emery@fluke.UUCP (John Emery) (06/20/85)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** Hello, I'm interested in finding good bible commentaries with as little denominational bias as possible. Can anyone suggest some popular and widely accepted bible commentators?
hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) (06/22/85)
None of the major commentaries have denominational biases these days. The major difference is between those that use critical scholarship and those that do not. Which kind you use will of course depend upon whether you are a fundamentalist or not. I don't know the names of the commentaries that are appropriate for fundamentalists. There is a wide range, from junk to quite good work. So you want to be careful. For non-fundamentalists, I have several recommendations. I assume you are interested in a single volume, rather than commentaries on individual books. For really serious study, of course you want separate commentaries on each book, written by the appropriate scholar. However for many purposes, this may be too much of a good thing. The briefest is the Oxford Annotated Bible. There are two, one for RSV and the other for New English. They are similar in orientation, though different people did the annotations. The RSV one is used in most college courses on the Bible. (Generally scholars prefer the RSV translation.) They have background articles, brief introductions to each book, and running commentaries at the bottom of each page. They seem to get the most important points, though of course they are briefer than a full commentary. If you want more than that, you might consider an "Introduction", rather than a commentary. These are texts, typically written for first-year college New Testament and Old Testament courses. They give lots of historical background and talk about the various books. In many ways this is more useful than a sentence by sentence commentary, though of course it won't necessarily help you with a specific passage that is giving you trouble. These books come on various levels. The titles are usually obvious, like "Introduction to the New Testament". I haven't looked for this sort of thing at a bookstore recently, so I only know ones that I saw a number of years ago. One of them was by Kee, Froehlich, and somebody else. This was an introduction to the New Testament. It is probably at the right level for someone who has not done any formal study of the Bible at college level. Maybe someone else can suggest more recent books. For a full-length commentary, I would recommend the Interpreter's One-Volume Commentary. NB: NOT the Interpreter's Bible, which is a multi-volume monstrosity, with scholarship that is not that high quality. But the one-volume commentary is very well done. There are a number of other one-volume commentaries by the major publishing houses, e.g. Abington or Westminster. They are generally OK too. Unless you are a fundamentalist, you want to stay away from Zondervan and that sort of thing (though if you are a fundamentalist, there is a commentary which Zondervan published for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship that you might want to look up). This means you may have to use a college bookstore or a denominational bookstore such as Cokesbury. Alas, most of the places that call themselves Christian bookstores are very conservative, though you can sometimes find reasonable things there.