Adolf Deissmann (1866–1937)

Scholarly consensus once held that the New Testament represented a "Sacred Greek.". This view was revolutionized by discoveries of ancient writings contemporary with the writing of the New Testament. As Deissmann demonstrates in this classic work, first published in 1909, the New Testament arose organically from its context: the rich, complex, vibrant, common lives of common people in the Hellenized Near East under the Romans.

It would be a mistake to read that description and conclude this show more is a dry book about linguistics. If you read books like I do — all the footnotes and all the appendices — then yes, this could be a grind. But Deissmann himself complains that theological works are too often written to impress theologians with their obscurity, and he does his best not to be obscure.

Deissmann opens doors and windows into a vanished past, and the people who lived there breathe again: the soldier exhorting his brother to treat their mother like a god, the boy chewing out his father for ducking out on a trip to the big city without him, the church official prescribing memorization of large tracts of Scripture for his deacon candidates, the prodigal son confessing his sin and his bad situation to his mother and begging to come home.

Deissmann draws parallel after parallel between the New Testament and the fragments of everyday writings that survived the centuries. The documents collected into our New Testament, he concludes, were never intended to occupy a high or literary shelf above vulgar concerns. It is a book of the common people, written by common people to common people. The best summary I can give is Deissman's own words:

"The New Testament was not a product of the colourless refinement of an upper class that had nothing left to hope for, whose classical period lay, irretrievable, in the past. On the contrary, it was, humanly speaking, a product of the force that came unimpaired, and strengthened by the Divine Presence, from the lower class....This reason alone enabled it to become the Book of all mankind." show less

NO OF PAGES: 535 SUB CAT I: New Testament Study SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: This book brings a scholarly middle-eastern view of the New Testament by a thorough treatment of the history and archeology of the region.NOTES: SUBTITLE: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World

: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of Graeco-Roman World -translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan