The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Like every language, Greek changes over time in script, word meanings, and grammar. Contemporary spoken and written English has significant differences from English of prior eras. This is most easily seen in vocabulary. Fifty years ago words like “blog,” “Facebook,” and “chatroom” didn’t exist in English. There are also differences, for example, between British and American English. So it should come as no surprise that the Greek of the New Testament is different than Greek of other periods.
These differences, along with the nature of the New Testament, led many people, including scholars, to suppose that the New Testament’s Greek was special, perhaps even created by divine providence specifically to communicate the truth of the gospel. People took this idea seriously into the late 1800s. Today, it’s known to be a complete falsehood.
The mythical nature of this belief was exposed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by archaeological discoveries of previously unknown Greek manuscripts. For example, toward the end of the nineteenth century, thousands of papyrus fragments written in Greek were discovered in Egypt in garbage dumps. Greek scholars quickly discerned that the Greek of these fragments was the same type of Greek found in the New Testament and the early church fathers, a stage of the language known as “common” Greek, or koinē Greek (pronounced, koinay).
Koine Greek is a byproduct of Alexander the Great’s conquest. Although Alexander’s soldiers were Greeks, they spoke different versions of the Greek language. There were numerous dialects. To effectively communicate with each other, a “common” form of the language was created and spread. As Alexander’s armies swept east across the Mediterranean, Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Mesopotamia, and into India, this common Greek spread throughout his empire. This common (koinē) Greek is the language of the New Testament.
There is no such thing as “Holy Ghost Greek.” We ought not assign any special status to it when we’re doing word studies in our study of Scripture. Doing so leads to flawed interpretation. Fortunately, the Greek of the New Testament wasn’t special. It was the Greek spoken and read throughout the known world. Consequently, the message of the New Testament was understood everywhere.