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[Praxeas]

2. The Proposals
In 1863, J. B. Lightfoot anticipated the great discoveries of papyri parallels when he said, “If we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the understanding of the language of the NT generally.”
Thirty-two years later, 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).
Deissmann demonstrated that the vast 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 (Thayer’s lexicon, published in 1886, was consequently outdated shortly after it came off the press-yet, curiously, it is still relied on today by many NT students).


Wallace, D. B. (1999; 2002). Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics - Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (25). Zondervan Publishing House and Galaxie Software.

Just a note, as I pointed out before, what I was quoting was not Thayer's lexicon commentary but the dictionary definitions.