Customer Reviews

Aramaic Light on the Gospels of Mark and Luke

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He studied under the great George Lamsa,orginal reinterpreter of the bible.A "must-read" for those who are studying Truth.

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 its predecessor, 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.

Lamsa's and Rocco's work is meant to take us out of our western cerebral society that is cognitively based in doctrine to a more experiential non dualistic view of Jesus' culture and spirituality in the world of Aramaic which was the common tongue of the time. I have all the gospel commentaries and have found them to be enlightening personally and have found that light to open up the hearts of the congregations where I have preached. Aramaic experience is more inductive that the western deductive process. Aramaic builds and widens the faith experience instead of narrowing it. If you like these, you'll like the commentary on the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes by Neil Douglas-Klotz called Prayer of the Cosmos. I actually read this one first and it was the beginning of a new and deepening shift in my spiritual life and opened up the gospels in ways that I haven't before experienced.

Dr. Errico's comments are interesting and could be enlightening but the reader should know his interpretation of the meaning of Scripture is not orthodox but more closely related to Gnosticism. He explains away all miracles and is interested in that doctrinal view. There are some insights here but those who adhere to mainstream Christianity will not find much inspiring here.