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When deciding what book of the Bible I would preach as a new pastor of a fairly young church, a friend suggested I select one of the Gospels. “Give them Jesus,” he said. “Give them his life, death, and resurrection.” That seemed wise. So I chose the Gospel of Luke and last week finished preaching Luke 17. That same week, coincidentally, I received a copy of Preaching the New Testament, which included a chapter by D. A. Carson on “Preaching the Gospels.” To my discouragement, Carson cautioned young pastors like me against starting a long sermon series like the one I was more than halfway through. According to Carson, “younger or less experienced preachers, just starting out, need to learn the discipline and power of expository preaching in their own experience, but usually do not yet enjoy the gifts that warrant long series, even though they sometimes think they do.”

Whoops!

Thankfully I also had a copy of Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey, essentially a commentary on commentaries. It’s been helpful to choose from a handful of trustworthy commentaries that someone has already surveyed and reviewed. It’s like having D. A. Carson as your personal assistant (please don’t tell him I said that).

After The Gospel Coalition National Conference next month on His Mission: Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, some of you may be inspired to preach or teach from Luke. Thanks to Baker Academic, a new edition of Caron’s New Testament Commentary Survey is coming soon, and the publisher has given us permission to reproduce the section on Luke’s Gospel. If you’d like Carson’s exhaustive survey on commentaries on Luke, see this PDF.

Here, however, you can read about the top five Luke commentaries suggested by Carson, along with his commentary.

The Gospel of Luke is now well served by several major commentaries. Pride of place goes to the two volumes of Darrell L. Bock (BECNT; 1994-96). It is comprehensive, well-written, and intelligent. If you buy this pair by Bock, you do not need the other two commentaries on Luke that he has written. Almost as good, but now more dated, is the commentary by Joseph A. Fitzmyer (AB; 2 vols., 1981-85). The work is a masterpiece of learning, and written with clarity and verve. Not all will be persuaded by the author’s positions on dating, sources, and details of historicity, but there are few questions Fitzmyer has not thought deeply about, and his competence in the Semitic parallels informs his work throughout. No less learned is the large commentary by I. Howard Marshall (NIGTC; 1978). Unfortunately the prose is so densely packed, owing not least to the fact that the notes are incorporated into the text, that some will make heavy weather of it. Moreover, it presupposes reasonable proficiency in the Greek text. Those with the requisite skills will benefit greatly from reading it.

Joel Green has filled in the lacuna in the NIC series (1997) with a commentary of almost one thousand pages. It is full of thoughtful interaction with contemporary scholarship, but I do not think it is either as rigorous or as accurate as the work of Bock. Its forte is narrative historiography or discourse analysis. At times it reads like a series of essays, and occasionally it is a bit difficult for the user to discover just what Green says on particular points. Indeed, Green’s almost exclusively literary reading means (for instance) that he downplays discussion about the relation between Luke and the other Synoptics, including the major historical issues implicit in such discussions. Occasionally he sidles into sociological considerations, but otherwise his literary reading controls the agenda and makes even this very large commentary seem narrow, confining, and sometimes skewed. The commentary by David E. Garland (ZECNT; 2011) adheres tightly to the series format, making this commentary simultaneously quite strong at the exegetical level and helpful at the homiletical level. The series format ensures that this commentary is a tad verbose, but at 1,039 pages Garland has space to address most issues.

Having used Green’s commentary, I agree with Carson—I argue with Green more than any other writers on Luke. At the same time, Green’s commentary has helped me ask questions about the text that I normally would not ask. More than other commentators, Green tends to highlight the social consequences of Jesus’ arrival. In this way he helps preachers see how the gospel affects our community life with one another. And while I’m not always thrilled with how or why he gets to his conclusions, he tends to ask more “preacher questions” than other critical commentaries, which makes it a great conversation partner, rather than strictly a reference guide. Plus, Green writes well, while others read like, well, commentaries.

While we’re discussing Luke, I can also commend for your listening pleasure Dick Lucas’s Tuesday lunch devotions. They’re not sermons and tend to be shorter (20 to 25 mins), but it often seems like Lucas has come straight from his personal devotions to these meetings with business leaders. And as a gifted and experienced expositor, Lucas always gives you a good sense of the text.

So whether you want to read in preparation for the National Conference or teach Luke when you return home, let Carson’s commentary on the commentaries help you study wisely.

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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