What is NT Greek?

The language of the New Testament is Koine Greek.

Like many other languages in the ancient world, the Greek language is tied to a specific people who used it: the Greeks. But unlike many other languages, it became a lingua franca - a language used widely by a number of different peoples besides the Greeks themselves. Thus, Greek was used as a second language by many people. Importantly for our focus, this included Jews living in Palestine.

As many Jews’ second or third spoken language, Greek would have been used with varying degrees of proficiency throughout the land of Judea. This can be seen within the NT itself. While some Greek is simple (e.g. the writings of John), other writings are stylistically much more complex (e.g. Hebrews). This illustrates the fact that “NT Greek” does not represent its own type of language – it is just the language that happens to be included in one particular collection of texts.

What does it mean, then, to be teaching “NT Greek?” Is it the Greek of John or the Greek of the author to the Hebrews or something in between like Mark?

Here's how we at Biblingo approach this:

Throughout the Biblingo app and the Reading Greek Deeply textbook, learners move from simpler NT texts to more difficult texts so that you will end up being exposed to a variety of writing styles - all of which are found in the NT. After you finish reading the lessons and working through the exercises in Biblingo, you should be able to start reading through the entire NT with fluency (without constantly looking up words in a dictionary).

The Bible module in the app includes a customized graded reader to allow you to work through the texts in the order that makes the most sense for you. After mastering the Greek of the NT, you should be able to move to other Greek texts written by Jews and others in the ancient world, and we encourage you to do so as a next step in the learning process. The more texts you can expose yourself to, the more refined your intuitions about the language will become.