What language was the Bible written in?
Short answer: the four Gospels and, more broadly, the 27-book New Testament were written in Koine Greek, the common written language of the first-century Mediterranean world. If the whole Bible is meant, most of the Old Testament is Hebrew, parts of Daniel and Ezra are Aramaic…
Short answer: the four Gospels and, more broadly, the 27-book New Testament were written in Koine Greek, the common written language of the first-century Mediterranean world. If the whole Bible is meant, most of the Old Testament is Hebrew, parts of Daniel and Ezra are Aramaic, and the New Testament is Koine Greek. Jesus is generally understood to have spoken Aramaic in daily life, and several Aramaic expressions are preserved in the text; that does not mean the whole New Testament was written in Aramaic. These are the original writing languages; a Turkish Bible is a translation from those source languages, not the same-language source text. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, was also an important witness used by early Christian writers. Because the first manuscripts do not survive as complete originals, researchers compare multiple manuscript witnesses; a translation is a new-language rendering built on that textual history. The Kadıköy Kilise Translation (KKR) on this site is produced from the WEB English source text through an AI-assisted process; it does not claim to be an academic edition reviewed by theological specialists. See the KKR guide for source, version and correction-reporting details.