The Greek New Testament

The Greek in which the New Testament is written may be called 'first century' Greek. It must not be confused with classical Greek, which flourished many centuries before. Ancient Greek had several distinct dialects, the chief of which were the Aeolic, the Doric, and the Ionic. Attic was a kind of Ionic, spoken in Athens. Most of the Greek classics were written in this dialect, which later came to be the recognized standard among cultured Greeks. A form of this, called the [koinE], the common dialect, spread over most of the known world after the conquests of Alexander. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into it and thus it became the language of the people of Palestine. It was the common tongue of all classes. All the so-called 'New Testament' was composed in it.

The Greek text

The fidelity of the New Testament text rests in the multiplicity of the extant manuscripts. There are about 5,000 Greek manuscripts to attest the New Testament. Furthermore, the interval between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence is so small as to be in fact negligible.
During the period of criticism and revision of the New Testament Text, the struggle between the 'Received Text' and 'a critical text' has been waged, with the latter emerging as the victor. While scarcely a modern scholar defends the superiority of the Received Text, it should be pointed out that there is no substantial difference between it and the critical text. Their differences are merely technical, not doctrinal, for the variations are doctrinally inconsequential. Nevertheless, the 'critical' readings are often exegetically helpful to Bible students.

The Language

The Greek alphabet has 24 letters. For the forms and names, see chart. The earliest form of the letters was the capital, used in inscriptions out in stone. A modification of this used for manuscripts is called uncial. All Biblical manuscripts in Greek before the 10^th cent. A.D. were written in uncials. It is important for the reader to keep in mind the lateness of some of the editorial devices. The earliest uncial manuscripts were even without breaks between the words. Breathings, accents, and punctuation marks-which often greatly influence the translation-are later editorial additions and should be treated as such.

The interlinear text : word meaning

The concordant method of studying the Greek New Testament uses a concordance, such as The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament (original edition 1840), edited by George V. Wigram, to discover the meaning of a word. This method is based on the vocabulary of the original language, not on the various vocabularies found in English versions. The aim is to discover a word's usage and fix its signification by its inspired associations. It is in line with the linguistic law that the meaning of a word is decided by its usage.
In employing this method an exhaustive investigation was made of the whole divine vocabulary in order to find the single most exact English equivalent for each Greek word; one which will not only fit each context in which the original word appears, but one which is not needed for any other Greek word.
More about this in these two articles: The Concordant Method and The Vocabulary Method.

The interlinear text : Grammar

The Greek-English concordant interlinear provides a simple and safe tool by which the English-speaking student may acquire some knowledge of Greek. This profit will be greatly enhanced when the grammar tags are intelligently used.
Greek grammar allows for the systematic discovery of important theological truths that are difficult to discover through reading a translation.

A sentence commonly consists of a verb indicating some kind of action, a number of nouns related to that action, and a variety of modifiers. The Greek language employs a case system that assigns to each noun its grammatical function in the sentence. The case system consists of four of these grammatical functions, which are assigned to the nouns by means of an inflection system. These four functions are : the subject, the source, the scene and the object. They answer to the questions : which one? whence? where? and<> whither? respectively. The latter three functions are associated with a direction, an association which is the same that governs the prepositions, which will prove of help in the understanding of the case system.

A GRAPHIC SCHEME SHOWING THE RELATION
OF THE WORD CONNECTIVES TO

THE GREEK CASES

GENITIVE Whence?	DATIVE Where?	ACCUSATIVE Whither?
MOTION FROM OF	REST IN to	MOTION TO

NOMINATIVE
Who? What?
From its nature, never used with a connective.

VOCATIVE
Never related to any other word.

The concept 'noun' here includes any word, phrase or clause that acts as a noun, which is known, more generally, as a substantive. The four cases, which indicate the four functions, are called nominative, genitive, dative and accusative, respectively.
Because each noun, together with its modifiers, is subject to the case system, a sentence abounds with case endings, affecting about three-fifths of all words in the Greek New Testament and attests to the importance of the case system.
By combining the use of connectives and cases, Greek is far more definite than English in indicating the relation of words to one another. Besides, this allows the words to be arranged in such an order as to give each its proper emphasis.