Mattiyahu

Commentaries

Among other things, these commentaries help confirm what is considered "common knowledge" about the text. Information our Maggid was already familiar with that appears in more than one of these commentaries is considered "common knowledge" and not given a footnote. (Our congregation's own prayerful insights are also not footnoted.)

You can click on the picture for each commentary to visit a website that sells it.

Craig Keener

Professor Craig Keener has written an enormous book (over 700 pages not counting the appendices), simply entitled A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. This commentary is quite readable, as well as quite exhaustive. Given the importance of the synoptic gospels, we do not feel it an exaggeration to urge all congregational libraries to have a copy.

Craig Keener occasionally teaches classes through the IAMCS. These are highly recommended, for the genre of scripture commentaries unfortunately does not allow his sense of humor to be present in his books the way his passion for and skill in understanding scripture intelligently is communicated.

David Stern

David Stern's Jewish New Testament is a commendable effort to restore the original, Jewish flavor of the Apostolic writings. He later added a translation of the Tenach and published this as The Complete Jewish Bible.

Since Stern's intention was to make scripture readible, his translation is a paraphrase, not a word-by-word translation. This means it is not as valuable for scholarly work as translations of scripture such as the New American Standard or King James, in which the occurances of any English word normally correspond directly with all the occurances of a corresponding Hebrew or Greek word.

However, Stern more than makes up for this scholarly weakness in helping his effort be useful to scholars by also publishing his Jewish New Testament Commentary. He goes through the entire New Testament, almost verse by verse, explaining why he translated each phrase the way he did and explaining the scholarship behind every issue.

John MacArthur

John MacArthur is a Eugene, Oregon resident. He is a true "elder" of our local Body of Messiah who shares great experience and humility.

His commentary on Mattiyahu is short and simple compared to the two prevous commentaries. Yet he says good things and says them well. Our scholarship would be lacking without his input.

Steve Halliday

NavPress has published a set of scripture commentaries designed to foster group discussion. The authors (Steve Halliday, in the case of Mattiyahu) are not as expert with the text or the Jewish context of scripture as the others we have listed, but have great insight into making the text relevant to modern life. Each book in this series contains very penetrating questions that urge followers of Yeshua to deepen their commitment to him. It would be irresponsible to lead a weekly discussion of Mattiyahu without drawing from this series's insights.