What do you think?
Rate this book
Light From the Ancient East
Excerpt from Light From the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World
This translation of my friend Deissman's Licht vom Osten has been made from the second edition (curiously called "second and third") of the German work (Tubingen, 1909). The genesis of the book, which was first published in May, 1908, is described in the author's Preface; its success may be judged from the shortness of the time that elapsed before a second edition was required. Arrangements for the English translation were completed before the book was three months old, and a preliminary advertisement appeared in the Athenaeum as early as October 10, 1908. It is not the fault of the publishers that the English version is ready a year later than was expected. There was a miscalculation to begin with, and the work of translation proceeded more slowly than had been estimated. Well, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" The delay has brought compensations. The English reader now has the book in its revised and enlarged form, including nine illustrations that were not in the first edition (Figs. 22, 23, 25, 29, 41, 42, 43, 49, 50). These facsimiles have their value not only for the learned, who (by taking pains: see p. 362, n. 1) can spell out most of the old writing, but also for the unlearned. Everybody can gain from them, as the author says (p. 147), some idea of the inimitable individuality of each single papyrus letter. "That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time; it was once a piece of the general fire and light of Human Life, that Letter!
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
This translation of my friend Deissman's Licht vom Osten has been made from the second edition (curiously called "second and third") of the German work (Tubingen, 1909). The genesis of the book, which was first published in May, 1908, is described in the author's Preface; its success may be judged from the shortness of the time that elapsed before a second edition was required. Arrangements for the English translation were completed before the book was three months old, and a preliminary advertisement appeared in the Athenaeum as early as October 10, 1908. It is not the fault of the publishers that the English version is ready a year later than was expected. There was a miscalculation to begin with, and the work of translation proceeded more slowly than had been estimated. Well, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?" The delay has brought compensations. The English reader now has the book in its revised and enlarged form, including nine illustrations that were not in the first edition (Figs. 22, 23, 25, 29, 41, 42, 43, 49, 50). These facsimiles have their value not only for the learned, who (by taking pains: see p. 362, n. 1) can spell out most of the old writing, but also for the unlearned. Everybody can gain from them, as the author says (p. 147), some idea of the inimitable individuality of each single papyrus letter. "That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time; it was once a piece of the general fire and light of Human Life, that Letter!
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
737 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1909
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 30, 2022
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 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."
It would be a mistake to read that description and conclude this 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."
April 30, 2018
Good reference book and should be on every Bible teachers desk for checking up on things.
November 16, 2012
REVIEW AND CRITIQUE Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World. Translated by L. Strachan. New York: Doran, 1927.
“The New Testament is in exile here in the West,” thus said Dr. Adolf Deissmann in his pioneer work LIGHT FROM THE ANCIENT EAST, a great book retaining eighty-five illustrations of os-traca, stelae, tombstones, numerous letters from the papyri, a Quirinius inscription from Antioch in Pisidia as well as a Roman milestone, highly informative for reinforcing our knowledge of the cultural and social backgrounds of the biblical times.
Written in a relatively pious tone with high reverence of the Christian Scripture, Deissmann established the great example of using the Ancient Near East backgrounds to shed light on the New Testament studies and fruitfully producing new insights for exegesis, yet without replacing the biblical authority with the secular scholarship of historical reconstruction.
The most significant achievement of Deissmann was to show that the New Testament was written neither in classical Greek nor "Holy Ghost Greek" but rather was composed in the popular or common (κοινή) Greek of the first century AD, based on the papyri evidences of private letters of all sorts, official documents and correspondence, contracts, decrees, petitions, leases, wills, etc.
Deissmann consciously confined himself in the excitement of probing the history that was once lost:"……a reconstruction of the ancient world is bound to be imperfect if founded solely on the literary texts, and that comparisons between Primitive Christianity [i.e. the Christianity founded on the Scripture] and this world, which has been pieced together fragmentarily out of fragments, might easily prove erroneous."
Critiques:
Deissmann's stress on the "popular" features of the κοινή Greek of everyday life and business might be overstating the case in today's eyes. The NT Greek has indeed some strong "literary" character that may not be so "popular". The Greek language used in NT was also often under the influences of ancient literature (most significantly, the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint) and foreign influences. After all, his findings were primarily guided by his utilization of the papyri, ostraca, and monuments data which reflected primarily the common life of the ancient worlds.
“The New Testament is in exile here in the West,” thus said Dr. Adolf Deissmann in his pioneer work LIGHT FROM THE ANCIENT EAST, a great book retaining eighty-five illustrations of os-traca, stelae, tombstones, numerous letters from the papyri, a Quirinius inscription from Antioch in Pisidia as well as a Roman milestone, highly informative for reinforcing our knowledge of the cultural and social backgrounds of the biblical times.
Written in a relatively pious tone with high reverence of the Christian Scripture, Deissmann established the great example of using the Ancient Near East backgrounds to shed light on the New Testament studies and fruitfully producing new insights for exegesis, yet without replacing the biblical authority with the secular scholarship of historical reconstruction.
The most significant achievement of Deissmann was to show that the New Testament was written neither in classical Greek nor "Holy Ghost Greek" but rather was composed in the popular or common (κοινή) Greek of the first century AD, based on the papyri evidences of private letters of all sorts, official documents and correspondence, contracts, decrees, petitions, leases, wills, etc.
Deissmann consciously confined himself in the excitement of probing the history that was once lost:"……a reconstruction of the ancient world is bound to be imperfect if founded solely on the literary texts, and that comparisons between Primitive Christianity [i.e. the Christianity founded on the Scripture] and this world, which has been pieced together fragmentarily out of fragments, might easily prove erroneous."
Critiques:
Deissmann's stress on the "popular" features of the κοινή Greek of everyday life and business might be overstating the case in today's eyes. The NT Greek has indeed some strong "literary" character that may not be so "popular". The Greek language used in NT was also often under the influences of ancient literature (most significantly, the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint) and foreign influences. After all, his findings were primarily guided by his utilization of the papyri, ostraca, and monuments data which reflected primarily the common life of the ancient worlds.
May 4, 2011
Deissmann has done what I consider to be typically German research (involving the painstaking collection of material from disparate sources and comparing minute detail - all of which can probably be done these days in seconds with computers) and made it interesting. He studied the use of common Greek used at the time of the writing of the Gospels as it appears in papyri, stone inscriptions, or ostraca to evaluate whether the Gospels contain neologisms or if there were some prior usage of phrases and vocabulary. Being that sort of person myself (German extraction - I think I can make fun of us Squareheads - and the sort who combs the Iliad for each killing, lists it, then sorts the information by verb usage and weapon used), I found that fascinating. It wore thin when he ended with descriptions of what he felt would be a necessary project to create a lexicon and some flowery stuff about religion. Note where my interest flagged.
This Gutenberg Project edition (read on the Kindle) was an unfortunate mass of intriguing gobbledygook that I was tempted to correct (being almost able to read the German footnotes), but it has none of the Greek available in an intelligible form. Not that my Koine Greek is anything worth speaking of (I've only had 7 weeks of Ancient Greek and some unofficial study), so I would not really be able to make the comparisons even if Greek characters had been available. It would not be useful for the serious student.
I am sorely tempted to find out how you can correct these Gutenberg files. It would be incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and unrewarding financially - which means it's right up my alley.
This Gutenberg Project edition (read on the Kindle) was an unfortunate mass of intriguing gobbledygook that I was tempted to correct (being almost able to read the German footnotes), but it has none of the Greek available in an intelligible form. Not that my Koine Greek is anything worth speaking of (I've only had 7 weeks of Ancient Greek and some unofficial study), so I would not really be able to make the comparisons even if Greek characters had been available. It would not be useful for the serious student.
I am sorely tempted to find out how you can correct these Gutenberg files. It would be incredibly tedious, time-consuming, and unrewarding financially - which means it's right up my alley.
April 1, 2015
This is a fascinating piece of work revealing many pieces of letters and writings of everyday and ordinary people in the ancient world. For that alone, it is worth reading. I don't agree with his conclusions and comparisons with the Bible in many places as those conclusions do not seem warranted except as a justification of foregone assumptions. But, this is a very enjoyable trip through the past in the common man's personal language in letters home among other writings.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews