Byzantine Greek is the later evolved form of Koine Greek used as the liturgical, literary and administrative language of the Eastern Roman Empire from roughly the fourth century until the empire's fall in 1453, and it is the language of most patristic theology, hymnography and monastic literature produced by Eastern Orthodox Christianity in that period. Figures including John Chrysostom, John of Damascus and the compilers of Mount Athos's monastic literature wrote in this register, distinct from both the earlier Koine of the New Testament and the older Classical Greek the atlas lists separately. Byzantine Greek liturgical texts remain in active use in Orthodox Christian worship today, largely unchanged in wording since their composition. The atlas holds Byzantine Greek as the primary source language behind the Eastern Orthodox patristic and liturgical material it catalogs.
Facts
Origins
Language FamilyHellenic branch of the Indo-European language family; developed from Koine Greek across the roughly thousand-year span of the Byzantine Empire (5th to 15th centuries CE). 2 Place of OriginByzantine Greek originated in the Greek-speaking core of the Eastern Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, continuing the Koine of the earlier eastern Mediterranean. 2 Identity
Native ScriptThe Greek alphabet in the minuscule hand developed in the ninth century, which carries almost every surviving Greek manuscript, with accents and breathings written in full. 1 Attestation
Era of AttestationByzantine Greek is attested continuously from roughly the fourth century CE, when Koine gave way to the medieval literary and administrative Greek of the Eastern Roman Empire, through to the empire's fall in 1453. 3 Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RolePrimary theological and liturgical language of the Byzantine Orthodox Church, including major councils, the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, and the Hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas. 4 Learn More
Byzantine Greek: The Language of Orthodox Christian Theology
Byzantine Greek, also called Medieval Greek, covers the form of the Greek language used across the Byzantine Empire from roughly the fourth or fifth century through the empire's fall to the Ottomans in 1453, developing from Koine Greek while incorporating grammatical simplification and vocabulary change over its roughly thousand-year span, and belonging, like all historical Greek registers, to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European family. Byzantine Greek functioned as the primary language of the Eastern Roman Empire's imperial administration, its highly educated literary elite, and crucially its Orthodox Christian Church, whose major theological councils, including Chalcedon in 451 and the later iconoclasm controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, were conducted and their conclusions recorded substantially in this evolving form of Greek.
The Byzantine liturgical and theological tradition, including the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom still used across Eastern Orthodoxy today, and the extensive corpus of Byzantine patristic and monastic writing, including major figures such as Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus, represent one of Christianity's largest bodies of theological literature in any single historical language register.
Byzantine Theology, Hesychasm and the Orthodox Liturgical Legacy
Byzantine Greek theological literature produced sustained and highly technical doctrinal debate across the empire's history, including the Christological controversies that split the Byzantine church from the Oriental Orthodox churches following Chalcedon in 451, the iconoclasm controversy over the legitimacy of religious images that convulsed Byzantine religious life through the eighth and ninth centuries before iconodule theology prevailed, and the fourteenth-century Hesychast controversy, in which the monk Gregory Palamas defended contemplative monastic prayer practices and a distinction between God's unknowable essence and knowable energies, a formulation that became authoritative Orthodox theology and remains influential in modern Eastern Orthodox spirituality. Byzantine Greek liturgical texts, hymnody and monastic literature continue to be studied directly by Orthodox seminarians and scholars, and Mount Athos, the autonomous Orthodox monastic community in Greece, maintains manuscript collections and living scholarly engagement with Byzantine Greek theological and liturgical texts largely unbroken since the Byzantine period itself, giving Byzantine Greek a continuous institutional life within Orthodox Christianity distinct from the purely academic study it receives in secular universities.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested in Region
Byzantine Greek is documented in use as a written language in Greece. The claim is where the language is documented in use as a written, literary or liturgical language. It is not a claim about the full extent of its speakers, and it is not a claim about where the language originated.
Named or Composed in This Language
The Byzantine rite is celebrated in Greek here, in the received liturgical form of the language rather than in the modern spoken one.
The Byzantine rite is celebrated in Greek here, in the received liturgical form of the language rather than in the modern spoken one.
The Byzantine rite is celebrated in Greek here, in the received liturgical form of the language rather than in the modern spoken one.
Related To
Byzantine Greek is the stage immediately preceding it, and remains the language of the Greek liturgy.
Sources
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