NT Resources Blog

I’ve posted several discussions in the past few months on commentaries (here and here). Today I read several journal articles and a book chapter devoted to reflections on commentary writing by several men who have written major commentaries on the Gospels. Part of my purpose was to come to a decision as to whether or not to sign a contract for the Mark volume in the ECC series—which has been the impetus for my earlier reflections as well. What I have included below are some select quotes regarding commenting and commentaries that are worth contemplating even if you aren’t thinking about writing a commentary.

John Nolland, “The Purpose and Value of Commentaries,” JSNT 29 (2007): 305–11.

“There is no uniform answer to the question of what one is doing in writing a commentary. Certain things are almost de rigueur, but the common features do little more than identify the genre at the most general of levels, and leave the question of the specific investments of the commentator almost entirely open” (305).

“Commenting inevitably involves, whether consciously or not, the bringing together of the horizons that belong to the text and the horizons that belong to the interpreter. If the horizons of the interpreter are dominant, then the text is unlikely to have been heard in more than a superficial manner: it will have been stretched upon a procrustean bed. If the horizons of the text are given exclusive dominance, then the danger is of a product that is technical and sterile, and distances readers from the text. A good commentary will be sensitive to the tension involved here, and seek to work with it creatively” (306).

“I appreciate it when commentators distinguish between matters which are foundational in their understanding and matters where they have a judgment (and reasons for it), but which are not elements of understanding that they would be prepared to construct an edifice on the basis of” (308).

“Real authors are content with something less than an ideal reception of the text. They will be looking for successful and effective communication, not ideal communication; and they will expect to communicate to different readers to different degrees and at different level” (308).

“I do not in the end value commentaries that demonstrate how cleverly a scholar can construe a text which has thus far been read along quite different lines. The scholar who is clever in this way is highly likely to be wrong.… But the kind of cleverness that ‘proves’ all previous understandings wrong is itself almost certainly wrong…. There are tendencies in scholarship in the humanities for novelty to be pursued for its own sake…; for novelty to be valued for its own sake, and confused with creativity. We can always improve old answers, but we should be much more cautious about totally disregarding or overturning existing answers” (309).

“For me an overriding priority is for a commentator so to write as to aid his or her readers in engaging with the text rather than offering the readers an alternative to engagement with the text. We cannot stop readers using our commentaries as replacement text, but we can make it difficult for the” (310).

“Commentaries exist to enable their readers to engage more successfully with biblical texts. They should be helpful companions for the journey of engagement with the text, and they should provide stimulation and assistance in the task of coming to terms with the challenges of the text. We should not, however, expect too much of them. In the end it is each reader who needs to make sense at the deepest level of the biblical text with which they are engage” (311).

Andrew T. Lincoln, “From Writing to Reception: Reflections on Commentating on the Fourth Gospel,” JSNT 29 (2007): 353–72.

“Some colleagues … have the enviable energies and prolific productivity that enable them not only to write commentaries, but also, and often at the same time, to author all sorts of other monographs. Some of us lesser mortals have often been heard to insist that we will never write another commentary. The reasons for this will often include a sense of having been constrained in one’s scholarly pursuits for too long a period. The discipline of commentary writing and the deadlines of publishers combine to ensure that interesting ideas for articles or monographs that may have arisen from the text one is studying or from some other aspect of one’s work usually have to be stored away in a file for later use in the hope that one day one might have the leisure to return to the” (353–54).

“The commentator dutifully returns to a pericope that may hold no special interest at this particular time and works through its issues simply because they are there” (354).

“The continuation and proliferation of different types of commentary series reflect publishers’ belief that there is a market for this sort of work and suggest that for the time being scholars who find it congenial and have the right connections will not be out of work. They will, however, have to be prepared to give up a certain amount of control of their work. Very few commentators have the luxury of deciding from scratch how they are going to present (and therefore conceive of) their reading. The publication of stand-alone commentaries is a rare phenomenon. How and for whom commentaries are written are largely in the hands of publishers and editors of series. I have not yet had the experience of writing a commentary whose deadline, word length and format were not established by publishers and editors in advance” (355).

“Commentaries are usually not best sellers, but the shelf life of those in the major series is arguably longer than most monographs on particular issues” (355).

“With the potential for becoming a valuable reference work or helpful resource for students, clergy and other colleagues for perhaps the next decade comes an expectation to be met. The expectation of such series is that their contributors will produce mainstream works that interact judiciously with the most recent scholarship and the range of contemporary interpretive approaches, while containing detailed exegesis based on the best linguistic, historical and literary data, and providing both reliable and distinctive insights into the content of a text. But is this expectation any longer one that can or should be met?” (355).

“Is there still a place for ‘mainstream’ commentaries that attempt to give a sense of some of the major approaches without being dominated by any one, or does this suggest some illusionary objectivity on the part of the commentator or some putative consensus, with concealed ideological roots, about what is central and what is marginal? … the attempt to gain a view from everywhere … can become a view from nowhere” (356).

“a commentary cannot be expected to provide answers to all the questions one might bring to a text” (356).

“The difficult and determinative decision … not simply to cut back the explicit interaction with other scholars in the commentary proper but to dispense with it altogether and then also to keep it to a bare minimum in the Introduction, despite the accompanying embarrassment of scholarly nakedness. The main advantage, apart from staying somewhere near the assigned word limit, is that the commentary can become the medium for an uncluttered engagement with the text. The possible dangers are more numerous. They include frequently having to state one’s conclusions without having given adequate space to showing the various stages by which one has arrived at them and the associated temptation to assume more detailed arguments made elsewhere and that readers will be familiar with them. In addition, not naming one’s conversation partners may leave readers with insufficient sense of other options for interpreting a passage, and the resulting style might sometimes give the impression of being too dogmatic or apodictic and attempting to resolve some of the text’s ambiguities instead of letting them stand” (369–70).

R. T. France and John Nolland, “Reflections on the Writing of a Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew,” in Built upon the Rock: Studies in the Gospel of Matthew, ed. D. Gurtner and J. Nolland, 270–89.

Reflections 1: Nolland
(This section is an expanded version of the JSNT article excerpted above. Only material not in the earlier article is noted here.)

“My eclectic approach to methods has been in part guided by a wish to avoid the kind of up-to-dateness that is in danger of becoming an out-of-dateness, as scholarly fashion moves on” (273).

“I have been struck by the narrowness introduced into many works by the studious implementation of a method of inquiry, and also by the technical verbiage that especially the more recent methods often generate” (273).

“I had spent ten years engaged with the Gospel of Luke before turning my attention to Matthew…. I spent the best part of two years reading widely in the Matthean scholarship and exploring the text of the Gospel before I wrote a word” (276).

“There is inevitably a certain comprehensiveness of answerability involved in writing a commentary. People will look in it [my commentary on Matthew] for everything they ever wanted to know about Matthew; and people will inevitably be disappointed in one respect or another. Inevitably a priority of importance must be established; otherwise what are already large books would become ridiculous and quite unusable” (276).

“As I have made use of various commentaries which have made a significant investment in reporting the Wirkungsgeschichte [the history of the effects of a text over time], I have concluded that it is a very blunt instrument that most of the time illuminates the vicissitudes of the history of the church more than it illuminates the biblical text itself” (277; the def. in brackets is Nolland’s own, inserted from an earlier sentence).

“I have thought of myself as serving a kind of apprenticeship by engaging with the existing scholarly literature in as comprehensive a manner as possible. But I have not wanted to produce a commentary on the scholarship or even a digest of the scholarship. I have wanted the commentary to focus squarely on the text of Matthew, and not on the scholarship on Matthew” (278).

“Questions at the level of detail are easy to identify, but they constantly threaten to overwhelm the enterprise, so that a reader becomes lost in an endless rehearsal of detail. Standing back from the detail is as important as becoming immersed in the detail” (278).

“Procedurally, I paid detailed attention to the questions of introduction only after I had completed in draft the whole commentary. I have tried to make my attention to questions of introduction answerable to an exploration of the whole text of the Gospel rather than bringing to the study of the text of the Gospel a set of pre-existing conclusions about introductory matters” (279).
N.5 at end of above parag.: “The one clear exception to my pattern of leaving detailed consideration of matters of introduction to the end has to do with my working assumption that Matthew had available to him the Gospel of Mark, or something much like it.”

Reflections 2: France

“Another thing I noticed about reviewers is that most rely on the introduction to give them a taste of the approach of the commentary, and some showed little sign of having read further” (283).

“My overriding concern with exegesis means that I devote less space than many commentators to issues of source and tradition criticism. I am more interested in what the text says than in how it came to exist in its present form” (284).

“Especially with a book of the length and density of Matthew it is a long hard slog [i.e., writing the commentary], one which I undertook with considerable reluctance having just spent ten years doing the same for the much less tightly packed and shorter Gospel of Mark. But now that I am retired it has been easier to find the time, and the work ground remorselessly on, not as quickly as I had hoped, but at least within nor much more than four years this time” (286).

“My method [is] … to write a first draft of what I wanted to say on each section before turning to the other commentaries, relevant articles, and the like, so as to insure that I was making a distinctive contribution rather than simply responding to other people’s commentaries” (286).