The New Testament is a book, but not of your dry kind, for the texts composing it are still to-day, despite the tortures to which literary criticism has subjected them, living confessions of Christian inwardness. . . . The words in which it is written come from the souls of saints sprung from the people, and therefore the New Testament is the Bible for the many.

Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the Graeco-Roman World, trans. Lionel R. M. Strachan, 251.