The New Testament part of the Christian Bible was originally written in Koine Greek, as most of the Church and scholars believe, and is therefore not a translation (notwithstanding that some reference material may have been from Aramaic).
[3] At the initiative of the pro-Reformed Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople, Maximos of Gallipoli (or Kallioupolites, died 1633) translated a vernacular New Testament from 1629 which was printed at Geneva in 1638.
[7] Frangiskos Soavios published in the year 1833 the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua translated from the Hebrew Original into the Modern Greek Language.
[8] A translation of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in literary Katharevousa Greek (Καθαρεύουσα) by Neofytos Vamvas and his associates was first published in 1850 following nearly 20 years of work.
University students protested that he tried to sell the country to the Slavs and the Turks in order to break Greek religious and national unity.
[11] In 1967 a team of academic staff of the University of Athens led by Basil (Vasilios) Vellas (Βασίλειος Βέλλας) translated the New Testament, with support from the Hellenic Bible Society.
Then, in 1997, they released the complete Holy Scriptures (Bible) in modern Greek,[13] being "the result of some seven years of painstaking work.”[14] A revision of the Vamvas translation of the Bible into the modern vernacular (Demotic Greek) by Spyros (Spiros) Filos (Σπύρος Φίλος) was first published in 1994.
Meanwhile, a team of 12 professors from the theological schools of the Universities of Athens and Thessaloniki had been working since the mid 1960s on another translation into the modern vernacular (Demotic Greek), with support from the Hellenic Bible Society.
In 2002, with the latest edition published in 2012, a New Testament translation by professor Nikolaos Sotiropoulos was published after he revisioned many hundreds of New Testament passages's interpretations in his 4 volumes work: «Ερμηνεία δύσκολων χωρίων της Γραφής» (Interpretation of difficult passages of the Bible).