What a Commentary Is and How to Read One

What a commentary is, and what it is not

An official of the queen of Ethiopia was on his way home from worship in Jerusalem, reading the prophet Isaiah in his chariot, when Philip, sent by the Spirit, ran up beside him. What they said to each other is every Bible reader's question:

“Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?”

Acts 8:30-31

A commentary is the church's long answer to that question: a book that sits beside the reader and explains the text, usually working through one book of the Bible passage by passage, saying what it means and what it asks of us. The work begins inside Scripture. When the exiles had come home, the Levites read the Law to the people, "explaining it and giving insight, so that the people could understand what was being read" (Nehemiah 8:8). On the road to Emmaus the risen Jesus explained to two disciples what all the Scriptures said about himself (Luke 24:27).

The church has kept at it ever since. Origen wrote commentaries on book after book in the third century, and Chrysostom preached through whole Gospels and letters of Paul at the end of the fourth. Medieval scholars wrote the Fathers' explanations into the margins of the biblical text, and the Reformers wrote commentaries so that preachers and congregations could follow its plain sense.

But a commentary is not Scripture. Scripture is God-breathed; a commentary is what one of its readers has to say about it. "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever" (Isaiah 40:8). A commentary is written with the knowledge and the questions of its own day, and it can be wrong. The best commentators know this. Matthew Henry calls the risen Christ the best expositor of Scripture, who taught "not by advancing new notions, but by showing how the Scripture was fulfilled, and turning them to the earnest study of it" Matthew Henry, Luke 24:27. That is a commentary's work too: not to add to the text, but to send the reader back to it.

Christians of every tradition distinguish Scripture from its interpreters, though they describe the place of tradition differently. The churches of the Reformation confess that Scripture alone is the final rule of faith, and that the Fathers, the creeds and the commentators, precious as they are, are tested by it. The Catholic Church teaches that Scripture and sacred Tradition together hand on the word of God, which the church's teaching office interprets with authority, as its servant and not its master; the Orthodox read Scripture within the Holy Tradition of the Fathers, the councils and the liturgy (The inspiration and authority of Scripture). No tradition sets a single commentator on a level with the Bible.

So it helps to know whose voice you are hearing. In the Catena Aurea the thirteenth-century Dominican Thomas Aquinas gathered the Greek and Latin Fathers. Matthew Henry was an English Presbyterian of the Puritan tradition, John Wesley an Anglican priest who led the Methodist revival, both writing in the eighteenth century. The cross-references and the topical index come from nineteenth-century Protestants working from the King James Version, the original-language data from scholars of our own day. Knowing this, you will see their strengths more clearly and be less misled by their limits.

Scripture first, read in its setting

The first step in reading a commentary well is to leave it closed for a while. Read the passage slowly, two or three times if you can, and ask who is speaking and to whom, what is being said, and what surprises or puzzles you. Then pray as the psalmist did:

Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law.

Psalm 119:18

Wesley turns the line into a fuller prayer: "Enlighten my mind by the light of thy Holy Spirit, and dispel all ignorance and error" Wesley, Psalm 119:18. It is the Spirit who gives understanding; a commentary is only a helping hand.

The order matters. Start with the commentary and you may see the passage only through the commentator's eyes, noticing what he noticed and missing what he passed over. Start with the passage and you can hold a conversation with him: here he answers my question, there he shows me what I missed, and here I wonder whether that is in the text at all. Henry gives the same advice on the Ethiopian's story: "In reading the word of God, we should often pause, to inquire of whom and of what the sacred writers spake" Matthew Henry, Acts 8:31.

Then read in context. A verse belongs to a paragraph, a chapter, a book and the whole Bible, and poetry, law, narrative, prophecy and letter are each read in their own way. Taken alone, "You pore over the Scriptures because you presume that by them you possess eternal life" (John 5:39) can sound like simple encouragement to Bible study. The next verse changes that: the people who search the Scriptures so closely refuse to come to the one they point to. Chrysostom reads it the same way in the Catena: they gathered little fruit, "thinking, as they did, that they should be saved by the mere reading of them, without faith" Chrysostom.

That is why the Commentary tab shows the whole section that covers your verse. Read the section through first, then find your verse within the comment.

Many voices, one text

Read only one commentary and one writer's age and tradition can start to feel like the meaning of the Bible itself. Set voices from different centuries side by side and you see what belongs to one period's emphasis and what the church has always found in the text. The Gospels, where all three commentaries meet, are the easiest place to try it. Take the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35).

Start with the Fathers. Origen, in the third century, sees in the disciples' burning hearts a sign that "the words uttered by the Savior inflamed the hearts of the hearers to the love of God" Origen. Bede, an English monk of the eighth century, asks how anyone can boast of being a Christian "who neither searches how these Scriptures relate to Christ, nor desires to attain by suffering to that glory which he hopes to have with Christ" Bede. Augustine and Theophylact see in the breaking of the bread, when the disciples' eyes were opened, a pointer to the Lord's Supper.

Henry, in the early eighteenth century, writes that "A golden thread of gospel grace runs through the whole web of the Old Testament" Matthew Henry, Luke 24:27, and finds comfort for ordinary believers: where two talk together of Christ, he comes and makes a third. Wesley's note is one sentence of argument: "These very sufferings which occasion your doubts, are the proofs of his being the Messiah" Wesley, Luke 24:27.

Across fifteen centuries these voices agree on the main thing: the whole Old Testament bears witness to Christ, and the risen Lord himself taught the church to read it so. Their emphases differ. The Fathers move on to mysteries and sacraments, Henry to devotion and fellowship, Wesley to the logic of the argument. Seeing the differences sends you back to the text.

Some voices are missing here. The Reformers honoured the Fathers but looked first for the literal and historical sense, a habit passed down through the Puritans to Henry, and modern scholars have used manuscripts, ancient languages and history to recover the first meaning more precisely. The app has no modern commentary, so check what an old commentator says about history and language against a recent reference work.

And every comment is to be tested by the text.

Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.

Acts 17:11

What the Bereans checked against the Scriptures was the preaching of an apostle; a commentator can certainly be checked the same way. The verb behind ‘examined’ is anakrinō, used when Pilate examined Jesus (Luke 23:14) and when Peter and John were examined before the council (Acts 4:9): the close questioning of a judge. Yet this is not suspicion. As Wesley puts it, "The receiving the word with all readiness of mind, and the most accurate search into the truth, are well consistent" Wesley, Acts 17:11.

So ask a few questions as you read. Does the comment grow out of the words of this text, and does the context support it? Does it fit the rest of Scripture? Is it the passage's first sense, or an application or a figurative reading drawn from it? Is it one tradition's view on a disputed question? If so, the app's questions set out the main views side by side. Has later study corrected a point of history or language?

Paul's counsel fits here too: "Test all things. Hold fast to what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Keep what comes from the text and set aside what has wandered from it, but do not discard a comment merely because it is unfamiliar. A reading the church has shared for centuries weighs more than a first impression, and testing is best done humbly.

Four kinds of help

The app sets four kinds of help beside the text, each with its own job. One verse will show them all: "But his delight is in the Law of the LORD, and on His law he meditates day and night" (Psalm 1:2).

A commentary explains and applies, telling you in prose what a passage means and what it asks of you. On this verse Henry writes: "To meditate in God's word, is to discourse with ourselves concerning the great things contained in it, with close application of mind and fixedness of thought" Matthew Henry, Psalm 1:2. A commentary gives the most, and so carries the most of its writer's age and tradition.

Cross-references let Scripture interpret Scripture. They pair the words of a verse with other passages and say nothing more, so the reader must find the connection. Under the keyword meditate, the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge lists six passages, among them the charge to Joshua, which shows that meditating day and night leads to careful obedience (Joshua 1:8). Some connections run deep; some rest only on a shared word.

A topical index gathers a theme from the whole Bible. This verse appears under ten of Nave's topics, among them Meditation, which brings together forty-two verses. Cross-references branch out from one verse; a topical index starts from a theme and calls in verses from all over the Bible.

Original-language tools show what a word means and how it is used. The verb behind meditates is hagah; the lexicon gives senses from moan and growl to utter, muse, meditate and plot, and lists the twenty-four verses where it occurs. In the next psalm it is what the peoples do when they plot in vain (Psalm 2:1); in Isaiah it is the growl of a lion over its prey (Isaiah 31:4). Biblical meditation, these uses suggest, is less an emptying of the mind than a murmuring of the word over and over, just as Joshua was told to keep the Book of the Law in his mouth.

The four fit together. The original words show a word's range, cross-references let Scripture speak again, the topical index shows where a teaching sits in the whole Bible, and the commentary shows how the church has read the passage and lived by it. Begin with the text and come back to it.

All four have passed through human hands. Lexicon definitions and grammatical tags are scholars' judgments, and a word's meaning is settled more by its use in context than by its origin, so do not build a doctrine on one word. A topical index carries its compiler's reading too. Under Word of God, Nave places John 5:39 under ‘Searching of, commanded’, because the King James Version renders it "Search the scriptures". The BSB and most modern translations read it as a statement; the Greek form allows either, and the app's Original tab tags it indicative. There the context has to decide.

In this app

All four meet on one screen. Tap a verse in the reader, then Study in the bar that appears, and a sheet opens with four tabs: Original, Commentary, Cross-refs and Topics. You can step to the previous or next verse inside it, and the tab you used last opens first.

The Original tab lists the verse's Greek or Hebrew words with their transliteration, meaning and grammar. Tap a word to open its lexicon entry, where Where this word is used lists every verse in which it occurs; NA and TR badges mark words found in only one printed Greek text. Using the Original panel teaches you to read the tab.

On the Commentary tab you choose Matthew Henry (the whole Bible), the Church Fathers (the Gospels) or Wesley (most books), and read the comment on the section that contains your verse.

The Cross-refs tab groups the Treasury's references under the King James words of the verse; tap one to read it in the translation you have open. The Topics tab shows the Nave topics that cite the verse and any of the app's questions that discuss it; tap a topic to open a map of its related topics, with its original words and key verses. Topics, at the foot of the screen, lets you search the topics and browse them on a map of related topics or in a list.

Henry and Wesley wrote in English, the Catena's English translates Aquinas's Latin, and the Scripture inside all three is older English, much of it the King James Version. The Korean app shows each comment and lexicon definition first in the Korean translation, with the English original always a tap away, and gives each chapter's commentary a page of its own.

Beside each credit, About this work opens the work's guide in this library, and Settings › Study sources lists every source and licence. Search covers commentary, topics and original words, and Settings › Offline reading saves the study data for use without a connection.

The six guides

This library has a guide to each of the six works: where it came from, how it reads Scripture, what it is good for and where it stops.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary is a later abridgement of the great Exposition by Matthew Henry (1662–1714), an English Nonconformist Presbyterian minister. It walks through all sixty-six books passage by passage and turns each one warmly toward faith and life, on the ground of Puritan Reformed theology. The only commentary here on the whole Bible, it is the best companion for devotional reading and family worship. "Those that would see the wondrous things of God's law and gospel," he writes, "must beg him to give them understanding, by the light of his Spirit" Matthew Henry, Psalm 119:18.

The Catena Aurea, the ‘golden chain’, is the chain of comments from the Greek and Latin Fathers that Thomas Aquinas linked together, verse by verse, on the four Gospels in the thirteenth century; the app has the English translation published under John Henry Newman's editorship in the nineteenth. Augustine, Chrysostom, Bede and others speak in turn on each verse, so you hear in one place how the early and medieval church read the Gospels, and how closely they weighed words: on John 1:1 Augustine notes that logos means both Word and Reason, and that "in this passage it is better to interpret it Word" Augustine. It covers only the Gospels, is rich in figurative and spiritual readings, and gives a few passages under a name not their author's.

Wesley's Explanatory Notes are the short notes that John Wesley (1703–1791), the Anglican priest who led the Methodist revival, wrote for plain readers. Those on the New Testament lean on the German Pietist scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel; those on the Old condense a great deal of Henry. They speak for the Wesleyan tradition, with its conviction that God's grace is offered to all and its call to holiness of heart and life. They are brief and often warm. Where John writes that God is love, Wesley remarks that "This little sentence brought St. John more sweetness, even in the time he was writing it, than the whole world can bring" Wesley, 1 John 4:8.

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, from the nineteenth century, gathers the cross-references of earlier compilers such as Canne, Browne, Blayney and Scott; the app holds more than 330,000 of them, without the Treasury's notes and chapter outlines. Because it lets Scripture speak without comment, readers of any tradition can use it, but it is keyed to the King James Version, and some links rest on a shared word more than a shared meaning. Open the cross-references for Acts 17:11 and follow the Scriptures the Bereans searched.

Nave's Topical Bible is the index that Orville J. Nave, a United States Army chaplain, published in 1896, arranging the Bible's people, places and teachings under topics and subheadings. The app has more than 5,300 of its topics and links each to its related topics on a map and to original words; try Word of God or Berea. It was made by a nineteenth-century American Protestant from the King James Version, and its divisions carry the readings of that time.

STEPBible's Original-Language Data comes from Tyndale House, a centre for biblical research in Cambridge, England. It tags every word of the Greek and Hebrew texts with its dictionary form, Strong's number and grammar, and links it to a lexicon entry, drawn from Abbott-Smith for the Greek and from an abridged Brown-Driver-Briggs for the Hebrew, so that a reader without Greek or Hebrew can see what a word means and where else it occurs. When Jesus explained the Scriptures on the Emmaus road, the verb was diermēneuō, the word also used for interpreting tongues (1 Corinthians 14:27) and for translating a name (Acts 9:36). The Greek and Hebrew courses under Learn can take you further.

All six are here for one purpose: to help readers today find what the two disciples found on the road.

They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us as He spoke with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Luke 24:32

A commentary is a companion for a stretch of that road. The one who makes hearts burn is the Lord who opens the Scriptures.