What does Mark sound like in its original language? Here’s an audio file of me reading the Prologue of Mark’s Gospel, Mk 1.1-15, in the original Greek. Someday I hope I can get the entire Gospel into .mp3 format just for the practice, but that will need some time. Meanwhile, though, you can listen to this guy for the entire New Testament— obviously, he’s an American, and he pauses, at each phrase, but still, he’s fluent. Better yet, though the reader is a bit fast, you can download the entire Bible— Septuagint and New Testament— through this site. (For language, select Greek. It will then offer you two NT options; choose the Antoniades Patriarchal Edition; this is the text that the Greek Orthodox Church uses, which is based on the Byzantine textform. The Spiros Filos translation is in Modern. (You can also download the entire Septuagint in audio form there!)
In my own recording, linked above, I stumble in a few places, but it’s pretty much how you’d hear Mark’s Gospel read in church today. If you want to hear it in an actual Greek church, you can either visit one this coming Sunday, or see this video of John 4.5-42, the story of the woman at the well, read by a Greek deacon. (Would someone please explain to those Greeks, though, that loudspeakers— especially so loud they echo— destroy any sense of liturgy??!— Please!)
Here is a well-curated list of the various pronunciation options. As you’ll see, the “modern” pronunciation is the last one mentioned. I don’t know what drives academic resistance to learning from actual Greeks how they pronounce the New Testament that they still read in its original language, but that resistance is fierce!— and, I suspect, more than a little racist, and of course it stems from deep-seated anti-catholic Protestant bias.
It might be objected that the pronunciation of Greek has shifted since the first century. That’s true, but first of all, not actually as true as you might think— listen to some selections from John here in “Reconstructed Koine”. In any case, it was never as far from the way Jesus and his apostles would have spoken, as Professor Maurice Robinson’s rendering, here. For one thing, Robinson is very choppy and he slaughters the accents. I don’t mean his “accent” is bad, although it is; I mean, he pays little attention to the accents as they’re actually marked. He’s not as bad as some, but as a guy who teaches Greek, he ought to be ashamed of himself. Do people imagine that those diacritics are there just to make the text look more complicated? Jesus and the apostles most certainly spoke more smoothly than Robinson, and most certainly didn’t go around speaking American Erasmian, as academics do, and as the big Bible programs teach!
The manner of reconstructing the sound of 1st century Greek is interesting. What scholars look at, of course, are misspellings in ancient documents and sometimes also transliterations into other languages. These give us clues as to how people actually thought things sounded. The process is laid out nicely here. But the conjectures don’t always convince. That page, for instance, claims that “[οι] was pronounced the same as [υ]”. And it gives as an example, Papyrus 109.2 (ca. 100 AD), where “οιειωι” appears as a misspelling of “υἱῷ”, “to the son”. If [υ] itself was pronounced like [ι], as it is now, οιειωι would sound like “iiō”, just as it does now. But the page would have us think that οιειωι sounds like “uiō” because “οι and υ had not yet merged with /[ει, ι]/ as the modern, itacistic change”. I am simply not convinced by the examples given.
Some folks might be shocked to learn this, but— Koine is to some extent still a living language. Music and poetry are still being composed in it— although rarely and only for church— and the services of the Greek Church, which require no fewer than twenty-seven heavy tomes of dense print, chanted (in their entirety at least in monasteries), during the course of each year, are constantly in the aural horizon of the Greek people. And many folks actually do go to those services and listen to them and understand them. To be sure, not everyone goes and understands them all the time, any more— it’s been a long time since that was the case, and especially today as Greece is losing its culture just like everyone else— so there’s a great need to do the services in Modern Greek, painful as that may seem to some— and I get that! But still— if native Greeks have had a high school education, the Greek of the New Testament and the Fathers is not inaccessible to them. I relied on my Koine/Byzantine Greek to get around when I lived in Greece in the 80s and 90s, and it worked pretty well— partly, of course, because I could often guess more or less how to “update” it on the fly. But if Americans can understand “the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me”, Greeks will not have to strain intolerably to manage things like, ὁ πατὴρ φιλεῖ ὑμᾶς, ὅτι ὑμεῖς ἐμὲ πεφιλήκατε. Or maybe if we can make sense of, “As thai haf writen and sayd, / haf I al in my Inglish layd, / in simple speche, as I couthe, / that is lightest in mannes mouthe’ (Robert Manning, 1338), they can handle ὅπως ἂν δικαιωθῇς ἐν τοῖς λόγοις σου καὶ νικήσῃς ἐν τῷ κρίνεσθαί σε (Ps 50.6). It takes work, but you can understand it, especially if you hear it often!
For sure, apart from the Scriptures themselves, the Greek you hear in church is mostly either the Septuagint or Byzantine— that is, patristic— Greek, but the difference between Byzantine Greek and that of the New Testament lies mainly in its more highly elaborated theological vocabulary— words like θεοτόκος (“Theotokos”) and ὑπερούσιος (“beyond being”), or in specialized meanings acquired by words like ὑπόστασις (“substrate” or “support”, but in trinitarian contexts, “hypostasis” or “person”) etc. And of course, Byzantine Greeks tended to use a much more, um, “Byzantine” literary style. But the grammar and the inflections of Byzantine are pretty much just as they were at the time of Christ and even centuries before. Heck, with Koine under your belt, you can even read Maximos the Confessor— and even St Photios— no illiterate he!— called him hard! But all you need is a dictionary and patience with his penchant for constructing 20-layer Chinese boxes. He’s not writing in a language other than Mark’s; he just takes that language to places you never thought you could go! The shift to Modern Greek came mainly in the post-byzantine era— in other words, it’s only a few hundred years old. So Modern Greek is to New Testament and Byzantine pretty much as Spanish is to Latin. And it was and is still pronounced like the Greek of the apostles.
Anyway, if you can understand Mark in Greek, it’s a great idea to download the files from a site like this one and listen to them at the gym or in the car or wherever, until you know it by heart!
So I’ve already said which pronunciation I favor, but just in case you’re still asking, let me say it again: Pronounce it the way the Church has pronounced it for just about its entire history, including the present. You’ll be glad you do.
Btw, why is it that so many recordings of people reading the Bible always have to have some schmaltzy, “uplifting” music in the background? Avoid that trash! Are the Scriptures so dull that we need gimmicks to make people feel “inspired”?? What, exactly, is this “inspiration” that we seek so much? I’m convinced all the producers of schlock like that are atheists, pure and simple!