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264 The Greek Papyri Of more importance is the indirect contribution made by the documents. From no other country. of the ancient world have we such a wealth of varied material relating to all the complex forms of social and economic life. Although the bulk of this evidence is strictly relevant to Egypt only, it is fair to recall that at the time when the books of the New Testament were written, the neighbouring lands of Egypt and Palestine were both provinces of the Roman Empire, that both were partially hellenized with a large non-Hellenic population, that contact between the two was easy, and that the official and business language of both countries was Greek. This Koine Greek, derived from Attic, but influenced by other dialects, was the lingua franca of the Roman East and though different parts of the empire produced their local variations, though within one country the spoken language differed from the written, and that of the educated from that of the half-educated, yet it was unmistakably a single language and the degree of uniformity in the written Koine was high. The publication of numerous contemporary documents, both papyri and inscriptions, has radically altered the views formerly held about the Greek of the New Testament; in par- ticular, the idea- that its language was something peculiar and divinely unrelated to other forms of Greek has disappeared. It is true that the Semitic element is strong in parts of the New Testament, that no letter remotely like the Epistles of St. Paul has been found in Egypt, and that the characteristic words of New Testament religion cannot be paralleled from the papyri; not only are few of our documents directly concerned with religion, but a new religion will commonly create its own vocabulary and Christianity deliberately avoided the usages of pagan cults. Yet these books were designed to be intelligible to and to appeal to the ordinary Greek-speaking public, and were not all intended for Jewish or Judaized audiences. Hence the resemblances between the language of the papyri and that of the New Testament books have given a new direction to the study