Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament is a major scholarly revision and expansion of Moulton and Milligan’s classic Vocabulary of the Greek Testament. This new edition adds 937 previously unrecorded lexical entries, significantly broadening the scope and depth of the original work. Designed to illuminate the linguistic environment of the New Testament, VGNT demonstrates how the Greek vocabulary found in the New Testament functioned within the wider Greco-Roman world of the same or closely related historical periods. Each lexical entry is supplied with an English gloss and is richly illustrated with citations from nonliterary Greek papyri and inscriptions, enabling readers to examine firsthand the semantic range and practical usage of these terms across diverse socio-historical contexts.

Moulton and Milligan made available the recently discovered papyri and inscriptions written in the same kind of Greek (Koine) that appears in the NT. Before these materials were unearthed in the 1890s, it was thought that NT Greek represented a distinct dialect, referred to by some as the “language of the Holy Ghost.” But based on these finds, scholars concluded that the New Testament was written in the vernacular Greek commonly spoken at the time, now known as Koine (or “common”) Greek. Koine is a later, simplified version of Classical (Attic) Greek that was widely spoken in the Hellenistic period and Roman empire (fourth century BCE to fourth century CE). Moulton and Milligan’s work helped scholars to understand the meaning of Koine Greek words by bringing to light a wealth of everyday written materials that were discarded and left in garbage heaps on the outskirts of old Egyptian towns. Their work paved the way for defining and refining the meaning of many NT Greek words, which scholars have been building on ever since.