Attention to John Calvin’s work as a biblical interpreter has grown significantly during the past decades. For such attention to be relatively recent is remarkable, given that Calvin’s Geneva sermons have been estimated to number more than four thousand, and these alongside his work in Bible translation, exegetical lectures, the writing of commentaries and his contributions to the weekly Bible study for pastors. This book focuses on Calvin’s work as a commentator, but rightly in the context of these other biblical labours as well as the particular historical and political struggles of his age. It is a very welcome addition to Calvin studies and will prove to be extremely helpful on a number of different fronts.

The book consists of eleven different essays; most by well known Calvin specialists and many are essentially mini-summaries of important recent monographs by the same authors. The volume provides a bird’s-eye view of crucial issues in the field which can be examined in greater depth in other places. The chapters cover Calvin’s commentaries on: Genesis; the Mosaic Harmony and Joshua; Job (sermons); Psalms; Prophets; the Synoptic Harmony; John, Acts; Pauline epistles; Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles. A final chapter by David Steinmetz synthesizes some of the book’s main arguments. Almost all the chapters cover a broad range of topics each time: Calvin’s sources (establishing his biblical text and exegetical aids), his relationship to humanism, the historical, political and polemical context, his place in the exegetical tradition, his exegetical emphases and hermeneutical approaches. Some contributors are clearly more interested in certain topics than others (and the same will doubtless be true for the reader), but the over-all picture of Calvin’s work that emerges in each chapter is immensely valuable. Steinmetz’s conclusion that Calvin is worth reading today no less than in his own day is vindicated by the recurring explanation of Calvin’s attempts to get to the heart of his text and expound its content clearly and succinctly.

Occasionally there are signs that the authors are not all on quite the same page methodologically. Barbara Pitkin’s, argument that Calvin’s exegetical work on his John commentary provided significant new material for the final 1559 edition of the Institutes is an example of refinement in the standard understanding of the hermeneutical circle which connects the Institutes to the commentaries. This grasp of their relationship is missing in Wulfert de Greef’s brief comment that Calvin’s view of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments in his Institutes plays an important role in his interpretation of the Psalms. Here de Greef points us to Institute II.9–11 for the relationship between the testaments. However, II.9 is an entirely new chapter added to the 1559 edition, two years after the Psalms commentary came off Robert Estienne’s press. Although II.10–11 date largely from 1539 and ensure that de Greef is right to point out the influence of Calvin’s established theology on his Psalm interpretation, this understanding of influence is one-directional. It does not consider what Calvin’s exegesis of the Psalms may have contributed to the final edition of the Institutes. Work by pitkin and by Stephen Edmondson, among others, has attempted to build on the prior studies of Richard Muller to put real flesh on the theoretical bones of how the writing of the commentaries and the developing editions of the Institutes actually inter-relate. In this regard, some of the studies here need to be brought into dialogue with other ongoing research. In a compilation such as this, the omissions of a bibliography and a Scripture index are regrettable.

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