Questions on Koine Greek

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhi John,

Secondly, does anyone know if there has ever been a comprehensive comparison of the grammatical differences between the Greek New Testament and Classical Greek grammar and syntax, showing both the number of differences, and the types and locations of those differences?

Crucial work on this topic has been done by Raymond A. Martin, who has proposed seventeen syntactical criteria for identifying Greek that has been translated from Aramaic. These features appear frequently in the verifiably translated Greek of the LXX, but are rare in works composed in Greek. He has applied these criteria mainly to New Testament texts. They are:

(1) Relative frequency of eight prepositions in relationship to the preposition "en"
(2) The comparative frequencies of "kai" and "de" in coordinating independent clauses
(3) The separation of the Greek definite article from its substantive
(4) The tendency to place genitives after the substantive on which they depend
(5) A greater frequency of dependent genitive personal pronouns
(6) A tendency to omit the article on a substantive with a dependent genitive personal pronoun
(7) A tendency to place attributive adjectives after the word they qualify
(8) Less frequent use of attributive adjectives
(9) Less frequent use of adverbial participles
(10) Less frequent use of the dative case without a preposition

Martin asserts that his seventeen criteria are not "the aspects of the language which would color the speech or writing of a person who is thinking in Aramaic or Hebrew as he writes Greek."

(Syntactical Evidence of Semitic Sources in Greek Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: Society of Biblical Literature, 1974); Syntax Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 10; Lewiston, New York/Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen, 1987)