Interview with Craig Keener (Part 2 of 6)

This is the second part of an interview series with Craig Keener, who is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, as well as, the current president of the Evangelical Theological Society. A new post in the series appears every Saturday.

JR:  In his New Testament Commentary Survey, Donald Carson gives your large commentaries on Matthew and John his laudatory, "Best Buy," designation. He says the Matthew commentary "in some respects sets new standards" and praises your commentary on John because "the breadth of learning and the bibliographic richness combine to make the work indispensable for the serious student."

However, he does note that in the Matthew commentary "Keener's focus on the socio-historical context comes at the expense of penetrating comment on structure, grammar, and sometimes theology." 

Was it simply the case that a commentary can only be so big?

CK:  Yes, keeping a commentary from getting too big is a major issue.

I am very grateful to Don Carson for his kind comments about the commentaries. His criticism is a fair one. I don't deal in detail with some of these other issues, especially the grammar and structure (I do deal with theology, but usually as concisely as possible. Sometimes, especially in the Matthew commentary, I was so concise that I was simply citing other passages where the theme recurs.) The reason is to keep the commentary from being too large, and because there are some things I trust a reader can and should get on their own.

If someone loves the Bible, they will read it in context and not take shortcuts. I deal with the passage in

Dr. Craig Keener

its context but I also assume that the reader will examine its context on their own, and come up with their own sermon from the biblical text, etc. If they don't love the Bible, a commentary can't really help them. (I could write sermons for them, but so could 100,000 other people, and there are other commentaries that can do that.)

Likewise, regarding grammar: if you have a laptop with a good Bible program it can parse the Greek and Hebrew verbs for you and even tell you everywhere those terms occur in that tense elsewhere in Scripture. Plenty of commentaries do that, and there's no need for me to make the commentary longer (and make my publisher charge more for the cost of paper) for something your computer can do for you even more conveniently.

What I can give is background that you wouldn't get unless you spent a couple of decades working through ancient texts. I didn't get from using a concordance of ancient literature seeing where the terms occurred. I got it from reading through ancient sources in context and looking for parallel ideas, not just parallel terms. No concordance can do that. So I wanted focus on what people could not afford the time to dig out if I didn't make it available to them.

My heart has been in ministry - in evangelism, in encouraging the hurting, and so on. I could not justify all the time spent in front of my computer if I didn't know I was providing something new. There are other resources providing other things and I would rather recommend them than reinvent the wheel.

One of Craig's publishers, Zondervan, has produced a substantive and professionally-presented video interview with him. It is 21 minutes long and can be viewed below.