Can You Explain the “Coasts” of Caesarea?

Our modern word “coast” means “land alongside the sea; seashore.” However, in the seventeenth century, when the King James Version of the Bible was translated (from which the above translations were taken), the term “coasts” signified “the frontier or borderland of a country.” That English term has obviously changed in meaning.

In the Greek New Testament, the word rendered “coasts” in Mark 7:31 is horion, which simply means a “boundary, district, region, etc.” (Arndt and Gingrich 584-85). The King James Version translators selected a word from their vocabulary that corresponded to that idea, namely “coasts.” Later translations have used terms more in keeping with modern language. And so, horion is translated “borders” in the American Standard Version of Mark 7:31.

In Matthew 16:13, the Greek is ta mere, which was used of the “parts of a country, region, district” (Arndt and Gingrich 507). In the later translations, the term is rendered as “the region” (New King James Version).

The problem perceived, therefore, is not real. It merely involves the fact that some English words change in meaning over time. It has nothing to do with an error in the biblical text.