The Gospel of Luke's unique use of "pestilences" (loimoi) turns Jewish apocalyptic into Greek

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (King James Version)

(σεισμοί τε μεγάλοι κατὰ τόπους καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ λοιμοὶ ἔσονται φόβητρά τε καὶ σημεῖα ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ μεγάλα ἔσται) (Textus Receptus)

-- Luke 21:11

The parallel use of loimoi in Matthew 24:7, found in the KJV and NKJV (footnoted), is weakly attested in the manuscripts and is therefore omitted by the NIV, ESV, RSV, ASV, NET and NASB.

Luke alone in the New Testament uses the otherwise relatively rare "loimos" (see in Bruzzone, below, p. 890), and in but one other place, Acts 24:5. There Luke puts the word in the mouth of a trained orator employed by the Jews to accuse St. Paul of being a "pest", which is quite funny actually (cf. Demosthenes 25.80). It must have been the mention of "famines", "limoi", in the tradition received by Luke which probably triggered his addition of "pestilences". 

This is likely because "limoi" and "loimoi", "famines" and "pestilences", are part of a classic literary constellation of calamities, those two especially and frequently in combination with "polemos", "war" (which Luke also has in 21:9f., kicking off the list of troubles). These terms in combination reach deep into Greek memory, back to such eminences as Homer (Iliad 1.61), Hesiod (Erga 243), Aeschylus (Suppliants 659), the historian Herodotus (7.171.2; 8.115.2f.), Plato (Laws 709A), Pindar, Sophocles, and particularly to the historian Thucydides (1.23; 2.47; 2.54), whose account of the famine and plague at Athens opens his History of the Peloponnesian War. The pairing of famine and plague in particular had become a topos taught in the schools already by the time of the Attic orator Aeschines (3.135), so thoroughly ingrained in the imagination had it become by then (see now Rachel Bruzzone, "Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval", Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 882-909, esp. 888ff., here).

As an obviously educated writer, Luke probably had learned the topos as a boy. 

Once this is appreciated, one can also observe and better appreciate Luke's (double) introduction of the felicitous "te...kai" construction, also in imitation of good style found in Herodotus and Thucydides in similar contexts, and how Luke uses it to pair "great earthquakes" with this topos "famines and plagues" in the first half of the sentence on the one hand, and in the second half of the sentence, the "signs from heaven" with a description of them as "both fearsome and great" on the other.

The only translation I know of which even attempts to capture this, at least in the first half of the sentence, surprisingly, is that of J. N. Darby:

there shall be both great earthquakes in different places, and famines and pestilences; and there shall be fearful sights and great signs from heaven.

Luke's is a morbidly beautiful sentence in its way, if not pulled off entirely successfully, attempting as it does to express how more or less two things of all too familiar and essentially terrestrial terror will be doubly echoed in the heavenly realm by signs at once spectacular and disturbing, confirming the gods' displeasure with men:

There shall be both great signs in place after place, as well as famines and pestilences, and signs from heaven both fearsome and great.

These "te...kai" and topos niceties are wholly lacking in Matthew 24:7 and Mark 13:8, which are artless and probably closer to the original form of the saying, omitting "pestilences" and "both...and". Hence the confusion in the manuscripts with the word order in Luke 21:11 itself, producing many variant readings, because the introduction of the terminology by Luke fought with the received elements.

It's all Luke's fault.

Smart people are frequently misunderstood.

But if one can keep from getting bogged down in all that for one moment, it points to the effort made by Luke to make the apocalyptic teaching of the Christians intelligible to Greek minds. He's trying to make it sound even more familiar to them than it already was. And this begs the question of the origin of Christian apocalyptic in the first place. Just how Hellenized was all this to begin with? It looks more plausible to me after reading Bruzzone, who, by the way, says narry a word about it. The success of the Christian movement is at least partly explained by the resonance of its message with the actual hopes and the fears shared by its hosts.

Bruzzone makes a good case that the Greek tradition is immemorially rich with suspicions of divine involvement in human ills of civil strife, war, natural calamities, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as wonders and portents in the skies, and on the earth below famine, plague, and mass death (loigos). All of these things are associated, if not always in every detail, with the gospels' memory of Jesus' apocalyptic teaching . . . and with Thucydides.

Oh my God, not Thucydides.

This unique case in Luke's Gospel involving pestilence might lead some quickly to say and too quickly to say, "See, Luke was a physician, preoccupied with 'medical' terminology. That's all this is." Well, that hardly makes Luke a physician than it makes one of Thucydides.

But maybe it makes Luke an historian, and a very Greek one at that, at least in his own imagination.

Greek Men Conjugate in Their Sleep

When I was growing up, my mother kept telling me that smart boys pretty much had three options professionally. You either studied to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a preacher. She was trying to get me ready for the future, since by the time I was a freshman in high school, I was more interested in making explosives in chemistry class and in playing football than in anything else. (If you weren't obsessed with football in Wisconsin in the 60's there must have been something wrong with you.) So when a victory over a track and field injury through surgery meant that I could continue to compete in football, it seemed like divine intervention to me and the die was cast. A preacher I would be.

In college in those days the place where all preacher wannabes met their Waterloo was in Greek grammar and syntax class, at the beginning of the sophomore year. If you didn't pass the verb exam with 90 percent accuracy, you didn't go on. You'd be steered at that point to a degree in "education," and become a certified teacher in the church, but not a preacher. We were, of course, terrified of this possibility, not because the outcome was so bad, but because it meant that we didn't have "the right stuff."

It was a good system, and weeded out the intellectually less gifted pretty quickly. By the second quarter of Greek you could already tell who was going to make it and who was not, and those over whom a question mark hovered tread their way precariously. Greek is a very difficult language in many respects, not in the least because of the precision of expression it affords through a multiplicity of inflections, both for the noun and the verb. And if you came to it without having learned Latin or French or German in the grades, you were at a distinct disadvantage, especially at the relatively late stage of college when beer and girls represented a far more appealing past time than drilling with flash cards two hours every evening. It's much better to get language under your belt before you get there so that you can actually spend your time reading the ancients in the original languages with smart guys who've spent their whole lives doing the same.

It's true that since this high water mark in the 70's there has been a precipitous decline in standards and expectations in America, but from the perspective of the history of education over the last hundred years, the story is really much much worse. For many years I mistook the high point in my own experience for the veritable Olympian heights, only to realize much later that it was merely a stop at the lowest of the base camps situated far below the summit. Today by comparison most divinity students aren't even mucking about in the grassy foothills far below . . . for them the mountain is not even in sight.

To appreciate my point fully consider some of the books used by a ministerial student during the years 1880-1884, which I acquired a hundred years after the fact through a friend. They are inscribed by one B. Henry Succop, who studied at what is now Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, a scion of a storied and prolific clan of Lutherans of the day. The young Henry was wont to mark his progress in the margins of his books, recording the day, the month, and the year at each point along the way, employing perfect penmanship I might add. His youth is in evidence because just like any school boy he doodles, delightfully, on the pages as he daydreams. There are even some fine figures he created, colored, and cut out for imaginative moments upon his desk, tucked between the pages. This means that Henry was younger than the typical divinity student of today, who matriculates at a seminary only after completing an undergraduate degree somewhere first.

The only volume in evidence for 1880 shows Henry reading Julius Caesar's commentaries on the Roman civil war, in Latin, using a Weidmann edition published just two years prior. In 1881-82, he moves on to Cicero and Livy in Latin, and Plutarch's lives of Themistocles and Pericles in Greek, employing late Teubner editions dating from 1872 to 1877. In 1882 he is also reading Virgil's Aeneid, again in Latin, not in translation. Come 1883 Henry is quite busy, reading Cicero's Against Catiline and the Odes of Horace in Latin, as well as the Ajax of Sophocles and the Philippics of Demosthenes in Greek, again employing the latest Teubner and Weidmann editions as available. Rounding out the list for that year is Justin Martyr's Apologies, in Greek. For the final year, 1884, there is evidence for only one subject, St. John Chrysostom, in Greek. Quite the plate full apart from the rest of the curriculum, about which there are no clues. And, oh yeah, the trots between the pages, they're in German, his native language.

B. Henry Succop came to Concordia prepared to read the ancients in Latin and Greek, and not just the New Testament or the fathers, but the best authors the pagan past had to offer. This means he had learned his Latin and his Greek in the grades. It also means those so-called backward, conservative, fundamentalist Lutherans thought it important for their future leaders like Henry to spend time studying the cultural opposition. In consequence, Henry's library more closely resembles that of a classicist. Poke around in the library of a contemporary preacher if he'll let you. You'll find far lighter reading in it, I assure you.

If it be objected that Henry's experience was peculiar and parochial, it must be remembered that public school students of the day themselves were reading difficult Latin authors such as the historian Tacitus by the time they were in high school. This was the case because most colleges had a foreign language requirement of three semesters of Latin, and high schools were expected to send them students who could complete them successfully. Today, by contrast, the country is crawling with degree mills without such requirements. Majors in classical antiquity themselves often have to wait until the senior year for a seminar in Tacitus. So-called doctorates in less demanding fields stalk the land who have never once studied a foreign language for a week, and masters of divinity litter the landscape who have passed Greek with a rudimentary summer course and presume to rule on matters of eternal significance but can't pronounce the letters of the Greek alphabet arranged carefully to embody those ideas. "If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

No wonder the thoughtful man in the pew is sad. He is alone.