Erasmian Pronunciation vs Modern Pronunciation of Greek (Our Father Prayer)

Name of the paper in the video: “The Error of Erasmus and Un-Greek Pronunciations of Greek”, by Chrys C. Caragounis Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was instrumental in developing the pronunciation system now named after him. In the 16th century, Western European humanists became dissatisfied with the pronunciation of Greek used by Byzantine scholars (which was essentially the same as Modern Greek or “Demotic” pronunciation). Scholarly consensus is that the Erasmian pronunciation commonly taught today does not precisely match how Koine Greek sounded in its own era . Erasmian is essentially an approximation of Classical Greek sounds (5th–4th century BCE Attic), whereas Koine Greek (approximately 300 BCE – 300 CE) underwent significant phonological changes relative to classical Greek. By focusing on an earlier phase of the language, the Erasmian system can misrepresent later periods like Koine . For example, W. Sidney Allen in Vox Graeca and other linguists have presented evidence that Erasmus’s assumptions about certain vowels and diphthongs were off the mark . The length of vowels, the pronunciation of certain diphthongs, and some consonant sounds likely differed from what Erasmian teachers use. (Erasmian often assigns each Greek letter a unique sound based on classical evidence or convenience, but historical evidence suggests that by the Koine period many of those sounds had shifted or merged.) One major critique is that Erasmian pronunciation does not account for dialectal and temporal variation in ancient Greek . Ancient Greek was not uniform: Attic Greek of the 5th century BCE differed from Ionian Greek of the same era, and both differed from Koine Greek of the 1st century CE. Erasmus’s system was largely Attic-focused and did not accommodate these variations. Koine Greek itself was a evolving “moving target” – by the end of the Koine period, Greek pronunciation had changed considerably from the classical norm. As one source puts it, at the beginning of the Koine period, pronunciation was close to Classical Greek, while by the end (4th century AD) it was almost identical to Modern Greek . Erasmian, however, ignores many of those evolutionary changes, effectively freezing pronunciation in an earlier state. Because of this, many scholars freely acknowledge that Erasmian is not a historically accurate reflection of 1st-century spoken Greek. New Testament scholar Rod Decker noted that Erasmian pronunciation “is not what Greek sounded like in the Koine of the first century” . Daniel B. Wallace similarly concedes that when he travels to Greece, he “leaves Erasmus behind” and uses the modern pronunciation, implying that Erasmian would be out of place in Greece . It’s telling that even proponents of Erasmian often admit its historical shortcomings. For instance, Decker continues that he “freely [acknowledges] that it is not an accurate representation of exactly what Jesus and Paul sounded like when they spoke Greek.” Instead, the rationale for using Erasmian is typically pedagogical convenience or tradition, not authenticity (a point we will explore later). Critics sometimes go further, casting Erasmian not just as outdated but as fundamentally flawed. The **“mispronunciation” evidence comes from ancient spelling errors and transcriptions. If Erasmian were correct for Koine, we’d expect ancient writers to always distinguish sounds like η vs. ι vs. ει, etc., in their spelling. In reality, Koine-era inscriptions and manuscripts show frequent vowel interchange errors – writers confounding omicron and omega, or eta and iota, for example – indicating those letters were pronounced similarly (or identically) by that time. As Prof. Holmberg observes, “One can tell that the pronunciation of Koine Greek that is commonly taught is incorrect by the written mistakes made in ancient manuscripts. These mistakes reveal that a more accurate pronunciation would [be] closer to Modern Greek.” . In other words, the living evidence from antiquity (misspellings, phonetic spellings, comments by ancient grammarians, etc.) aligns more with a Modern Greek-like pronunciation in many cases than with the distinct sounds used in Erasmian. Additionally, some see Erasmian as culturally insular. It was a product of Western European scholarship and ignored the Greek-speaking world’s own pronunciation. In the Renaissance, Erasmus’s contemporary Johann Reuchlin favored the “Reuchlinian” (i.e. Byzantine/Modern) pronunciation, arguing that the living tradition should be respected. Modern critics echo this: One commentator compares Erasmian reconstruction to rewriting history while “disregarding eyewitness accounts”, since Greek speakers through the centuries have continuously pronounced their language in a way very different from Erasmian . From this perspective, Erasmian was a kind of historical overreach – a scholar in 1500s Netherlands telling Greeks that they’ve been pronouncing their own language “wrong” for centuries.