Two things to deal with in this follow-up post. First, while
I don’t recommend this for most people, I do make one recommendation for
pastors in regard to their Bible reading. That is, that a pastor ought to read
through the Bible in the versions used by the folks in his church. He needs at
least to be familiar with the different versions, so that he can anticipate
questions that might arise. For some (increasingly rare) churches, that might
mean that the pastor needs to be familiar only with the KJV. In some churches,
two or three versions might suffice (KJV, NKJV, NASB ).
But my guess is that in most evangelical/Reformed churches today, their will be
five or six versions being used by the various members of the congregation.
Some few, mostly older members, will still use the KJV. Others, conservative
but younger, will use the NKJV or the NASB .
Increasingly some will be using the ESV .
Others will be using the NIV, and some will be using the New Living Translation
(NLT). This last will more likely be the case among the younger members of the
congregation. The pastor also needs to keep up with the appearance of new
translations. He should also be aware of such things as new or updated editions
of older versions. For example, the NIV that is now in the bookstores is the
NIV 2011. It is something of a hybrid between the “old” NIV (also known as the
NIV 1984) and the TNIV (Today’s New International Version, 2001, with an update
in 2005). The TNIV is a gender-neutral version, and that has had a significant
impact on the NIV 2011.
In the last post, I mentioned a couple of commentary series
that I thought readers would find helpful as they read through the Bible.
Obviously, both of these series are multiple volumes, and would require a
significant outlay of funds. One reader asked if there were some one-volume
commentaries that I could recommend. These recommendations come with a warning.
First, one-volume commentaries often suffer from the same disease as study
Bibles: they don’t answer the question the reader is asking. In addition, even
a one-volume commentary is pretty sizeable. Those that I am listing here run
from about 1,500 to 2,500 pages. In other words, if you are reading the Bible
through in a year, it is unlikely that you will be reading the full text of a one-volume
commentary along with your Bible reading, unless you have a significant amount
of time to commit to the project. Remember, one-volume commentaries are books
with a larger-than-average page size, and smaller-than-average print. Reading
Matthew Henry’s One-Volume Commentary. This is the one
edited by Leslie Church. Do not make the mistake of buying the whole unabridged
Matthew Henry in one volume. Dr. Church did a very commendable job of reducing
Henry to a size manageable for most people. Henry focuses on devotion and
application, so don’t expect extensive discussions of technical matters.
New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition. This
will provide more up-to-date technical commentary than Henry. Not particularly
devotional, but not entirely lacking practical insight.
Believer’s Bible Commentary. This one I have not personally
used, but it strikes me as more reliable than some of its competition.
Somewhere between Henry and NBC in devotional level.