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Silvia Luraghi and Eleonora Sausa - University of Pavia

NEW APPROACHES TO NEW TESTAMENT GREEK LINGUISTICS

ABSTRACT

In this paper we provide an overview of new approaches to New Testament Greek linguistics,

in light of recent linguistic trends. The New Testament may be of interest for linguists in

many respects: it can be studied from a sociolinguistic, synchronic, and diachronic point of

view, and it plays a relevant role also for developments in language contact research,

translation studies, corpus linguistics, and digital humanities. Here, we briefly discuss the

importance of New Testament Greek in a sociolinguistics perspective and within the history

of the Greek language. We also take into account some syntactic changes from Classical

Greek in a diachronic perspective, adopting insights from Construction Grammar. Within the

same perspective, we observe the issue of language contact through translation. Finally, we

show some digital resources for the study of New Testament Greek and its translations, such

as electronic corpora, parallel corpora, and Treebanks, together with an exemplification of

what kind of research can be carried out on such resources.

1. INTRODUCTION

New Testament Greek has been the subject of extensive linguistic research aimed to different

purposes. In the first place, it has raised the interest of sociolinguists, because it mostly

features a low register variety of Greek, and attests to language contact. In the second place,

together with the other Biblical texts, it is the first instance of translations that has had such a

large diffusion, and has triggered the development of various translation theories and of

translation studies (see for example Nida, Taber, 1982). Finally, the New Testament is an

interesting text in itself, and, in very much the same way as other texts, it can be studied (and

has been studied) under different theoretical perspectives. In this paper, we aim to give some

simple examples of what kind of research questions can be formulated and answered when the

New Testament is considered under different perspectives, in the light of the earliest linguistic

trends and approaches.

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The paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we give a brief overview of some

sociolinguistic issues concerning New Testament Greek, limited to features relevant to the

discussion in the following sections. In section 3 we adopt a diachronic perspective, and

describe some differences between Classical Greek and the language of the New Testament

that have been variously interpreted in the literature. We show how such changes can be

described in terms of processes that involve whole constructions, rather than individual forms.

In section 4 we extend the approach outlined in section 3 to language contact through

translation, and show how constructions typical of New Testament Greek spread to several

languages of Europe after having been adopted in the Latin translation. In section 5 we

introduce some recently developed digital resources, and show how a quantitative analysis

can be carried out using the methods of corpus linguistics. Section 6 contains the conclusions.

2. NEW TESTAMENT GREEK

The New Testament is the most important and the richest document of non-literary Hellenistic

Greek, and gives us, more than other texts of the same period, a great amount of information

about the spoken koiné Greek of the daily life, providing an essential source for retracing the

history of the Greek language.

Although the Greek of the New Testament shows a number of peculiar features, from

a general perspective it reflects and is part of the Greek language of this period (presumably

1th-2

th century CE), that is, Hellenistic Greek or koiné.

New Testament bears witness to the language written by a variety of different Greek

speakers within the context of Greek koiné: some attempt at a more literary style (e.g.

Hebrews, Luke-Acts, parts of Paul), others write on a more vernacular level with many

Semitisms (e.g. Revelation, the Gospel of Mark); for some authors Greek was their native

tongue and they composed in it (e.g. Paul), while other documents suggest Greek was the

author‟s second language next to Aramaic (e.g. Revelation). Nevertheless, the writings of the

New Testament collectively betrays much of the contours and nuances of the koiné period,

bearing an important witness to the shades of the koiné as a whole. Thus, from a general

perspective, following Horrocks (1997: 92), we can consider New Testament Greek, in many

respects, as “a reasonably close reflection of a range of everyday Greek styles in the early

centuries AD”.

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The New Testament was, at least partially, written in an area where Aramaic, a West-

Semitic language related to, but different in many respects from Biblical Hebrew, was the first

language of the majority of the population. The authors had a good knowledge of Greek as

second language and wrote in a variety close to the spoken Greek of the time. Nonetheless,

New Testament Greek is rich of Semitic influences at different levels (lexical and syntactic,

above all), which have been considered an evidence of the fact that at least some books are

the translations from Aramaic originals. For the authors involved, one must also assume a

good knowledge of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, which influenced

above all their religious vocabulary, and, as we will see in section 3, the choice of some non-

classical constructions. (cf. Blass, Debrunner, 1961: 3). In particular, among the synoptic

Gospels (Marc, Luke and Matthews), various Semitisms in the Gospel of Marc and Luke

show that the mother tongue of their authors was not Greek but Aramaic, but there is no clear

evidence of translation from an Aramaic original version (cf. Wikenhauser, 1966: 152).

Concerning Matthews‟s Gospel, according to an ancient tradition it was originally written in

Aramaic for the Hebrew people of Palestine and Syria and translated later, but today this

hypothesis has also been challenged1 (cf. Wikenhauser, 1966: 165, Köster 2000).

However, it is not easy to gauge to what extent Semitic knowledge influenced New

Testament diction and, consequently, to decide which peculiar features of New Testament

Greek are Semitisms2 and which are not. We can conclude, together with Moulton (1906: 4),

that New Testament Greek, in spite of Semitic influence, “was simply the vernacular of daily

life”. (Note that Semitic influence on the syntax of New Testament Greek is highly overstated

in the Syntax volume of Moulton‟s grammar, which was written by Turner 1963, as noted in

Horsley, 2014.) One of the features of New Testament Greek which is most often taken as a

Semitism, the usage of the preposition en to express instrument, will be discussed in section 3

(see also Regard, 1919: 328-329).

Several other constructions that are quite typical of the New Testament, such as the

preference for coordination over subordination and the reduction of case variation with

prepositions, are better regarded as features of the spoken koiné, rather than outcomes of

Semitic influence.

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3. NEW CONSTRUCTIONS IN NEW TESTAMENT GREEK

In this section, we describe some constructions that are, to various extents, typical of New

Testament Greek. We concentrate on the usage of cases with prepositions, and show that the

language of the New Testament partly shares developments that are also attested in other non-

literary sources. In some cases, new constructions arise from the challenges of translation.

However, they do not always or only reflect foreign influence: rather, they must better be

regarded as extensions of constructions aimed at accommodating new meanings.

Changes in the usage of cases and of cases with prepositions are among the most

frequently described instances of innovation in New Testament Greek. Typically, they are

treated as concerning the meaning of isolated forms. In this section, we would like to propose

a different approach, by which we consider cases and prepositions as parts of wider

constructions, which constitute holistic units and bear a specific meaning. We aim to show

that individual changes are better explained when whole constructions are taken into account,

rather than single parts. In doing so, we follow general principles of Construction Grammar, a

family of theories that share the tenet of a lexicon-syntax continuum, by which constructions

must be regarded as conventionalized pairings of form and meaning, in much the same way as

lexemes (see Lakoff, 1987, Goldberg, 1995).

Both in the New Testament and in non-literary papyri, case variation with prepositions

is highly reduced with respect to Classical Greek. The counting in Regard (1919) and Luraghi

(1996: 66-69) show that government of the dative by hupó and perí, already infrequent in

Attic prose, was lost, as was government of the genitive by prós (Regard mentions a single

occurrence in his corpus). In addition, there is a frequent confusion of eis (direction) with en

(location). It indicates that the coding of the two semantic relations tended to merge, that is, to

be indicated by the same preposition, as it eventually became common in Middle Greek (the

same holds for the similar confusion between prós with the accusative and the dative).

Consider:

(1) ṑn eis tòn kólpon toû patrós

„Who is in the bosom of the father.‟ (John 1.18).

This confusion apparently reflects some uncertainty in actual usage: as discussed in

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Humbert (1930:,66-73), confusion between the two prepositions displays different patterns in

the four Gospels. In Mark‟s Gospel, in particular, it is only eis that is sometimes extended in

the place of en, and not the other way around. This overextension is partly confirmed by

contemporary papyri, and seems to point to an ongoing change, as outline above.

Remarkably, in Modern Greek the preposition s (from eis) indicates both direction and

locative. However, the above changes cannot be regarded as directly reflecting the loss of en,

even though this preposition eventually disappeared. As we discuss below, in spite of its

partial replacement by means of eis in locative expressions, en is widely used in the New

Testament in a new construction, that is, as marker of the instrumental relation. The change

described above, then, must be considered in terms of constructions, rather than single

prepositions: it points to the extension of the direction construction (eis or another preposition

with the accusative) to the coding of the locative relation. In other words, the type of

argument structure construction used with motion verbs in Classical Greek is extended to

verbs of rest.

Another possible hint to later developments is the extension of apó „from‟ to functions

earlier expressed by other prepositions, and its increased usage with respect to ek (which

however remains frequent, see below). In this case, too, the New Testament seems to

anticipate Middle and Modern Greek, in which apó is the only inherited preposition that

indicates the ablative relation. Even in this case, however, one gains better insights by

examining changes in terms of constructions. In general, one can remark that plain cases tend

to be substituted by prepositional phrases, which increasingly become the preferred pattern.

An example is the occurrence of prepositional phrases with apó or ek in the place of the

partitive genitive, as in:

(2) hóti ephágete ek tôn ártōn

„Because you ate (of) the bread.‟ (John 6.26)

In Middle and Modern Greek, the partitive meaning once expressed by the genitive came to

be encoded by means of prepositional phrases, and ultimately only by apó. Thus, examples

such as (2) reflect the increasing semantic restriction of this case, and the extension of a

prepositional construction in the place of a plain case construction. The prepositional

construction involved, at its onset, both ek and apó, and only later became limited to the latter.

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Several classical usages of the plain dative are limited in the New Testament, but it is

doubtful that one can detect the first signs of the decay of this case, which was eventually lost

in Byzantine Greek (see Humbert, 1930). In particular, the instrumental dative is often

replaced by en phrases. Even though some occurrences of instrumental en also occur in the

papyri, its spread seems to reflect a real Semitism, as in Semitic languages the same

preposition that indicates locative also indicates instrument. We come back to instrumental en

below, in section 4. Here it must be stressed that its occurrence does not seem to be connected

with the decline of the dative: in the first place, because the preposition en itself took the

dative, in the second place because it is connected with the Semitic background of the

authors.

In addition, some verbs that took a nominative-dative argument structure construction

in Classical Greek take a nominative-prepositional phrase argument structure construction in

the New Testament. Even in this case, however, one must consider specific verbs and their

meaning, before acknowledging a weakening of the dative. One such verb is peíthein „trust‟,

as in:

(3) tḕn panoplían autoû aírei eph’ hêi epepoíthei

„He takes from him all his armor wherein he trusted.‟ (Luke 11.22)

Indeed, this usage seems to be connected with a new meaning of the verb, and rather than be

taken in isolation, the dative here should better be regarded as part of a whole construction. In

the Septuagint, peíthein epí (or eis) translates the Hebrew verb bth, whose meaning is glossed

as “firmae spei plaenus fuit”, “be full of firm hope” in Zorell‟s lexicon (1940); another

possible translation of this Hebrew verb is with elpízein „hope‟. Remarkably, the latter verb

occurs in Biblical Hebrew with the same prepositional phrases as peíthein, and does not

conform to the Classical usage. Differently from peíthein, elpízein did not take the dative in

Classical Greek. Thus, the reason for the occurrence of prepositional phrases with the two

verbs must not be sought in a putative decline of the dative, but rather in the creation of a new

construction, nominative-epí/eis phrase. This construction occurred with the new meaning of

the two verbs, which did not correspond in a clear-cut manner to the meaning of the Hebrew

verb.

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4. TRANSLATION AS A VEHICLE FOR LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL CONTACT

In section 3, we described the rise of a new argument structure construction with the verbs

peíthein and elpízein, and argued that this change was connected with the need of expressing a

new meaning for these verbs, partly influenced by the meaning of the Hebrew verb to which

they corresponded in the Old Testament. In this section we show how the creation of new

constructions extended outside Biblical Greek to translations in other languages, and

ultimately influenced the development of the modern languages of Europe (concerning New

Testament translations see also Luraghi, Cuzzolin, 2007).

New Testament Greek has always raised interest not only in itself, but also for its

influence on many other languages, as it served as the basis for several translations. Among

other early translations, Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic were based on the Greek text.

The most influential of these was Jerome‟s Latin translation, commonly known as the

Vulgate.

When Jerome embarked on the translation of the Bible in the early 5th

century CE,

several Latin translations were available. These translations were highly unsatisfactory

because translators, in an attempt to avoid introducing changes into the original meaning,

often came up with grammatically incorrect and in some cases barely comprehensible Latin.

Jerome based his work on his own theory of translation, which he outlined in his famous

Letter on translation. According to his own statements, Jerome tried to translate verbum de

verbo „word from word‟. In general, this means that he tried to establish a (couple of)

translation equivalent(s), and use them as consistently as possible. In some cases, new usages

introduced by Jerome (and possibly other translators before him) in specific collocations gave

rise to new constructions. Among several examples, we will discuss three constructions,

which have spread to the languages of Europe, and could be considered, at their onset,

symbols of identity of the Christian community.

The first construction has to do with the instrumental usage of locative prepositions in

a phrase that can be considered a Biblical idiom, en/epì tō onómati + gen „in the name of‟.

Here, Greek en or epí reflect Hebrew b in its instrumental functions. The name of God gives

special strength to those who make use of it, as shown in:

(4) éphē autôi ho Iōánnēs: didáskale, eídomén tina en tôi onómatí sou ekbállonta

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daimónia, hòs ouk akoloutheî hēmîn, kaì ekōlúomen autón, hóti ouk ēkoloúthei hēmîn.

John said to him: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and

we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” (Mark 9.38)

As evidenced by the English translation, far from being confined to Biblical Greek,

this meaning has extended to the modern languages of Europe, in which it is now also used

outside religious discourse (as in the expression „in the name of the law‟). The vehicle for this

extension was Jerome‟s Vulgate, and Jerome‟s translation technique, by which he tried to

always use the same form for a given meaning. In this case, Jerome decided to always use in,

in spite of the occurrence of two different prepositions in Greek.

The second construction that we would like to discuss here concerns the verb „cry‟,

and is reflected in the English expression cry over. This usage that, again, is quite widespread

in the languages of Europe, originates in the Biblical expression klaíein epí, and the Latin

translation flere super, as in:

(5) idṑn tḕn pólin éklausen ep’ autḗn

videns civitatem flevit super illam

„When he saw the city he wept over it.‟ (Luke 19.41)

The verb klaíein „weap‟ did not take epí in Classical Greek (with this verb, cause was

expressed with diá and the accusative, as expected). However, this Greek construction was

already attested in the Septuagint. If one examines the Hebrew text, it can be seen that the

verb „cry‟ occurs with the preposition ’el „to‟ „towards‟, which, in its concrete spatial

meaning, corresponds to Greek eis or epí plus the accusative. Jerome also used super in

similar contexts in the translation of the Old Testament. In this case, his use of super seems to

be influenced by the Greek translation: Jerome opts to extend the meaning of super to the

same abstract contexts to which the meaning of epí had been extended in the Septuagint.

When this expression was extended to other languages through the translation of the Vulgate,

the meaning of the corresponding prepositions in the target languages was also extended. In

this way, a whole construction is created, whose meaning cannot be explained by the

meanings of its components. That the construction has a meaning of its own is shown by the

possibility of extending it to new collocations, as in English „cry over spilled milk.‟

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Remarkably, such a meaning extension for over would otherwise be difficult to explain, as

shown by the fact that the use of over with cry remains unexplained in Brugman‟s study of

this preposition (Brugman, 1988).

Finally, periphrastic constructions with the auxiliaries be and have, which are

considered a common feature typical of the languages of Europe (cf. Haspelmath, 2001), also

developed out of Greek influence, and ultimately went back to translation strategies

developed in the Septuagint (see Ceglia, 1998). Drinka (2011) analyzed the usage of „be‟ in

periphrastic constructions and of „have‟ in perfect constructions. Especially the latter, through

the Latin translation, have served as a basis for the development of periphrastic patterns in the

Romance and Germanic languages. An example is:

(6) sukên eîkhén tis pephuteuménēn

arborem fici habebat quidam plantatam

„A certain man had a fig tree planted.‟ (Luke 13.6)

Here, the participle has a predicative function. Later, the complex have+participle was

reanalyzed as having a resultative function, and as constituting a compound verb form.

Drinka (2011) provides a detailed and compelling description of the influence of New

Testament Greek on other European languages, not limited to translation but reaching beyond

and affecting their development from late Antiquity onward. She shows how the influence of

New Testament Greek was reinforced by Latin influence on Germanic: this is indeed also

visible in the case of other constructions, which can be defined „sacral stamps‟, i.e. linguistic

features interpreted as signs of identity by the Christian community (Drinka, 2011: 41), such

as for example the expressions „in the name of‟ or „cry over‟ that we have analyzed above.

Thus, common developments of the languages of Europe connected with Bible translations

can be shown to precede by several centuries the birth of the Charlemagne area, usually

considered the cradle of Europe as a linguistic area (van der Auwera, 1998, 2011).3

5. NEW TESTAMENT GREEK IN THE DIGITAL AGE

5.1. Digital resources for the Greek New Testament

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New Testament Greek has always been studied by linguists and grammarians within different

theoretical approaches. Recently, the availability of digitalized and annotated corpora has

provided the possibility of analyzing a greater amount of data in a limited processing time,

making quantitative and statistical analysis faster and easier. In this section, we provide an

exemplification of the type of analysis that can be carried out on New Testament texts using

an annotated corpus, starting from a simple linguistic research question. Before that, we

briefly discuss some recent digital resources available for the New Testament.

Digital editions of the Greek New Testament, and of the Bible in general, are

numerous. One such edition is the TITUS project (Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und

Sprachmaterialien), which was created in 1996 and is hosted by the University of Frankfurt. .

The linguistic content of the texts is accessible in two ways: either by reference to a given text

passage, or by using the word search engine. By means of the word query, one can find all

occurrences of specific tokens (that is, word forms), and, by using special query tools, of

lemmas. The text is digitalized, but not annotated: no grammatical or semantic information is

provided in the corpus. In Fig. 1, we give as an example the results of the query for the form

metoikesías:

FIGURE 1. A WORD QUERY IN THE TITUS CORPUS

The Perseus project, hosted by Tufts University (Medford, MA), contains a digital

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library of annotated classical texts, which also includes the New Testament. Annotation is the

addition of metalinguistic information into the text: in the Perseus library we find POS (part-

of-speech) annotation and morphological analysis, at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/.

Each Greek word is further linked to the entry in the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon. By using

the query tool, one can look up word forms or lemmas. In Fig. 2 we show the result of the

query for the form metoikesías. By clicking on the word form, one can access the

morphological analysis, which further connects to the online dictionary (Fig. 3); by clicking

on the reference, one can access the text, and also view the English and Latin translation (Fig.

4).

FIGURE 2. A WORD QUERY IN THE PERSEUS CORPUS

FIGURE 3. WORD STUDY TOOL IN THE PERSEUS CORPUS

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FIGURE 4. THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT WITH THE ENGLISH AND LATIN TRANSLATIONS IN THE

PERSEUS LIBRARY

Among other existing digital resources for the New Testament, that of the project

PROIEL (Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European languages), hosted by Oslo University,

provides a parallel Treebank, which includes the Greek New Testament and a number of early

translations, and is available at: http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/proiel/.

A Treebank, or parsed corpus, is a syntactically annotated corpus, that is, a corpus in

which “the sentences [are analyzed] into their constituents (groups or phrases, depending on

the grammatical nomenclature, that is, noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.),

function roles (e.g. Subject, Direct Object), and, occasionally, dependency relations (i.e.

argument structure).” (Freddi, 2013: 52; see further Freddi, Luraghi, 2013). The project

PROIEL was created starting in 2008 with the aim of comparing the Greek text of the New

Testament with the existing translations into Old-Indo-European languages, with particular

interest for information structure in discourse (cf. Haug, Jøhndal, 2008). With respect to other

treebanks, the PROIEL treebank also adds a level of annotation relative to information

structure (this level is not completely developed for the whole corpus yet).

Thus, the advantage of the PROIEL New Testament corpus is constituted by the

number of annotation layers: part-of-speech and morphological annotation, syntactic

annotation based on dependency grammar (cf. the syntactic annotation guidelines at:

http://folk.uio.no/daghaug/syntactic_guidelines.pdf), as well as tags to signal information

structure, concerning for example word order, topic-focus contrast, elliptical elements, etc. In

the PROIEL interface, different layers of annotation are given separately. In Fig. 5 we show

the POS and morphological annotation for Matthew 1.17. Fig. 6 shows the dependency tree

(syntactic annotation), and Fig. 7 shows the tags based on information structure. By clicking

on word forms, we further retrieve all occurrences of a lemma, in this case metoikesías, as

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shown in Fig. 8.

FIGURE 5. POS AND MORPHOLOGICAL ANNOTATION IN PROIEL

FIGURE 6. DEPENDENCY TREE IN PROIEL

FIGURE 7. TAGS FOR INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN PROIEL

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FIGURE 8. OCCURRENCES OF METOIKESÍAS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT (PROIEL QUERY)

As we remarked above, the PROIEL project contains a parallel treebank, and, besides

the Greek New Testament, it also includes the Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavic, and Classical

Armenian translations. As all texts are annotated in a similar manner, this corpus allows for

in-depth study of parallel constructions in the five languages. The fact that the texts are

completely digitalized and annotated makes it possible to compare a large number of

occurrences through the query tool.

5.2 Studies on the New Testament parallel corpus: a contrastive approach

The PROIEL New Testament parallel corpus, as we pointed out above, provides elaborated

levels of annotation (POS, morpho-syntactic and pragmatic), and allows for easy queries on

contrastive analysis at various levels. The stylistic uniformity among parallel texts is one of

the features that make it particularly suitable for comparative studies. Among other things,

this complex annotation makes it possible to analyze the interaction of grammar and discourse

structure at various levels. Welo (2011) contains a collection of papers on a variety of issues,

most of which are approached through the contrastive study of this annotated parallel corpus,

based on the original New Testament and on its early translations. Among other topics, the

emergence of a definite article from the demonstrative in Classical Armenian is described by

Müth (2011) in comparison with the highly grammaticalized definite article in New

Testament Greek. The author analyzes the increasing usage of the demonstrative as definite

articles in Classical Armenian contrastively, comparing the same constructions in New

Testament Greek and evaluating at which stage of grammaticalization the Armenian

demonstrative lies in the New Testament translation. Müth concludes that they are at the stage

of a determiner demonstrative, expressing pragmatic definiteness (see Müth, 2011: 21-23).

Another contrastive analysis based on Greek, Gothic, Classical Armenian, Old Church

Slavonic Gospels, is the study on negation and polarity by Klein (2011: 152). He reviews the

type of negation in the four languages providing a detailed comparison of parallel passages

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containing negation with similar patterns in the different languages. The translation of Greek

prepositional phrases with en and eis into Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, and Classical

Armenian constitutes the topic for Thomason‟s study on *EN-phrases (Thomason, 2011).

Thomason shows, through an accurate contrastive analysis of single occurrences, that the two

prepositions do not have a single and fixed translation equivalent in any of the three

languages: rather, their translation depends on semantic and pragmatic factors, which is why a

wide range of variation is available.

These are only some representative examples of the several potentialities of a parallel

corpus annotated at the morpho-syntactic and pragmatic layers.

5.3. A corpus-based linguistic analysis

The best way to explore the potentialities of a Treebank, in our case the PROIEL Treebank

based on the digital edition of the New Testament, is to investigate it with a linguistic query.

Thus, we have thought of a simple research question and, using the search tool in the PROIEL

interface, we have extracted the quantitative data that we discuss in this section. The PROIEL

query tool allows for queries based on the annotated information, thus, among other things, it

is possible to select words by part of speech and relation.

The research questions that we used for our query are: (a) what kind of verbs occur

with the name of Jesus as a subject within the four Gospels? (b) And what kind of verbs occur

with the names of Peter and Paul as subjects in the Acts of the Apostles? These questions

could be at the basis of different kinds of linguistic analyses and could answer many

interesting linguistic problems: for example, these data could be helpful to measure the degree

of control and thus of agentivity exercised by these types of subjects, or to detect if these

subjects occur in the same type of constructions and, measuring their frequency, to evaluate if

they occur in fixed and idiomatic expressions within the New Testament.

5.3.1. What did Jesus do?

The word Jesus in the Gospels is, of course, rather frequent; however, we are not looking for

all its occurrences, but just for the ones in which it functions as subject, as we want to know

with which verbs it most frequently occurs. This will tell us what type of actions Jesus

typically performed in the Gospels. In order to find the data we need, we employ the

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information available at the syntactic layer of annotation. With the search tool available in the

PROIEL website, as we noted above, it is possible to search a word as lemma and, among

other things, to select its syntactic function. In our case, we looked for Iēsoûs as lemma and

for „subject‟ as syntactic function. The query yielded the following results: within the four

Gospels the word Iēsoûs occurs 400 times as subject, for a total of 429 verb tokens (this

includes coordinated verbs with the same subject).4 Turning now to verb lemmas we found

43 different verbs in the Gospels. The distribution among the four Gospels is highly uneven.

The number of different verbs in John‟s and in Matthew‟s Gospel is much higher as compared

to the other two Gospels: we have 25 different verbs in John, 21 in Matthew, 14 in Mark, and

12 in Luke.

From a general perspective, around 63% of verb tokens (268 tokens out of 429)

occurring with Iēsoûs as a subject is divided among four verbs that belong to the same

semantic field: verbs of saying. In particular, we find verbs that often introduce direct speech,

such as „say‟, „tell‟, „answer‟ and „call‟: 50% of the total verb occurrences are tokens of the

verb légō „say, tell‟ and its suppletive aorist form eîpon (218 tokens); the verb apokrínomai

„answer‟, very often in its aorist form, is the second most frequent verb, with 42 tokens. In

addition, we found six tokens of the verb phemí „tell‟ and two of the verb kaléō „call‟. Below,

we give an example of the verb légō „say, tell‟ introducing direct speech, occurring in a very

frequent, formulaic sentence:

(7) tóte légei autoîs ho Iēsoûs: pántes humeîs skandalisthḗsesthe en emoì têi nuktì taútēi

„Then Jesus tells them: all of you will fall away on account of me tonight.‟ (Matt.

26.31)

The verbs apokrínomai „answer‟ and légō „say, tell‟ very often appear in coordination,

in an idiomatic construction particularly frequent in John‟s Gospel, frequently introducing

direct speech (not quoted below), as in the following passage:

(8) apekríthē Iēsoûs kaì eîpen autô […]

„Jesus answered and told him […]‟ (John 14.2)

Another well represented semantic area in the Gospels is that of motion: we counted

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27 occurrences of the verb érkhomai „go, come‟ (included the suppletive aorist form êlthon,

and the preverbed forms parérkhomai „go by‟, exérkhomai „go out of‟, apérkhomai „go away

from‟, prosérkhomai „go to‟), four occurrences of the verb anabaínō „go up‟ and one

occurrence of the verb pheúgō „flee‟, for 32 occurrences in total, 7.4% of verb tokens. An

example of a typical occurrence of the verb érkhomai „go, come‟ is given in (9):

(9) êlthen ho Iēsoûs eis tḗn Galilaían

„Jesus came to Galilee.‟ (Mark 1.14)

Other miscellaneous occurrences of verbs that take Jesus as subject make up for the remaining

30% of occurrences. In their case, we mostly found an average of 4:1 correspondence

token/verb for 128 token occurrences of 30 verbs. Among these verbs we find, for example:

poiéō „make‟, didáskō „teach‟, baptízō „baptize‟, thaumázō „wonder‟, horáō „see‟ etc.

In conclusion, the figures show us that the main activity of Jesus was talking: this is

not surprising, as he was a teacher and a preacher, and the Gospels are the testimony of his

teaching. Jesus mostly preached addressing an audience, but he quite often also answered

questions, as shown by the frequency of the verb „answer‟. In addition, the frequency of

motion verbs is in accordance with the well known fact that Jesus teaching was carried out in

different places in Palestine. However, Jesus did not limit his activities to teaching: he

performed a wide variety of other actions, as shown by the high number of other different

verbs. Even though he might have performed other actions (such as baptizing or healing)

many more times in his life, the Gospels only report of a few (most often one) exemplar

instance of each. This, too, is hardly surprising: the main interest of the Evangelists was to

report of Jesus‟ teaching.

5.3.2. Were Peter and Paul good Apostles?

In the Acts of the Apostles, the same kind of verbs that occur in the Gospels taking Jesus as

their subject take Peter or Paul as subject most frequently than other verbs. Indeed, out of 94

verbs in terms of token occurring with Pétros or Paûlos verbs of saying have the highest

absolute frequency: the verb légō „say‟ occurs 29 times, the verb phemí „tell‟ and

apokrínomai „answer‟ seven times, dialégomai „converse with‟ and parakaléō „call in‟ twice,

and apologéomaié „refuse‟ once, for a total of 48 occurrences. This makes up for more than

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the half of total occurrences (51%).

In (10) we give an example with direct speech, very similar to the ones described

above with Jesus as the subject of a verb of saying:

(10) Pétros en mésōi tôn adelphôn eîpen […]

„Peter among his brothers said […]‟ (Acts 1.15)

The other frequent verb class in the Acts of the Apostles occurring with Paul and Peter

as subjects is constituted by motion verbs, exactly as in the case of Jesus in the Gospels. We

have a total of 13 occurrences belonging to the semantic area of spatial movement, partly

forms of the same verbs found in the Gospels, as érkhomai „go, come‟, eisérkhomai „go into‟

exérkhomai „go out of‟, diérkhomai „go through‟, sunérkhomai „go together‟, eîmi „go‟,

anabaínō „go up‟. An example is given in (11):

(11) hoútōs ho Paûlos exêlthen ek mésou autôn

„At that, Paul left the council.‟ (Acts 17.33)

The remaining 33 occurrences distribute over 30 verbs, which means that the token/verb

correspondence for these occurrences is around 1:1 and that their frequency is very low.

The analysis carried out in the Acts of the Apostles shows quantitatively something

that could easily be expected: exactly as Jesus in the Gospels, the most frequent activities of

the apostles Peter and Paul is connected with the act of speaking and with movement. As their

teacher, the good disciples went around to spread the euaggélion, the good message, and their

main activities were of course moving around, as an important presence of motion verbs

shows us, and talking about Jesus, his deeds and his teaching, as the great frequency of verbs

of saying reveals (51%). Remarkably, if we compare the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,

we find that we are dealing with almost the same types of verbs of saying and motion verbs.

All these elements lead us to the conclusion that Paul and Peter performed actions similar to

those performed by their teacher, that is, talking and moving around the world to spread his

word, doing exactly what their teacher did and taught them to do.

Other miscellaneous verbs distribute among different semantic fields, such as poiéō

„make‟, boúlomai „want‟, lambánō „take‟, apodeíknumi „show‟. Their very low frequency,

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almost one token for one type, indicates that these other verbs mostly denote actions that are

used as links to connect the events to each other, do not constitute significant „acts‟. This

analysis constitutes essentially a further piece of evidence that the main „act‟ of the apostles

was giving testimony of Jesus‟ life, and travelling, in order to reach more people with their

new message.

To conclude, the two parallel analyses on verbs occurring with Jesus in the Gospels

and with Peter and Paul in the Acts of the Apostles are an example of the kind of quantitative

data that can be extracted from an annotated corpus. We showed, then, a possible qualitative

interpretation of the extracted data. In our case, the data provided quantitative evidence to

show what type of activities Jesus and the Apostles were mostly engaged in.

6. CONCLUSION

In this paper we have discussed a number of issues concerning New Testament Greek, and

have shown how they can be better understood when seen in the light of recent advances in

linguistics. In the first place, we focused on some changes in verb argument structure, which

are often connected, in other studies, with developments in the meaning of cases or

prepositions. Following Construction Grammar, we have argued that such changes should

better be taken as involving the meaning of whole constructions. In the second place, we have

observed how the creation of new constructions extended outside Biblical Greek to

translations in other languages, and ultimately influenced the development of the modern

languages of Europe. We have shown to what extent the translations of the New Testament

can be considered as a vehicle for cultural and linguistic contact.

Finally we have presented some digital resources for the Greek New Testament and its

translations, and their possible use in linguistic analysis. In particular, we focused on the

importance of the creation of the parallel Treebank for the New Testament within the

PROIEL project, which includes the Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, and

Classical Armenian versions. The syntactic and pragmatic annotation of such parallel corpora

allows and simplifies different kinds of linguistic investigations, both intra-linguistic and

contrastive ones. In the last part of our paper we have shown a concrete example of a

quantitative analysis answering to a syntactic-semantic question based on the Greek

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Treebanks of the Gospels and of the Acts of the Apostles, and a possible qualitative

interpretation.

In conclusion, our contribution provides an overview of some different perspectives

under which it is possible to study the New Testament in the light of recent linguistic

advances, emphasizing, once more, the richness of these texts for linguistic research, along

with the importance of linguistic advances for the study of the New Testament.

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SITOGRAPHY

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1 Concerning a possible Aramaic original of Matthew‟s Gospel, most scholars see it as very doubtful that this

original ever existed (cf. Wikenhauser, 1966: 174, Köster 2000), not only because the presence of Semitisms and

Septuagintisms can be explained as due to interferences of the mother tongue of the author(s), and derive from a

thorough knowledge of the Greek Old Testament, but also because a comparison among the synoptic Gospels

shows that the author of Matthew‟s text took into account the texts written by Marc and Luke. Thus, this was not

the most ancient Gospel, and probably it was not written in Aramaic. Furthermore, traces of an Aramaic version

of any of the four canonical Gospels have never been found. 2 “[…] the decision for or against a Semitism in a specific instance often create difficulties. It is important,

therefore, to guard against two opposing errors: not everything which conforms to Semitic idiom is a Semitism,

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nor is everything which appears somewhere or sometime in Greek is genuine Greek” (Blass, Debrunner, 1961:

4). 3 The construction described in sec. 3 found with the verbs peíthein also extended to Latin, in which we find the

newly created credere in. This construction, too, became a sign of Christian identity, as argued in Mohrmann

(1951); see further Luraghi (2014). 4 Note that this is not the total number of the occurrences in which the name of Jesus functions as subject, but

only of those in which the NP Iēsoûs is overtly expressed as a subject. As Greek allows for null, or ellyptical

subjects (i.e. the subject can be omitted when it is recoverable from the context), verbs that take Jesus as subject

are more, and they are not included in this counting. The only group of verbs that have ellyptical subjects

referring to Jesus which has been included is constituted by verbs in coordination, as remarked above (see

example (8)). Even though we only survey a part of verbs, the number of occurrences is relevant, and we

consider it representative of the whole corpus in terms of percentages.