Reconstructed Koine Pronunciation

Our church has been reading through the Bible this year in a reading plan, and we have now started going through the New Testament. After looking at some possible audio Greek NTs, I started listening to Ben Kantor's readings of the NT books using a reconstructed Koine pronunciation. I had the opportunity to get to know Ben better this September, so it was great to see these resources freely available online and learn more about his reconstruction.

What does a question of Greek language learning pedagogy have to do with OT textual criticism? More than you might think, actually. The reconstructed, historical Koine pronunciation he uses is reconstructed largely on the basis of ancient transliterations and spelling errors in ancient manuscripts, and it is meant to approximate Roman-period pronunciations (with some further developments for consistency). Where this becomes particularly important for our purposes is precisely in that scribes frequently made spelling errors (at least as we normally consider them) that match phonetic interchanges. So if you work with old Greek manuscripts, you will often encounter spelling errors like -τε for -ται that don't actually make sense semantically or graphically, but make perfect sense when you realize scribes pronounced both of these the same way. So even if you don't use this pronunciation in your Greek language pedagogy, it's still very useful to know how scribes actually pronounced things in order to make sense of their manuscripts and spelling practices.