Friday

1 Corinthians

After listening to Mark Driscoll's series on Ruth, I wanted to go through a book of the Bible reading in a commentary and listening to his sermons on the same passage. Mr. Driscoll has a series on 1 Corinthians which took 9 months actual times to go through. The trick was to find a good commentary that was engaging and solid. I wanted to try something different than my favorite series - the NIV Application Commentary - so I grabbed my New Testament Commentary Survey by Carson and looked up what he said. Dr. Carson writes,
"The best commentary on the Greek text of 1 Corinthians is Anthony Thiselton (NIGTC; 2000, / $80.00). The work is very impressive. Over 1,400 pages long, it could easily have been a ponderous volume of massive learning and impenetrable prose. But Thiselton has outdone himself. Every section I scanned was well written, accessible (for readers of this sort of series!), and penetrating."
I am not a reader of this sort of series. I have tried to take Greek twice (as well as German and Spanish) and am not easy learner of languages. However, Anthony Thiselton has published "A Shorter Exegetical & Pastoral Commentary" on 1 Corinthians through Eerdmans. This was much more my speed, with less linguistic emphasis, and more practical outgrowth. However, well done it is, I still found it difficult to muddle through, so I put it aside for Craig Blomberg's 1 Corinthians commentary in the NIV Application series.
This was not a good choice. I found this to be a very week volume in the series and found it to be dry and lacking engagement. Dr. Blomberg is a very good scholar of the Gospels, but I found his treatment of Paul's letter very uninspiring. However, Dr. Carson reports it to be "the best of the middle-level commentaries."
I had never read any of the works in The Bible Speaks Today series, but was always intrigued by it. Even though Dr. Carson mentions David Prior's The Message of 1 Corinthians only in passing, I picked it up and worked through it. I found Dr. Prior's perspective to be very interesting, having pastored in both South Africa and Oxford. His writing was engaging and informative, as well as giving me different takes on the passages than what I was listening to with Mark Driscoll. I found it to be a very fresh exposition.

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