter-ethnic spoken commerce in the eastern Mediterranean world in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquest of that region (334-323 BCE). Since people always tend to write as they speak, by the 1st c. CE koiné had replaced the more complex grammatical forms of the classical Greek dialects in most literature, especially literature intended for popular use, like the Christian gospels.
Greek script was derived from the western Semitic (Phoenician) alphabet. Like other Greek documents written before 200 CE, the gospels were originally recorded in unaccented angular characters. Very few fragments of Christian mss. from this period have been found, however, and most of these are from the gospel of John rather than the synoptic gospels. By the end of the 2nd c. CE pressure upon scribes to produce more in less time led to the emergence of a more rounded (uncial) script that required fewer strokes per letter. Still, texts were simply an unpunctuated string of unaccented capital (majuscule) letters, which could be deciphered easily only by someone who actually spoke Greek. The use of the more compact lower case (minuscule) alphabet -- with occasional use of upper case letters -- that is still in use today was developed by scribes only in the 9th c. CE. The resultant 24 letter Greek alphabet is (reading left to right):
Script Sound Script Sound Script Sound Script Sound Α α = "ah" Β β = "b">"v" Γ γ = "g" Δ δ = "d" Ε ε = "eh" Ζ ζ = "z" Η η = "ay" Θ ϑ = "th" Ι ι = "ee" Κ κ = "k" Λ λ = "l" Μ μ = "m" Ν ν = "n" Ξ ξ = "ks" Ο ο = "uh" Π π = "p" Ρ ρ = "r " Σ σ = "s " Τ τ = "t" Υ υ = "eoo" Φ ϕ = "f " Χ χ = "kh" Ψ ψ = "ps" Ω ω = "oh" The simplification of Greek script -- along with the use of Greek texts by non-native speakers -- led grammarians to introduce a standard system of accents and aspirates to promote reasonably uniform pronunciation. Since the old Semitic character "H" had been co-opted in classical Greek to represent the long vowel eta (pronounced "ate-ah"), other symbols were introduced to indicate whether a word beginning with a vowel sound was to be aspirated (e.g., "hah", "heh", "hee") or not (e.g., "ah", "eh", "ee"). In time these were rounded and reduced to "breathing" marks placed before or above an initial vowel
"rough" breathing (an aspirated vowel sound) was indicated by (
"smooth" breathing (no aspirate) was indicated by )
Sporadic use of accents to clarify ambiguous words began in Alexandria, Egypt about 200 BCE.
acute accent > rising inflection: ύ
grave accent > falling inflection: ὺ
circumflex (over long vowels or diphthongs) > rising-falling inflection: ῦ
But it took centuries before this came to be a uniform scribal convention. Early Christian mss. (2nd-4th c. CE) contain no accents; and the systematic use of accents became standard only in later uncial NT codices (7th-8th c. CE). Nevertheless, since the invention of the printing press, Greek NTs have regularly employed a fully accented script to help clarify the text for readers who do not normally speak or think in Greek.
Since Greek characters are used universally for mathematical and scientific notation, computers normally come equipped with a symbol font that contains a full unaccented Greek alphabet. A number of accented Greek computer fonts were developed for distribution commercially or as freeware. This website's Greek synopsis was originally composed in SP Ionic, a free font developed by Patrick Durusau (the Society of Biblical Literature's Director of Research & Development) in collaboration with Jimmy Adair for TC -a Journal for Biblical Textual Criticism to encourage the electronic publication of biblical scholarship. Proper reception of such an accented Greek text, however, requires the installation of the same special font on both author's & reader's computer. Otherwise the file one receives in one's browser will look like undecipherable cyber-garbage.
The current Greek text is composed in Palatino Linotype, a unicode font that is included in versions of Microsoft software since 2003. The advantage of this open type font is that its extended symbol system includes each accented letter in the Greek alphabet as a single character with its own distinct number that can be read & accurately reproduced by current browsers, regardless of the typeface of the font. Composition of this revised text was facilitated by a keyboard interface developed by Char Matejovsky at Polebridge Press that is available at the Westar Institute website.
Other On-line Resources
Greek New Testament Gateway - Links to texts, fonts, grammars, lexica, discussion lists and software (posted by Mark Goodacre, U. of Birmingham).
Perseus Collection of Greek Texts - searchable digitized classical & early Christian Greek texts including the Westcott-Hort 1885 critical edition of the New Testament (Perseus Digital Library).
last revised 21 December 2015
