Thayer’s Strikes Back

In discussion with fellow Christians that are committed to their traditions will use outdated materials to defend their beliefs. These desperate maneuvers to preserve a position is quite bad. I’m not directing this at anyone, but I’m leaving that for future discussions. Josh Smith(Calvinist Klein) directs you to Wallace:

“…in 1895, Adolf Deissmann published his Bibelstudien – an innocently titled work that was to revolutionize the study of the NT. In this work (later translated into English under the title Bible Studies) Deissmann showed that the Greek of the NT was not a language invented by the Holy Spirit (Hermann Cremer had called it “Holy Ghost Greek,” largely because 10 percent of its vocabulary had no secular parallels). Rather, Deissmann demonstrated that the bulk of NT vocabulary was to be found in the papyri.

The pragmatic effect of Deissmann’s work was to render obsolete virtually all lexica and lexical commentaries written before the turn of the century. (Thayer’s lexicon, published in 1886, was outdated shortly after it came off the press – yet, ironically, it is still relied on today by many NT students.)”
Daniel B. Wallace. The Basics of New Testament Syntax: An Intermediate Greek Grammar. Zondervan, 2000, p. 21.

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