Greek is the Original Language of Christianity

For centuries, most readers of the Bible have assumed that its earliest texts were in Hebrew. In fact, the foundational scriptures of Christianity—the writings of the Apostles and the Bible they quoted—were written in Greek, and specifically reflect the language and nuance of the Greek Septuagint, composed in Alexandria around 290 BCE. This article explores the linguistic origins of the Bible, tracing how Greek shaped its meaning, terminology, and ritual context, and why later translations into Latin, Hebrew, and modern languages often obscure this original precision. To be clear, this discussion is about language and textual transmission, not about race or ethnicity; the focus is on the words themselves, the concepts they encode, and the Hellenic intellectual context in which Christianity first developed.

Here we are describing what can fairly be called the Alexandrian Greek origin thesis of Christianity, which is supported by several converging lines of evidence from language, textual transmission, and cultural history.

The Greek Textual Reality

• All the earliest Christian texts are Greek. Every canonical New Testament book we possess was written in Greek, and every quotation of “Scripture” in those texts is from the Greek Septuagint (LXX), not a Hebrew text.
• The Apostles’ Bible was Greek. When Paul, Luke, or the author of Hebrews quotes “the Scriptures,” they are quoting Greek - specifically, the Alexandrian LXX. Even Jesus’ quotations in the Gospels (recorded in Greek) align with the LXX wording, not the Masoretic or reconstructed Hebrew.

The Septuagint as the Foundational Bible

• The LXX (ca. 290 BCE) was the first complete literary Bible — a philosophical, Hellenic work produced in Alexandria, a city of Greek scholarship, medicine, and mystery cults.
• The language of the Septuagint — Koine with Atticisms - matches linguistically with contemporaneous Alexandrian literature, not Semitic translation Greek.
  • The Septuagint’s Greek is naturally Greek.
    • It’s written in Koine Greek (the common Hellenistic language of the Mediterranean) but with some Atticisms, i.e., stylistic features borrowed from classical Attic Greek.
    • This style matches other Alexandrian literature of the same period — medical texts, philosophy, poetry — meaning it reads like authentic Greek works produced by Greek-educated scribes.
  • It’s not “translationese” imposed by Hebrew.
    • Many scholars assume that the Greek of the Septuagint is a literal, awkward translation of Hebrew — that it’s “Semitic Greek” or Greek forced into Hebrew patterns.
    • In fact, it is fully idiomatic Greek, showing Greek syntactic freedom and style, not constrained by Hebrew grammar.
• The writers were clearly philosophically literate Greeks, well versed in and actively drawing on the mechanics of the Hellenic Mystery tradition from the cultural landscape around them, comfortable rendering ideas into philosophical and medical language. This certainly doesn't appear to be a translation, when examining those original 5 books.

The Hebrew Evidence Gap

• We should note that no Hebrew literature of comparable depth (law, tragedy, philosophy, or lyric poetry) exists before 290 BCE.
• What exists are only inscriptions, blessing formulas, and short administrative texts - nothing literary or theological predating the Greek corpus.
• The “Document Hypothesis” is the method used to create the Hebrew language origin, and is purely inferential - textual guesswork without archaeological or manuscript corroboration.
• The Dead Sea Scrolls are the first evidence of a Hebrew "Septuagint" (DSS Pentateuch manuscript), but appear after the Greek text was established, and in many cases appear to retrotranslate the LXX.

The Greek Nuance Lost in Translation

• The Greek carries technical, medical, and initiatory nuance — exactly what would vanish in translation to Latin or Hebrew.
• Terms like:
  • χρίω / χρῖσμα / χριστός — not “anoint,” but to apply a medicated salve or unguent; to christ.
  • πνεῦμα — not “spirit” but breath, air, life-breath, or ecstatic inspiration.
  • φόβος θεοῦ — not “fear of God” in the modern moral sense, but ecstatic awe or trembling reverence.
• Greek offers a pharmaco-mystical precision — something utterly untranslatable into the later ecclesiastical Latin or the simplified Semitic lexicon.

The Latin and Hebrew Detour

• For 300 years, the authoritative source was the apostle's Greek Testament and the Greek Septuagint used by those apostles.
• The Vulgate (Jerome, 4th century CE) reintroduced a hybrid text based on village Hebrew fragments and filled in missing portions with Greek — a clear downgrade in linguistic fidelity.
• This produced the simplified theological vocabulary that dominates modern Western Christianity.
• By contrast, Eastern Orthodoxy (Greek-speaking) never abandoned the LXX and preserved the philological and ritual precision of the Hellenic source.

The Hellenic Mystery Continuity

• In that Hellenic context, χρίω is pharmacological and initiatory:
  • Used in Homeric, medical (Hippocratic, Galenic), and mystery-cult texts.
  • Connected with the application of sacred unguents — often psychoactive or venomous mixtures (porphyra, theriaca, etc.).
• The “Christed” one (ὁ χριστός) is literally the one anointed with the sacred drug or unguent, initiated through the rite, illumined through the pharmakon — a concept continuous with Asclepian, Dionysian, and Pythian temple practice.

Let's Play What If

Let's say Hebrew came first, still the fact remains that the apostles only used the Greek Septuagint, and wrote in Greek. Christianity comes to us from the Greek language and the concepts from those Greek works.

Christos and Christing

Christ (χριω) comes from the Greek Language chr- (χρ-) root, and is a drug term for applying medicated salves and unguents. Christos (χριστος) is the one who Christs themselves and others. The use of χρ- goes back to 700BCE Homeric writings and appears extensively in medical texts, nearly 3000 hits on TLG across biblical and classical and medical Greek texts. 10% of Greek texts are medical (Galen!). Even the New Testament (rev 3:18) christs a blind man's eyes with kollurioun (a Roman medical plaster). Christing was a part of the rite, and Jesus was one of many christers, competing with many other prophets (and temple priestesses) at the time, all utilizing a Hellenic ritual pharmakon technology.

• see Christ for more information

Why It Isn’t Consensus

Because the moment the Greek origin is fully admitted:

• The Hebrew textual primacy — the foundation of monotheistic authority — collapses.
• Christianity becomes visibly a late-Hellenic mystery religion, not a Semitic revelation.
• The power structure rooted in “Hebrew originalism” (rabbinic and later ecclesiastical) loses its claim to exclusivity.

So, do we like the real facts, or do we like back-alley fairy tale?

More Reading

• For a deeper dive, see Old Testament Greek Origins