New Testament Commentary Survey

D. A. Carson

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780801039904
• eBook ISBN: 9781441241412
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Highly respected New Testament scholar D. A. Carson provides students and pastors with expert guidance on choosing a commentary for any book of the New Testament. The seventh edition has been updated to assess the most recently published commentaries. Carson examines sets, one-volume commentaries, and New Testament introductions and theologies, offering evaluative comments on the available offerings for each New Testament book. This is an essential guide to building a reference library.

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Introductory Notes

1.1 The Need for Several Types of Commentary

For an effective teaching and preaching ministry, commentaries take their place among other essential tools. But since different tasks often require different tools, useful commentaries are of more than one kind. Those listed in this little book may serve in at least three or four distinct ways, which correspond to the following needs.

The dominant need is to understand meanings accurately. Postmodern sensibilities notwithstanding, the issue at stake is that of sheer faithfulness to the biblical message rather than smuggling one’s own ideas into the interpretation under the cover of the authoritative text. Even so, commentaries in this category can be subdivided further. Some commentaries seek to establish the text and provide basic help in translation, choosing among variant readings and offering elementary help at the level of Greek syntax and semantics. Grammatical and linguistic commentaries help to ensure faithfulness to the meanings of words and phrases in their literary setting. Theological commentaries set words and phrases in the wider context of chapters, books, corpora, and even the canon. Of course, these three subcategories often overlap—indeed, they should do so, for it can be seriously misleading to try to understand a word or concept in isolation from its linguistic and theological context.

To understand a passage (let alone to expound it forcefully) often requires a faithful and imaginative historical reconstruction of events. Actions and sayings cannot accurately be cashed into today’s currency until the preacher (although not necessarily the congregation) has seen what these presuppose and involve in their original setting in the ancient world. The best response to those who argue that history, archaeology, and other related disciplines are irrelevant to the interpretative enterprise is to give them a copy of, say, Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia (Eerdmans, 2000), and suggest that they revise their theory. Rightly done, this kind of study contributes toward a vivid, colorful, and honest reconstruction for the congregation or classroom. Admittedly, it is disastrous when historical information becomes an end in itself (cf. the warning, “Divinity was easy, for ‘divinity’ meant Noah’s Ark”). But even purely historical commentaries can do a useful job if they project readers faithfully into the ancient world.

Unfortunately, not a few commentaries in this camp attempt historical reconstructions that are long on speculation and short on evenhanded weighing of evidence. Some of these historical reconstructions have become so powerful that they serve as a grid to authenticate the primary sources: for example, because some scholars have reached a consensus about the flow of early church history, they forcefully squeeze the biblical documents into the theory, and they dismiss counterevidence as anachronistic or the like. Moreover, these kinds of reconstructions are probably the most difficult theories to evaluate for those not trained in the primary sources.

Nevertheless, these commentaries often include histories of the text (including form- and redaction-critical analyses), plus information of a geographical, historical, cultic, rhetorical, and socio-cultural nature, that cannot easily be found and weighed elsewhere without doing a lot of work in the primary sources.

Some commentaries offer useful guidance on the legitimate range of practical application. If one danger is to read one’s own applications into the passage, books of the sort already mentioned may serve as the remedy. But equally, most students and pastors must be reminded of the many directions in which practical lessons can be found. Expository lecturing is not the same thing as expository preaching; the Word must not only inform but also wound and heal, sing and sting. Some of the older commentaries are exemplary in their concern to apply the Scriptures to later readers. But these hints and helps must be reviewed in the light of strictly exegetical considerations, for practical concerns can so control the text that no one hears the Word of God. Worse, the search for relevance frequently degenerates into the trite or the trivial.

A few commentaries perform all of these functions, but they are rare and sometimes dated.

Finally, I must say something about series of books that a casual glance might mistake for commentaries but that are really something else. A case in point is the IBT series, to which occasional reference is made in the following pages. The volumes in this series provide useful treatment of (for instance) The Gospel of Matthew or The Gospels and Letters of John, but they are not commentaries. These volumes try to help students grasp the issues and methods surrounding the interpretation of the biblical texts at issue. They are a mix of history of interpretation, survey of themes, exposition of sample texts, brief comments on structure, and so forth. Briefer yet, but perhaps a little more upmarket than IBT, is the NTG series. Only rarely have I mentioned NTG volumes.

1.2 Individual Commentaries or Series

1.2.1 General Principles

Series are almost always uneven, and the temptation to collect uniform sets of volumes should be seen for what it sometimes is. Often an author writes an individual volume because he or she has something to say that is worth saying. By contrast, series are often farmed out by publishers to well-known and therefore very busy scholars for whom the invitation is merely part of a day’s work. This does not call into question the value of any particular series; it is certainly not meant to brand all commentaries that belong to a series with the label of mediocrity. But it does mean that volumes in series should ideally be judged only on individual merit. Thus comments on the major NT series now available (e.g., BNTC/HNTC, ICC, Hermeneia, NIGTC, etc.) will be found not only in the following paragraphs but also below under individual authors. Sets prepared by one scholar are a different matter and are discussed below (§1.4).

1.2.2 Series Worth Noting but Not Pursuing

A few series are worth identifying, even if only the exceptional volume in the series achieves mention in these pages. The Living Word Commentary (ed. E. Ferguson; Sweet) testifies to the effort of the noninstrumental Churches of Christ to provide elementary commentaries for their laypersons. The series is in some ways theologically akin to the Tyndale Old Testament and New Testament Commentaries but generally a shade lighter. It has no relation to the Living Bible except the similarity in name; it must also be distinguished from the Living Word series (IVP/), which is not so much an attempt at formal commentary as a series of lay-oriented expository studies full of application and life. The Armoury Commentary (Hodder & Stoughton) compiles many years of the Salvation Army’s annual Bible Reading Notes. Everyman’s Bible Commentary (Moody) is too elementary to be very useful; The Layman’s Bible Commentary (John Knox) is singularly undistinguished. Collins/Fontana have come out with a series of thirteen books designed to explain “everything that really matters for the modern reader” of the NT. In some cases (e.g., Mark, Luke, John, Rom., Gal.), these are succinct commentaries on the TEV; elsewhere they provide essays (Acts) or brief introductions. They are elementary and sometimes misleading even if, on the whole, they are engagingly written. Pitched at about the same level, but for Southern Baptist readers, is the Holman New Testament Commentary series, only a few of whose growing list of entries are mentioned in these pages. Included are such matters as “life application,” a prayer relating to the text, and sometimes a teaching outline and discussion questions.

Fortress continues to publish its series Proclamation Commentaries: The New Testament Witnesses for Preaching. These short books, written by established scholars, are supposed to help the preacher come to grips with the essential themes of the NT documents. Occasional volumes from the series are mentioned in these notes, but as a rule the commentaries are not very helpful to the preacher interested in systematically expounding the Scriptures, even if they are useful handbooks for helping students discover the way much contemporary scholarship understands the biblical texts. In short, they are useful compendia for students; preachers interested in biblical exposition should begin with something more challenging. The Knox Preaching Guides (John Knox) series is no better; neither is Interpretation Bible Studies (Geneva Press). The Layman’s Bible Book Commentary (24 vols.; Broadman) is very elementary and frequently resorts to slippery language to sound more conservative than it really is. The Communicator’s Commentary Series (Word) is a trifle better than those just mentioned, partly because the individual volumes are usually longer than those in the other series; however, application is read back into the text with alarming frequency and with too little awareness of the hermeneutical steps being taken. At best these commentaries are worth a quick skim after the preacher’s serious exegetical work is well in hand, in order to retrieve any homiletical stimulus that may be present.

Another series too thin to merit much notice in these pages is the College Press Bible Commentary Series, a product of the Independent Christian Churches and the noninstrumental Churches of Christ. The volumes that have appeared so far are gently conservative, fairly consistently partisan to their theological heritage, and usually aimed at the lay student or poorly trained pastor, but they are not robust enough to be the primary support for well-trained students and preachers. There are a few exceptional volumes in the series, noted below. Another set, The Complete Biblical Library, edited by Ralph W. Harris (Gospel Publishing, 1991), is an extraordinary mélange. It includes an expanded interlinear (the textus receptus plus “important variants”), its own text-critical apparatus, various versions, and verse-by-verse commentary designed for the beginning layperson. In other words, the more technical material is almost useless to the layperson, and the comments are so lacking in depth as to be almost useless to any mature reader, lay or otherwise. Some sections are better than others, but the series as a whole is too expensive for the little it offers. The Free Will Baptist Commentary (Randall House) includes one or two volumes worth a quick skim (e.g., Jack W. Stallings on John) but is so elementary and so defensive on “free will” that it can safely be overlooked. The new Focus on the Bible commentary series (Christian Focus Publications) is far from complete, but its volumes usually lie somewhere between the BST and the Tyndale Commentaries. The Westminster Bible Companion series (WJK) is an attempt to break into the popular-level market largely held by evangelicals (e.g., TNTC, IVPNTC). So far it does not approach these well-established series in either quality or reliability. The Life Application Bible Commentary (Tyndale House Publishers) is a slimmer and more popular counterpart to the NIVAC (see below) with most of its weaknesses and few of its strengths. The series of Feminist Companion (SAP) volumes to various biblical books continues to grow, written by Athalya Brenner on Old Testament books, and by Amy-Jill Levine and others on New Testament books. It will ordinarily not be noticed in the following pages, since the volumes offer comments only on those passages of relevance to that interest, not on the entire text. In other words, these volumes are “companions” to biblical texts, not commentaries on them. Moreover, despite the valid insights that frequently turn up in these companions, the approach, monofocal as it is, seems almost calculated to encourage misinterpretation of the text being studied.

Another series of books that are not quite commentaries, all with titles beginning with Teaching . . . , has been launched by Christian Focus. Sponsored by the Proclamation Trust, this series is something of a new genre: part commentary, part sample expositions of select passages, part summary of themes—all in brief compass and all designed to help the preacher think through how to preach from the biblical book in question. I have included only one volume of the series in these notes (Lucas and Philip on John).

One very recent series should be mentioned. The Resonate Series (IVP) describes itself as “a new wave commentary.” Edited by Paul Louis Metzger and David Sanford, the series claims that these commentaries represent a new genre—not commentary traditionally understood, not commentary plus contemporary application, not expository sermons, but a series that is “biblical, theological, cultural and personal.” Each commentary is essentially a series of extended essays on sequential passages of biblical books. Two volumes have appeared: Paul Louis Metzger on John (The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town, 2010) and Matt Woodley on Matthew (The Gospel of Matthew: God with Us, 2011). To quote from the John volume:

By all accounts, it’s a failed candidacy. Up until now, Jesus is the front-runner in the race for Messiah. But right when he has the people eating bread and fish from his hand, he tells them that the answer to the world hunger problem is to eat his body and drink his blood. . . . Every time Jesus soars ahead in the polls, he pulls a Dan Quayle and says something that sounds so unpresidential. . . . The more he speaks, the more his campaign finances move toward the red. . . . As time marches forward, and as Jesus nears Jerusalem, some wonder if he has what it takes to win.

In fairness, despite the superfluity of cutesy remarks that are in constant danger of distorting the picture of who Jesus is, when Metzger pays attention to the text, he is more often right than wrong: he has relied on some good commentaries (not always with attribution). The Matthew volume is a good deal further removed from what Matthew’s Gospel actually says.

Scot McKnight has announced that he will serve as general editor of a new commentary series, Regula Fidei Commentaries (Zondervan), “that will focus on explaining the New Testament books in the context of the Bible’s Story and discerning how to ‘live the Story’ in our world today” (from the Jesus Creed blog).

1.2.3 More Substantial Series

Usually the individual volumes of the more substantial series receive separate treatment in the following pages devoted to individual New Testament books. These series include not only those that have had a long history but also a surprisingly high number of new series that have appeared only in the last few years—since the sixth edition of this book.

The Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Abingdon) are designed to be “compact, critical commentaries on the writings of the New Testament.” They are written with the theological student in mind but are reasonably accessible to others. By including sections on literary genre and structure, they have a more contemporary feel than some older commentaries. By and large, however, their interaction with alternative interpretations is thin—and this can be more than a little irritating when of various possible interpretations, the reader’s interpretation of the passage is not even mentioned, and more than a little dangerous when the reader is not made aware that there are alternatives.

The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament (IVP), edited by Thomas C. Oden, brings together in fresh translation passages from the patristics that comment on biblical books. The unwary—those largely igno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introductory Notes
• 2. Supplements to Commentaries
• 3. Individual Commentaries
• 4. Some “Best Buys”
• Name Index
• Back Cover