Customer Reviews

Aramaic Light on the Gospel of John

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This book is like fresh air! Breathe in wisdom and understanding. Clear and lucid are the teachings of Jesus when you find them in his own language, Aramaic.

If you like reading about Hidden Gospels, and Lost Books of Christianity, and Wisdom teaching, then this book is a definite must-read. A civilization with customs, manners and language almost identical to those in the time of Jesus with similar idioms and parables, and untouched by the outside world for 1900 years was home to author George M. Lamsa. Only at the beginning of the 20th century did his isolated segment of the once great Assyrian Empire learn of the discovery of America and the Reformation in Germany. Likewise, this early culture of early Christians was unknown to the Western world, and the Aramaic language was thought to be dead. But in this so-called "Cradle of Civilization" in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, primitive biblical customs and Semitic culture, cut off from the world, were preserved.

This book is a treasure chest of gems of new understanding and insight. In John 20:22, we read that Jesus blew his breath on his disciples: "He breathed on them." This means that he encouraged them. It seems that it is a rope, rather than a camel, that has such difficulty going through the eye of a needle.

Easy to read and enjoyable and very informative, this book is definitely one you should have in your library.

Not really a commentary. It provides easy-to-understand Aramaic backgrounds on the text of the Gospel of John, especially for non-Aramaic readers. However, one has to be open-minded and ready to accept new concepts when reading the book.

Mr. Errico absolutely sheds Great Light and Understanding on the Gospel of John. His insights plus blend of Aramaic customs and idioms absolutly solidify what the Christ was teaching...

This book is interesting. On one hand, it reads more like a book than a commentary. On the other hand, for a commentary it is accessible to the general public and certainly not scholarly with its wording.

Much like the other books in this series, the main purpose is to expose the reader to some contextual problems of reading the Bible from a western mindset through a language not easily transferrable from the original. With one of the authors claiming to have been brought up in a near eastern setting, some of the insights are intriguing and worth pondering over.

The main thrust is dealing with the idiomatic expressions with a little personal theology built-in. Hard line literalists will simply hate this book since it relies on the gray instead of the black and white.

The one MAJOR caution I would suggest is that unless you're going to read the whole book, don't buy it. There are certainly some areas where if a person used this text as a commentary and pulled out a specific verse, they would definitely miss the author's intention since there are multiple lines of theology coursing through this text. However, if you are going to read the whole thing, and it is honestly a pretty easy read for a commentary, you will be able to temper some of the more questionable commentary against the background of the whole text.