Book Details
Luke 1:1-9:50
Luke 9:51-24:53
Reviews
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The gospel of Luke has much to say to us today. Our diversity can divide and destroy us and we are quick to fight for our individual identities as a culture. The book of Luke discusses these problems and prejudices through Jesus. The life of Jesus was God-breathed and made the disctinction between Jew and Gentile moot. Luke’s gospel’s central application is that God,through the incarnation of Jesus, can pull a fractious world together. Darrell Bock (Ph.D., University of Aberdeen) is professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is coeditor of a contributor to Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church, and the author of a two-volume commentary on Luke. [Full Review]
For a dissenting view. I was greatly disappointed in this commentary on Luke. Bigger is not necessarily better.
Bock lists lots of views of previous commentators and acts as a sort of judge or referee. Though it is not necessarily wrong to do this it makes reading very burdensome after a while. Yes, there are lots of details here so perhaps for more in depth study one will find helpful information, but on a whole I found much more insight on the passage as a whole from shorter commentaries like Tiede and Miller. Indeed, even with all this information, I often felt like some of the main or key issues of the text were left unaddressed. I am still waiting for a longer commentary which is really great on the book of Luke. For this one, however, I found longer is not better.
Yes, the second one I consult is Darrell Bock. These two scholars are my contemporaries and friends and have been involved in Lukan studies their entire careers. [Full Review]
Bock is a preeminent scholar on Luke. These two gigantic commentaries are to be preferred to Marshall. There is a great deal of theological comment in these volumes which make them very useful for sermon preparation. However, Bock does not always come down on one side in issues of controversy. He is a progressive dispensationalist.
My first choice, hands down, is Darrell Bock's BECNT (1994, 1996). It's fairly comprehensive, well-reasoned, easy to read, aware of all the scholarship, and generally conservative. He handles theology more fully than most detailed commentaries (e.g. Marshall, Fitzmyer, Nolland below) and spends a little time on what Luke would have wanted us to take away from the text, which you won't get in very many academic commentaries. This commentary is strong on the flow of argument, taking larger blocks of text to comment on and explicitly thinking in terms of the larger flow at various points, although this usually stops short of what many think of as literary analysis (on which several commentaries below are very strong, sometimes at the expense of everything Bock does well). He does interact a little with Robert Tannehill's work in that area in volume 2, but it's still not a lot. Bock has also written the Acts commentary in this series, but his work on Luke is much more detailed, filling up two volumes, both bigger than the Acts volume. Bock is well-known for his work countering the claims of radicals and skeptics who write about the life of Jesus with the kind of scholarship liked by the History Channel. He's also been very influential in developing and defending progressive dispensationalism, a view that I think is still a little too far in the direction of dispensationalism but is really a different animal and is much more defensible than traditional dispensationalism. I place him solidly in the conservative evangelical camp, and he's taken some criticism for this in reviews, mainly from people who assume historicity and theological agendas are incompatible, something Bock spends a great deal of time arguing against. His scholarship is top-notch. If he's weak anywhere, it's in favoring commentaries over journal articles. Bock has also written the IVPNTC and NIVAC volumes on Luke, but I don't think there's any need to look at the shorter two if you have the BECNT, which you should. [Full Review]
One of the best available commentaries on the Gospel of Luke is the massive two-volume set by Darrell L. Bock, a professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. Weighing in at over 2,100 total pages, this commentary is certainly comprehensive. Thankfully, it is also clear. Most readers will also find the layout of the Baker Exegetical series very reader friendly. [Full Review]
