Commentaries

The Gospel of Luke was written, says its author, as an historical account of the ministry of Jesus. Not only would it serve as the basis for a sound faith on the part of professing Christians, but it would also claim a place for Christianity in history. Christ’s ministry, as Luke shows, is realized prophecy; it is that time during which God’s promise of salvation was fulfilled. His teachings, healing, and acts of compassion are all part of the good news. In Luke’s Gospel, Christ’s message of salvation is directed to the weak, poor, and needy, with an emphasis on the importance of self-denial and of whole-hearted discipleship. Thus, while Luke is the most conscious historian of the Gospel writers, his history is a vehicle of theological interpretation in which the significance of Jesus is expressed.

In this commentary I. Howard Marshall calls attention to the theological message of Luke the Evangelist. His primary purpose is to exegete the text as it was written by Luke, so that the distinctiveness of Luke’s Gospel may be seen.

Basing his commentary on the third edition of The Greek New Testament, Dr. Marshall also refers to many variant readings which are significant in this study. He provides fairly full information on the meanings of the Greek words used by Luke and shows which words and constructions occur frequently and are therefore characteristic of his style. It is by this meticulous analysis of the Greek that Luke’s theological intentions can be objectively determined.

Having devoted the past ten years of his life to research for this major new work, John Nolland gives us a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that engages with a notable range of Matthean scholarship and offers fresh interpretations of the dominant Gospel in the history of the church.

Without neglecting the Gospel’s sources or historical background, Nolland places his central focus on the content and method of Matthew’s story. His work explores Matthew’s narrative technique and the inner logic of the unfolding text, giving full weight to the Jewish character of the book and its differences from Mark’s presentation of parallel material. While finding it unlikely that the apostle Matthew himself composed the book, Nolland does argue that Matthew’s Gospel reflects the historical ministry of Jesus with considerable accuracy, and he brings to the table new evidence for an early date of composition.

Including accurate translations based on the latest Greek text, detailed verse-by-verse comments, thorough bibliographies for each section, and an array of insightful critical approaches, Nolland’s Gospel of Matthew will stimulate students, preachers, and scholars seeking to understand more fully Matthew’s presentation of the gospel narrative.

The letters of Paul to the newly founded Christian community at Thessalonica hold a special place within the Christian tradition as possibly the earliest extant Christian writings. They are also of special interest not only for their theological value but for their sociological context. Among the communities established by Paul, the church at Thessalonica appears to have been the only one to have suffered serious external oppression. These two important epistles, then, speak uniquely to contemporary Christians living in a society often ideologically, if not politically, opposed to Christian faith.

In this innovative commentary Charles A. Wanamaker incorporates what may be called a social science approach to the study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, taking into full account the social context that gave rise to Paul’s correspondence. While Wanamaker in no way ignores traditional historical-critical, linguistic, literary, and theological approaches to writing a commentary — in fact, at several points he makes a significant contribution to the questions raised by traditional exegesis — at the same time he goes beyond previous commentaries on the Thessalonian correspondence by taking seriously the social dimensions both of Christianity at Thessalonica and of the texts of 1 and 2 Thessalonians themselves. In blending traditional exegetical methods with this newer approach, Wanamaker seeks to understand Pauline Christianity at Thessalonica as a socio-religious movement in the first-century Greco-Roman world and attempts to grasp the social character and functions of Paul’s letters within this context.

Peter David’s study on the Epistle of James is a contribution to The New International Greek Testament Commentary, a series based on the UBS Greek New Testament, which attempts to provide thorough exegesis of the text that is sensitive to theological themes as well as to the details of the historical, linguistic, and textual context.

Drawing on many years of Marcan studies, world-class scholar R. T. France has produced an exegetical commentary on the Greek text of Mark that does what the best of recent Greek commentaries have done but in France’s own inimitable, reader-friendly way.

This work is a commentary on Mark itself, not a commentary on commentaries of Mark. It deals immediately and directly with matters that France himself regards as important. Working from his own translation of the Greek text and culling from helpful research into the world of first-century Palestine, France provides an extensive introduction to Mark’s Gospel, followed by insightful section and verse commentary.

France sees the structure of Mark’s Gospel as an effective “drama in three acts.” Act 1 takes up Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee. Act 2 covers Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem with his disciples. Act 3 focuses on Jesus’ public ministry in Jerusalem, including his confrontation with the Jewish leaders, his explanatory discourse on the future, and his passion, death, and resurrection. France carefully unpacks for modern readers the two central themes of this powerful narrative of Jesus’ life — the nature of Christ and the role of discipleship.

Supported by careful argumentation and impressive in its sensitivity to Mark’s structure, context, and use of the Old Testament, France’s study of the second Gospel is without peer.

This is a thorough, full- scale English commentary on the Greek text of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. While author George W. Knight gives careful attention to the comments of previous interpreters of the text, both ancient and modern, his emphasis is on exegesis of the Greek text itself and on the flow of the argument in each of these three epistles.

Besides providing a detailed look at the meanings and interrelationships of the Greek words as they appear in each context, Knight’s commentary includes an introduction that treats at length the question of authorship (he argues for Pauline authorship and proposes, on the basis of stylistic features, that Luke might have been the amanuensis for the Pastoral Epistles), the historical background of these letters, and the personalities and circumstances of the recipients.

Knight also provides two special excursuses: the first gathers together the information in the Pastorals and elsewhere in the New Testament on early church offices and leaders; the other excursus examines the motivations for conduct in Titus 2:1-10 with a view to their applicability to present-day situations.