Ok, that is a different question than I thought you were asking.
The answer lies in the history of the Roman Empire and western
Christianity. People in North Africa, Spain, England, Gaul were never
deeply influenced by Greek culture and language. St. Augustine, a native of
North Africa, knew very little Greek in the fourth and fifth centuries. In
the East the Armenians, Christianized in 306 (the first Christian Nation),
retained their language. Greek in Egypt developed into Coptic (it uses many
characxters from the Greek Alphabet). The coup de gras was given to Greek
by the Muslim conquest of Egypt, North Africa, and the Middle East. Given
that its sacred language was Arabic, Greek lost out in Alexandria, Cyrene,
Gaza, Antioch, etc., all cities that had been centers of Greek culture and
language.
Then came the split between East and West in the Roman Empire. When
frequent contact with the East ceased, the need for Greek ceased--just as
French ceased to be the lingua franca of the world sometime in this
century, to be replaced by English as the new world language (Internet,
science, multinational business, etc.). Latin lost out, though it had been
the common language of the west for scholarship, church, government, etc.,
as the common people's use of it developed into the Romance languages.
*********************************************
* Edgar Krentz *
* Professor of New Testament *
* Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago *
* 1100 East 55th Street *
* Chicago, IL 60615 *
* e-mail: office, ekrentz@lstc.edu *
* home: emkrentz@mcs.com *
*Tel: 0ff.: 773-256-0752; home 773-947-8105 *
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