Commentary Introductions

What about that Introduction to a commentary on the New Testament? Do you read it? When? How?

The premise of the Story of God Bible Commentary is that these commentaries are for the parish pastor, for the Sunday School teacher, for the Bible college and seminary student, but most especially for the preacher. The central feature of this series, and our Sermon on the Mount and Lynn Cohick’s Philippians are now available, is that we seek to explain each passage in the New Testament in the context of the larger Story of the Bible. (At one time we thought of calling the series the Regula Fidei series since the “rule of faith” emerges from the gospel story of the Bible.)

Which gives the Introduction a special slant. Let’s face it, if you’ve read one thorough introduction to a commentary or, even more, if you’ve read an extensive introduction in a standard NT introduction, you may never read another introduction again. Yet that doesn’t stop most of us, when writing commentaries, from rehearing issues about authorship, date, context, and outline. Yes, those factors come into play in any reading of a NT book and so, Yes, those elements need to be found. But we are seeking a modification of that Introduction by focusing on how the book itself fits into the large story.

I illustrate the point with what happens in my introduction. The Sermon on the Mount is considered the greatest moral document of all time (at least by man), so I sought to explain how the Sermon fits into moral theories in the history of thinking. And I sought to show how the Bible’s Story reshapes how we see moral theories — in other words, by asking What was Jesus’ “moral theory”?

The big idea is to compare Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the three big theories: virtue ethics (character shapes behavior), deontology (which focuses more on rational-based moral obligations), and consequentialism (what’s best for the most people?). I suspect virtue ethics is the best theory going, and many today are into that theory, but I wanted to ask how Jesus, in his Jewish world, would have understood “moral theory.” My contention is that Jesus’ moral world emerged from the Bible’s Story, namely, the Law, the Prophets and the Wisdom writings. I call these an Ethic from above, beyond and below. But Jesus redefined even those in two directions: an ethic from above gets connected to Jesus as Messiah (and the Spirit) and all of this in an ecclesial-based ethic, that is, an ethic in the context of the kingdom community of Jesus.

Then I do the standard stuff in an introduction: author, date, relationship to Mark and Luke and Q, and structure. And I’ll post about the Sermon’s structure, and what that helps us see, in my next post on the Sermon on the Mount.