You do? After your last debacle with regard to Roman history, I somehow doubt it. Everyone else would probably have used this as opportunity to get a refresher, but I guess that wasn't on your priority list.Steven Avery wrote: ↑Fri Oct 05, 2018 5:59 amAnd I do look at history. Can you explain your thinking here?
Anyway, just a short history sketch to get a few cornerstones right.
~200 AD Koine Greek is a language that is spoken as first language in much of the Eastern half of the Empire, as second language pretty much everywhere in the East, by most of the Christians in the city of Rome and generally by educated people in the Western part. It's the language all Christian texts are composed in.
200s: The big crisis of the Roman Empire brings an end to education in the Latin parts of the Roman Empire. Greek isn't understood anymore in those areas. Not even most of the Latin church fathers can read Christian texts in their original language. That's where Latin translations branch off and a first shrinking of the Greek world takes place.
300s: The Roman capital is transferred to Constantinople in the East, which becomes the center of Christianity. Christianity gets first tolerated, then state religion till the end of the century. Church divisions mimic those of the Roman state. All seven ecumenical councils (325-800) take place in or around the new capital or not far away.
400s: The Empire is divided. The triple assault of the Hun invasion, the plague and severe famines lead to the end of the Roman Empire in the West and a near collapse in the East. The last large library of antiquity in Constantinople burns down. Efforts to replace some books are reported, but the library is never heard of again. Two thirds of the Christians in the East Roman Empire separate from Constantinople after the Council of Chalcedon and are mostly in opposition to the church leadership. They now basically only write in other languages than Greek, like Coptic or Syriac. This includes formative regions of Christianity, like Antioch or Alexandria. The struggle between the state church and the others will be a constant source of strife for the next two centuries.
500s: Justinian tries to renew the Roman Empire. He is the last one who spoke Latin and is generally considered the last Emperor of antiquity. This attempt is very short-lived. Slavs settle the Balkans and come very close to Constantinople. Even after accepting Christianity in the 800s, they don't want to deal with Greek but use Church Slavonic.
600s: First the Avars, Slavs and Persians nearly destroy the Byzantine Empire, then the Arab conquest leads to a permanent loss of most Christian areas. The monophysite churches (Oriental Orthodox) seem to be happy to get rid of their Byzantine overlords. The Greek-speaking world has now contracted to a small country. It's basically the city of Constantinople and the lands around the Aegean Sea. On the plus side, this small area is now very uniform in culture and the constant inner strife of the former multinational state with its different churches is now gone. The year 630 sees Koine Greek introduced as the one and only official state language. This new small, uniform country is where all future Greek Bible manuscripts come from (sometimes indirectly, but that doesn't matter).
Here is a map of the Roman Empire in 717. Only the Eastern part around the Aegean speaks Greek:
Most areas connected to textual history, like Antioch, Alexandria, Caesarea and the whole West (some Italian areas are formally Byzantine vassal states, but are not part of the core Empire and its themata), are cut off from the development of the Byzantine text. The Byzantine state was completely restructured, administratively and culturally, and it was a strictly centralized state. Anything that happens after this date regarding Greek manuscripts is a local phenomenon and does not matter in any way for the textual history of the Bible. As this was the only Greek speaking area left, it's not a surprise that pretty much all Greek manuscripts from that time originate from that area (unless produced as learning exercise) and all look more or less the same. That's the product of a small, centralized, state-run church.
And now I spent much too much time on something that should be common knowledge.