Light From Ancient Letters

With this collection of ancient Greek letters--written on papyrus and discovered in Egypt--John L. White provides a "comparative body of texts for studying the style of early Christian letters in the New Testament and the early church fathers." He seeks, as well, to contribute to an understanding of socio-political and economic factors within Greco-Roman Egypt and to illuminate broad environmental factors that help in understanding both Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman period.

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

This volume looks at various nonliterary papyri from Oxyrhynchus with an eye toward insight into New Testament language and thought. The aim of Meecham's essay is to show how far the writers of the New Testament are affected by the language of everyday life and to discern what, if any, light is thrown by these letters on the epistolary forms of the New Testament.

"This volume places the New Testament letters squarely in the middle of all the important letter corpora of antiquity. Chapters cover the basic letter formula, papyrus and postal delivery, non-literary and diplomatic correspondence, Greek and Latin literary letters, epistolary theory, letters in early Judaism, and all the letters of the New Testament. Part I of each chapter surveys each corpus, followed by detailed exegetical examples in Part II. Comprehensive bibliographies and 54 exercises with answers suit this guide to student and scholar alike."--Publisher's website.

Excerpt from Light From Ancient Letters: Private Correspondence in the Non-Literary Papyri of Oxyrhynchus of the First Four Centuries, and Its Bearing on New Testament Language and Thought Greek was the language of the Hellenes, and reflects the high degree of cultural life which that people attained in the ancient world. In origin it belongs to the Aryan family. It is therefore cognate with the Germanic (itself a branch of the Aryan parent language) from which our own mother-tongue is derived. Hence the language in which the n.t. Was originally written has a certain philological kinship, however far removed, with English. This fact is not without Significance for the comprehension of the Christian message by the Western world. In reading the N. T. In the original, one is not led to remark that absence of linguistic affinity which, soon makes itself apparent to the student of the qt. The latter is essentially Semitic, and is to that extent foreign to indo-european mentality. 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.

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