Those familiar with this blog will know I like commentaries. Not just to consult as reference books; but to read, and yes, some of them cover to cover. An exegetical commentary is an aid to understanding a text. When that text is a biblical document, establishing the meaning of the text is much more than an academic exercise of scholarship and intellectual engagement. It is all of that, but it is more.
Having established the meaning of the text, a person of committed faith who views these texts as authoritative truth and guide for life will then want to go further: What does this text require of me? If I try to live in the light of this text what might that look like? Are there discernible connections between what the text says and the world we now live in?
Answering such questions requires careful reading, alert listening, and expectation of questions. But those questions are two way - our questions to the text, and the text's interrogation of our heart's desires, our mind's thoughts, and our motives and actions each step of our journey. So a commentary can be an important help, a stimulus to thought, a source of key information about language, concepts, context and social milieu; all of that, and much more.
Now all of that is by way of introduction to one of the most opaque paragraphs I've come across in a long while. I think I know what the author is trying to say, but my, what a tortuous semantic path he constructs to get there:
"In the New Testament there are other instances in which the causative sense would not make obvious nonsense - it is abstractly possible. But, on the other hand, there are so many instances where the causative sense is out of the question, so many other considerations arising from correlative and antithetical expressions indicating the forensic meaning, and the suitability of the forensic meaning in those cases where there is the abstract possibility of the causative sense that to impose an abstract possibility, contrary to the pervasive usage in the New Testament, in such cases would be wholly arbitrary and indefensible."
That paragraph is worthy of submission for pseudo corner in Private Eye! But it occurs in a commentary written by a respected scholar in the Reformed tradition, which had on of the most respected editors of the series in which it appeared. Even one or two commas might have helped - or perhaps not!
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