Hi folks,
I'm in ch 2 of a preaching series through John's gospel.
Been tossing around buying NT Wright's John For everyone.... anyone use it and love it?
also interested to know your favorite John commentary and why.
I'm in ch 2 of a preaching series through John's gospel. Been tossing around buying NT Wright's John For everyone.... anyone use it and love it? also interested to know your favorite John commentary and why.
Yes: I love Wright's John for Everyone (Vol 1 and 2). Have them in Logos as well as on paper (as they get loaned out). They're great little accessible surveys, designed for a popular audience, so not technical, of course. Wright doesn't claim to be a Johannine scholar, but he is a historian so very good on the second-temple Jewish context and the Old Testament narrative that undergird John's gospel.
Bruce Milne, The Message of John (Bible Speaks Today series) is also a great little book. Accessible, useful, often just the depth you need.
For more in-depth study, I reach for Kostenberger (BECNT), Newman (UBS Handbook), or Carson (Pillar), in that order.
Amazon gives you a preview of the first few pages, to give you a feel fot it.
So does Logos: http://www.logos.com/product/15811/john-for-everyone-part-1
David,
I would suggest looking over http://www.bestcommentaries.com/john/ which gives rankings and reviews for commentaries, with a classification for type of commentary.
Carson's volume in the Pillar series gets top honors, followed by Kostenberger (BECNT), Morris (NICNT) and Keener.
Don't overlook Raymond Brown's 2 volume commentary in the Anchor series. While dated, it still offers a tremendous amount of background material. I just got Ridderbos' Theological Commentary, but have not really read much in it yet, but it came highly recommended.
I will admit that I usually lean toward the more technical type of commentaries, although some of the smaller ones are great sources of ideas for sermon organization.
Dave
I haven't looked at the one by N.T. Wright. I'm starting to teach through the book of John in two weeks. The commentaries that I have are: BECNT, Pillar (D.A. Carson), MacArthur, R. Kent Hughes, William Barclay. I hope this helps.
I would find interesting a commentary that stops reading John as if the Lord's words had been spoken to 21st century Western Christians as opposed to Jews, who as far as they were concerned, considered themselves to be God's people. I don't know what Wright does with John. He often goes to far in his "new exodus" approach. But certainly in the Victory of God he at least does a good job of addressing categories that would have spoken -- as far as can be known -- to the Jews back then.
I have:
I bought all the available For Everyone books with the March Madness Sale and have been going through the first volume on John's Gospel. Definitely try a sample to give you a taste of what to expect. For each pericope, Wright gives a modern illustration that relates to the point of the passage, which is helpful. With this series you get one good point from the passage (the point Wright considers to be the purpose of the passage and most of the time I agree). I think it's good to read this kind of thing along with the more technical commentaries for teaching prep. It gives you a good example of an appropriate illustration and, more often than not, the main overarching point that you can overlook when getting into the details when just reading technical commentaries.
Difficult to suggest best commentaries given you know your audience, their background and needs better than we do: but once you have looked over the more recent commentaries, including "John for everyone", it might be a good idea to touch base with the early christian interpretations of John's Gospel by looking over what Joel Elowsky has to say in the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volumes on John: http://www.ivpress.com/accs/ http://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=2480
Introduction to John
Among the four living creatures of the Apocalypse, the Gospel according to John has most often been identified with the eagle. Augustine likens John to "an eagle hovering among Christ’s sayings of the more sublime order and in no way descending to earth but on rare occasions."2 The eagle symbolizes a Gospel so sublime that, as John Chrysostom says, "if people actually had the capacity to receive and retain these words, they could no longer exist as mere mortals or remain on the earth." The very nature of this Gospel in particular brings out the best in the ancient Christian tradition of interpretation. A purely historical-grammatical, let alone historical-critical, approach to the text would lend a helpful but impoverished interpretation at best—one out of sync with this most "spiritual Gospel," as Clement of Alexandria termed it. Early Christian interpreters have what Maurice Wiles calls "a certain intuitive sympathy of understanding,"4 providing a much fuller insight into the meaning of the Gospel. Chief among these interpreters are the ancient Christian writers contained in this volume of the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. This introduction will serve to orient the reader into the milieu of the early church’s commentary on John.
The following may be particularly helpful:When the early Christian writers speak of John’s purpose in writing the Gospel, it is always in relation to the other Gospels.
To me that means that we need to be careful in treating John as a "stand alone" as the early church apparently understood it to be more of "filling in the gaps", recounting events that the others had not necessarily been witness to and hence had not mentioned, but as John himself stated, never intending to provide the complete story of everything.
