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Comment by titanomachy | Hacker News Reader

The New Testament is actually in Greek, if you go to any church in Greece they are reading from it in the original language and people understand it fine.

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Modern Greek speakers can NOT understand ancient Greek. And modern Hebrew is NOT mutually intelligible with Aramaic. The OP is correct and the two responses are nonsense. Also, in the 1500s when the Bible was translated to English, very few Europeans spoke Latin and if they did it was a very different Latin from the translations from the Roman era (pre 500 or so). Languages change over time and the Latin spoken by the aristocrats in the 1500s was very very different from the Latin spoken by the Romans.

I simply made the observation that when you go to churches in Greece, they are speaking the original New Testament and people can understand it. Which part are you refuting, that the priest is reading the original text or that the parishioners can understand him?

It certainly sounds strange and unlike how any modern Greek person would speak, but it can be basically understood especially if you are a bit used to it. I’m not an expert but I think it’s probably a smaller gap than say Latin and modern Italian. Definitely a smaller gap than English and Old English, despite being more than twice as old!

Virtually none of the Bible was written in a currently-dead language. Only small bits were written in Aramaic, and Koine Greek and Biblical Hebrew are pretty much comprehensible to modern Greek and Hebrew speakers.

Even the Christian era of the Bible being distributed in Latin made perfect sense since it was originally mostly being distributed to people who spoke Latin with questionable accents (and where Latin was the language everyone who was literate was literate in).

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