Commentaries and audience-identity crises?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on a review of Douglas Moo’s Colossians (Pillar) commentary. Let me say, first of all, it is excellent in that Moo is a sharp scholar who does not make unwarranted claims and has fair assumptions. The prose flows well and it is easy to read.

I do have a concern with the way the Pillar series operates, which is not unlike other commentary collections. Because it is geared towards ‘serious pastors and teachers of the Bible’ but wishes to ‘avoid getting mired in undue technical detail. Thus, the writer performs ‘rigourous exegesis and exposition, with an eye alert both to biblical theology and the contemporary relevance of the Bible’. Ok, I’m on board.

An outworking of this objective is that anything the author wants to say about the Greek text is done in transliteration to make the comment intelligible to a reader who has not learned Greek. This is also ideally acceptable, but so many of the exegetical issues and insights that an author such as Doug Moo has, and he has many good ones, can hardly be understood, let alone appreciated, by a non-Greek-proficient reader – the simple act of transliterating doesn’t all of a sudden make the grammatical discussion intelligible. I am not blaming Moo – he is doing his job, rigorous exegesis. And he is trying to explain his process of thought and argumentation. The problem is taking such a small step towards helping a reader who has not taken Greek by transliterating does not really do much at all.

For example, in the same paragraph, Moo uses the phrases ‘periphrastic construction’ and ‘participle might be concessive’. WIll the non-Greek reader understand either of these?

What is the solution? Well, the way it is, this series is not really doing any damage because those who can read Greek can tolerate the transliteration. It seems, though, that, in an attempt to include a wider pastoral audience of serious preachers/leaders who do not know Greek, just transliterating is not enough. If they want to do more to bridge the gap, they have to…do more. I think the Tyndale (small) commentaries actually accomplish this by explaining grammatical terms and concepts (such as Kruse’s new John commentary). As it is, the Pillar suffers from an audience-identity crisis. I hope in future volumes, whatever way they decide to go, they ask ‘what is the good of transliterating Greek if much of the exegetical discussion is dominated by grammatical issues?’