Chapter XXXIX: Section XXXVII: The Hellenistic Greek

After the close of Old Testament prophecy, the conquests of Alexander of Macedon, the consequent diffusion of the Greeks, and the favor which that prince and his successors showed to the Jews, introduced an intimate intercourse between them and the Greeks. By him Alexandria in Egypt was founded, designated by his own name, and intended to be the western capital of his empire. In this new Greek capital, its founder assigned the Jews an extensive section, and equal privileges with the Macedonians. After the death of Alexander, and the subdivision of his empire, the Ptolemies, the Greek kings of Egypt, continued to favor the Jews, treating them on terms of equality with the Greeks. During the same period, the persecutions suffered by the Jews of Palestine from the kings of Syria, drove multitudes into exile, many of whom were attracted to Egypt, so that the Jewish population of Alexandria was at one time estimated at nearly a million of souls, occupying two of the five districts of the city; and at least, for a time, governed by their own ethnarch, or superior magistrate. Among these Jews, and those elsewhere scattered in the Greek colonies, their own language was gradually superseded by the Greek, into which, at length, the Old Testament Scriptures were translated, in a version known as the Septuagint. Of the precise time and circumstances in which this version was made, there is no reliable information, except that it was done in Alexandria, within the first quarter of the third century before Christ. In the time of Christ, the Greek had become the language of literature and of commerce for the civilized world. Among the Jews dispersed everywhere, it was prevalent, and was extensively used even in Palestine itself, and thus became the divinely prepared channel for communicating the gospel to all nations.

But the language thus employed—the Greek of the Septuagint, the Apocrypha and the New Testament—was not what is known as classic Greek. The Jews did not learn it in the schools of Greece, nor from a study of her poets, orators, and philosophers. It was the product of social and business contact and intercourse of the one people with the other, in a land foreign to both.

Already the purity of the Attic had been lost, by the commingling of the Macedonians with the various tribes of Greece proper and her dependencies, in the armies from which Alexander’s colonists were taken; and still further by the mixed multitude which flocked to their new settlements. In the process of adaptation to the expression of Jewish thought, it was inevitably subjected to further modifications, in definition, in syntax, in order and construction—in the very tone and spirit which pervade the whole. By these modifications, the language, which had grown up as the native and coeval expression of the idolatrous religion, the arts and philosophy of pagan Greece, was adapted to become a repository for the system of divine and saving truth, contained in the Scriptures. Those Jews who resided in Alexandria and other Greek cities, who spake this Greek language, and were more or less conformed to the manners of the Gentiles among whom they lived, were known among their brethren, as Hellenists, that is, Greek Jews, and hence, the Greek dialect used by them has acquired the designation of Hellenistic Greek.

The authors of the New Testament adopted this as the language of their writings, and, in their references to the Old Testament, their quotations are mostly made, not from the Hebrew, but from the Septuagint, or Hellenistic version. It was ordinarily used by the Lord Jesus himself in his discourses. It thus appears as the source and standard of the language of the New Testament.

Together with these Greek Scriptures of the Old Testament, there have been transmitted to us several other Jewish documents of the same period, written in the same Hellenistic Greek. They are invaluable for the light which they shed upon the history, customs, and modes of thought and language of the Jews of that time; although the attempt of the church of Rome, to exalt some of them to an equal authority with the Scriptures, has tended to fix a stigma on them, as known to us under the name of Apocrypha. Incautious recourse to the rules and definitions of classic Greek is liable to deceive and mislead us in the critical study of the New Testament. But conclusions intelligently deduced from the language of the Septuagint and of the other Jewish writers of that age, are to be respected as of the highest authority on all questions of the New Testament language. On the subject of our present investigation, these authorities shed a flood of light. In them, we first find the verb, _baptizo_, used to designate rites of religious purifying. Once in the Septuagint, and twice in the Apocrypha, it is applied to Hebrew rites of this nature.

That the use of the word to designate religious observances is peculiar to the Hellenistic, as contradistinguished from classic Greek, is indisputable; and it is worthy of consideration, how it came to be selected from the Greek vocabulary for this purpose. The Hebrews of Egypt, in their exile from the land of their fathers, had not abandoned but rather augmented their zeal for the institutions of Moses. A circumstance in their own history, which at first might have seemed to threaten a dissolution of the ties that bound them to the temple at Jerusalem, operated in fact to renovate and strengthen them. This was, the erection by some of their number, of a temple at Onias in Egypt, in imitation of that at Jerusalem. Here, the Levitical rites were punctually observed under priests of the Aaronic line and Levites of the sacred tribe. For this they claimed warrant from the prophecy of Isaiah, xix, 19.—“In that day, shall there be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.” The adherents of this movement do not seem to have been numerous, and its effect was rather to increase the devotion of the people to the temple at Jerusalem, and the ordinances there maintained. Among them, was developed the same disposition which was prevalent in Judea to give undue importance to multiplied rites of purifying; and hence an increased and constant necessity of finding, in the Greek language which they were now adopting, some word suitable to designate these rites. In that language was the verb, _bapto_, meaning (1) to dip; (2) to wet by dipping; (3) to wet, irrespective of the manner; (4) to dye by dipping, and thence, to dye, without respect to mode—even by sprinkling. But, as we have seen, the rites in question were not dippings, nor were they dyeings, and the word was never used by the Jews to designate them. From this root, the Greeks derived the verb _baptizo_. (1.) Its primary meaning, as used by them, was,—to bring into the state of mersion. This meaning had no respect to the mode of action, whether by putting the subject under the fluid, pouring it over him, or in whatever manner. In other words, it expressed not _im_mersion, but mersion,—not the mode of inducing the state, but the state induced,—that of being embosomed in the mersing element. From this primary signification, was derived a secondary use of the word. As any thing that is mersed is in the possession and control of the mersing element, the word was hence used to express the establishing of a complete possession and controlling influence. As we say that a man is drowned,—immersed,—overwhelmed, in business, in trouble, in drunkenness, or in sleep; having, in these expressions, no reference whatever to the mode in which the described condition was brought about; so the Greeks used the verb _baptizo_. They spoke of men as baptized with grief, with passion, with business cares. An intoxicated person was “baptized with wine,” etc. In such use of the word, the essential idea is that of the action of a pervasive potency by which the subject is brought and held in a new state or condition. On this subject, no authority could be better or more conclusive than that of the Rev. Dr. T. J. Conant, a scholar of unquestioned eminence and whose researches on this subject were undertaken at the request of the American (Baptist) Bible Union. The result of his investigations he thus states. “The word, _baptizein_, during the whole existence of the Greek as a spoken language, had a perfectly defined and unvarying import. In its literal use, it meant, as has been shown,—to put entirely into or under a liquid, or other penetrable substance, generally water, so that the object was wholly covered by the enclosing element. By analogy it expressed _the coming into a new state of life or experience_, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently, he belonged wholly to it.”[29] Dr. Dale has been at the trouble to list and enumerate no less than forty different words which Dr. Conant employs in his translations of this word of “perfectly defined and unvarying import.” It is, however, enough for our present purpose, that this distinguished scholar here expressly admits with Italic emphasis, that “by analogy,” the word “expressed the coming into _a new state of life or experience_, in which one was, as it were, inclosed and swallowed up, so that temporarily or permanently he belonged wholly to it.”

Footnote 29:

“The Meaning and Use of _Baptizein_, Philologically and Historically
investigated for the American Bible Union. By T. J. Conant, D. D.,” p.
158. The italics are by Dr. C.

Now, here was the very word required to designate the Mosaic rites of purifying. Of dippings and immersions, Israel had none; and, if these had been found in their ritual, the verbs, _bapto, to dip, and kataduo, to plunge into, to immerse_, and the nouns, _baphē_ and _katadusis_,—_a dipping, an immersion_, were at hand and specific in meaning. But they did want words to express that potency by which the unclean were, in the words of Dr. Conant, introduced into “a new state of life,”—a state of ritual cleanness, typical of the spiritual newness of life in Christ Jesus which God’s people receive, by the baptism of the Spirit. To express the working of that change, they appropriated the word _baptizo, to baptize_; that is, to cleanse, to purify. Then, to give name to the rites by which that change was accomplished, they formed from it the two sacred words, _baptisma_ and _baptismos_, words wholly unknown to classic Greek literature. They are, as to etymology and meaning identical. By grammarians, the termination, _mos_, is said generally to indicate the act signified by the verb, while _ma_ indicates its effect. But the rule is neither absolute nor universal; and the sacred writers do not maintain the distinction. By them _baptisma_ is used alike to signify the act of baptizing, and the effect, the new state produced by it. In their writings, the distinction seems to consist in the employment of _baptismos_ generically, as designating divers kinds of purifying rites; while _baptisma_ is specifically applied to the baptism of John and of Christ. It is found in no other writings of that or preceding ages. Outside the Scriptures, _baptismos_ occurs once, in the works of Josephus, who thus designates John’s baptism.[30]

Footnote 30:

“Antiquities of the Jews,” XVIII, vi, 2.