Greek Letters Don't Scan Well

Light From the Ancient East Or The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco Roman World by Adolph Deissmann
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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.


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