Works
Schonfield was one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls team.
Schonfield wrote over 40 books including commercially successful books in the fields of history and biography as well as religion. In 1958 his non-ecclesiastical historical translation of the New Testament was published in the UK and the US, titled The Authentic New Testament. This aimed to show without idealised interpretation the meaning intended by the writers while maintaining the original structures. A revised version appeared in 1985 titled The Original New Testament. In 1965 he published the controversial The Passover Plot, a book whose thesis is that the Crucifixion was part of a larger, conscious attempt by Jesus to fulfill the Messianic expectations rampant in his time, and that the plan went unexpectedly wrong.
Schonfield followed The Passover Plot with a sequel in 1968, Those Incredible Christians. This was also described as controversial, but had less impact than the earlier book.
An additional aspect of his work was the revision of the Hebrew writing system. In The New Hebrew Typography, published in 1932, he argued for a revised version of the Hebrew alphabet modeled after the Latin alphabet, including a capital-lowercase distinction, no final forms, a vertical emphasis, and serifs. This alphabet has not been adopted.
Read more about this topic: Hugh J. Schonfield
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“We all agree now—by “we” I mean intelligent people under sixty—that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves. Unluckily, the matter does not end there: a rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.”
—Clive Bell (1881–1962)
“The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.”
—William James (1842–1910)