Back in college I used to covetously thumb through the Christian Book Distributors catalog and think, “Ah, if only I could afford this… and this… ooh, and this.…” In the case of some of those books, I could afford ’em, so I bought ’em. Filled a few bookshelves.
Of course, this was back before Google Books and Internet Archive and the vigorous efforts to put public-domain books—namely, all the books published before 1923 that are no longer under copyright—on the Internet for all to read. So the only way I could’ve read Alfred Edersheim’s Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, was by finding it in a library (and good luck in trying) or by purchasing it myself. Nowadays? It’s on Google Books. You gotta love the 21st century.
So gradually, the classic Christian books I’ve wanted have made their way onto the Internet. Not all of them are available yet. It all depends on how badly people want them, and whether these books are in the libraries Google, and other groups, are scanning. But many of the books you’d only find in bible colleges’ libraries, or only own after spending thousands of dollars, are instantly available.
So if you ever hear of a biblical reference work, first thing you should do is find out when it was originally published. And if it’s old enough, start looking for the full text online. Some books are harder to find than others. But instead of purchasing, say, a full set of commentaries for $500, you can download the full set for $0. Well worth the time.
Well, let me get to Edersheim’s Life and Times.
Alfred Edersheim (1825-89) was a Jewish convert to Christianity and a pastor in the Free Church of Scotland. As a result of growing up as a Talmudic student of Judaism, he had a unique insight into the New Testament that non-Jews lack. Bear in mind, though, that the Mishna and Talmud were written centuries after the New Testament, so to some degree Edersheim was looking at the first century from a second- and fifth-century Jewish perspective. Even so, it has a lot more in common with the Judaism of Jesus’s day than the 19th-century Gentile perspective of most of Edersheim’s contemporaries.
Books written in the 1800s and early 1900s are, unfortunately, florid: When five simple words would do, people thought it was still better, and more educated, to use fifty obscure ones. So if you ever find older books hard to read, that’s why: They were meant to be hard to read. Easy-to-read books were for children and the feeble-minded. To a degree Edersheim is a thick read. But there’s a lot of useful information and insight buried under all the verbiage. Thanks to him, I discovered if you really want to know how and what the Pharisees thought, you have to read the Mishna. Among other things; he really got me interested in Jewish studies.
Life and Times comes in two volumes: Part 1 and Part 2 are both on Google Books. You can also find the full text at Christian Classics Ethereal Library, and a few other formats for download. Add it to your library.