The Septuagint and New Testament in Koine Greek

The Septuagint, traditionally said to have been produced by seventy or seventy-two translators working in Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, rendered the Hebrew Bible into Koine Greek for a Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora that had lost fluency in Hebrew, and became the Old Testament text most early Christians actually read and quoted, since Greek-speaking Christianity spread faster and further in its first centuries than direct engagement with the Hebrew original among non-Jewish converts.

The entire New Testament, including the four Gospels, Paul's epistles and the Book of Revelation, was composed in Koine Greek within a few generations of Jesus's death, giving Christianity's foundational scripture a specific linguistic register whose particular grammar and vocabulary, including terms such as agape for selfless love and logos for divine reason or word, became deeply embedded in later Christian theology across languages that subsequently translated these Greek concepts. Koine Greek remains the language of the Eastern Orthodox Church's own scriptural and patristic textual tradition, studied directly by Orthodox seminarians and scholars rather than approached only through later Byzantine or modern Greek intermediaries.