Why was the New Testament written in Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic?

Question 1161

Jesus and his first followers were Jewish men who spoke Aramaic in their daily lives and read the Hebrew Scriptures in the synagogue. It seems natural, then, to expect that the books written about them and by them would be set down in Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet the entire New Testament has come to us in Greek, the language of a people far removed from the hills of Galilee. This puzzles many readers, and it is worth asking why the Spirit of God chose this language to carry the good news of his Son to the world.

The answer lies in the providence of God, who prepared the world over many centuries for the coming of Jesus and the spread of the gospel. The choice of Greek was not an accident of history but part of the fullness of time into which God sent his Son, a world made ready to receive and carry his Word.

A World That Spoke Greek

To understand the choice of Greek we must look back about three centuries before Jesus was born, to the conquests of Alexander the Great. As his armies swept across the eastern world, they carried the Greek language and Greek culture with them, and what they planted did not die when Alexander did. The kingdoms that followed him kept Greek as their language of government and learning, and it became the common speech of trade and conversation from the shores of Italy to the borders of Persia. A traveller could cross most of the known world and be understood in Greek wherever he went.

This was not the polished literary Greek of the old philosophers and poets, but a simpler and more flexible form known as Koine, which means common. It was the everyday Greek of the marketplace and the harbour, spoken by ordinary people across many lands. By the time of the apostles even the city of Rome was full of Greek speakers, and Paul wrote his great letter to the Romans in Greek rather than Latin. The whole Mediterranean world was bound together by this single shared tongue.

For many years scholars were puzzled by the Greek of the New Testament, for it did not match the refined literature of the classical age and seemed to belong to no known form of the language. Some even suggested it was a special Greek given by the Spirit for the Scriptures alone. Then discoveries of everyday documents in Egypt, letters, receipts, contracts and private notes written by ordinary people, showed that the Greek of the New Testament was the common speech of the age, the very language in which a soldier wrote home to his mother or a merchant kept his accounts. Far from being a strange or sacred dialect, it was the plain language of the street, which is exactly the kind of language a message for all people would take.

A Language Ready for the Gospel

Greek was well suited to carry the message of the gospel beyond the borders of Israel. The good news was never meant to stay within one nation, for the risen Lord sent his disciples to make disciples of all nations and to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. A message meant for the whole world needed a language the whole world could understand, and Koine Greek was that language. Had the apostles written only in Hebrew or Aramaic, their words would have been locked away from the very Gentiles to whom God was opening the door of faith.

Greek also possessed a richness and precision that served the truths of the faith well. It had words capable of carrying fine shades of meaning, which allowed the writers to express the deep things of God with clarity. When Paul reaches for the word that describes God’s unearned favour, or John for the word that names the eternal Word who became flesh, the Greek gives them the exact tools they need. The Spirit who inspired the writers used a language already shaped to bear the weight of the message.

The Scriptures Were Already in Greek

There is a further reason that is often overlooked. Long before the New Testament was written, the Hebrew Scriptures had themselves been translated into Greek. This translation, known as the Septuagint, was made for the great communities of Jews living outside the land of Israel who spoke Greek rather than Hebrew. By the time of the apostles it was widely read and loved, and many Jews knew their Bible chiefly in this Greek form.

This meant that when the apostles wrote in Greek and quoted the Old Testament, they were often drawing on words already familiar to their Greek-speaking readers. The continuity between the old and the new was preserved in a single language, so that a reader could hear the promise in the Greek of the Septuagint and the fulfilment in the Greek of the Gospels and the letters. The ground had been prepared, and the message of Jesus stepped naturally into a world that already read God’s earlier Word in Greek.

The Fullness of Time

Paul tells us that when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son. That fullness was not only a matter of the calendar but of a world made ready. The Roman peace had brought safe roads and open seas across a vast empire, so that messengers of the gospel could travel as never before. The Roman roads carried the preachers, and the Greek language carried their words once they arrived. The pieces had been set in place over generations for the moment when the good news would go out.

We should see the hand of God in this long preparation. He was not caught off guard by the spread of Greek or the rise of Rome, but had been weaving these threads together so that his Son would come into a world able to hear of him quickly and widely. The choice of Greek for the New Testament is one strand of that wider design, and it shows a God who orders the affairs of nations for the sake of the gospel.

Why Not Hebrew or Latin?

Some may wonder why the apostles did not write in Hebrew, the ancient language of the covenant people, since the gospel came first to the Jews and is rooted in the promises God made to Israel. The reason lies in what had happened to Hebrew itself. By the first century Hebrew was no longer the everyday language of most Jews, who spoke Aramaic at home and Greek in the wider world. A gospel written only in Hebrew would have reached few even among the scattered Jewish communities, let alone the Gentiles to whom the door of faith was being opened. The continuity with Israel was preserved instead through the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which the apostles quote again and again.

Others ask why not Latin, since Rome ruled the world of that day and its power seemed to be everywhere. Yet Latin was chiefly the language of the western part of the empire and of the army and the courts, while the common life of the eastern Mediterranean, where the church was born and first spread, was carried on in Greek. Even at Rome itself the early church used Greek, and the believers there received Paul’s letter in that tongue. Greek reached further into the daily lives of more people across more lands than any other language of the age, and so it was the natural vehicle for a message meant to run to the ends of the earth.

The Riches of the Greek Tongue

It is worth pausing over how well the Greek language served the truths the apostles needed to express. The word charis, which we translate as grace, carried the sense of a free and gracious gift given without thought of return, and it became the great word for the undeserved favour of God toward sinners. The word agapē, used again and again of the love of God, spoke of a love that gives itself for the good of another rather than a love drawn out by the worth of the one loved. Through such words the gospel found a vocabulary fitted to its message.

When John opened his Gospel by calling Jesus the logos, the Word, he reached for a term rich with meaning to both Jew and Greek, the expression of God’s mind and the agent of his creating power. The Greek of the New Testament also possessed verb forms able to mark fine distinctions of time and completed action, so that a writer could show whether something happened once for all or went on continually. The Spirit used a language already supplied with the tools to set forth justification, redemption, adoption and reconciliation with care and clarity, and this precision has blessed the church ever since as it has sought to understand and defend the faith.

So, now what?

Take comfort in the truth that the same God who prepared a language for the gospel is still at work to carry his Word to every people. The New Testament came in Greek because God meant it for the world and not for one nation, and that same heart for the nations beats on today. Every translation of the Bible into a new tongue continues the work that began when the apostles wrote in the common language of their age.

Let this also deepen your trust in the Bible you hold. The Greek of the New Testament is not a barrier between you and the truth but a bridge that God built across the ancient world, and faithful translators have carried that bridge into your own language. When you read the Scriptures in English, you are reading a message that God always intended for people far beyond Galilee, a message meant for you as surely as for the first believers who read it in Greek.

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Galatians 4:4-5