Logos publisher sale for August is Baker publishing. Their premiere commentary collection is the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (18 vols).
If you don’t now what Logos is, it is an extremely powerful Bible software program that allows you to not only store and read digital books but use all of their tools to sort and search through your books/resources and use their tools to do things like in depth word study, Bible timelines, and all kinds of great databases that helps amplify your study and save you time. Logos can also save you money when things go on sale to be far far cheaper than print books.
The Baker Exegetical commentary is probably in the top 3 overall New Testament commentary sets in existence. Let’s explore why that has been the case – why people rank these highly among their competitors and what sets them head and shoulders above just about every other set.
Here are a few things I love about this set:
- It is up to date with all commentaries written from 1992-2023 (Most 2008-2023)
- The scholars involved are incredible (See list below) – some of my very favorites who have devoted their lives to the specific book(s) they cover. Like Darrell Bock on Luke-Acts…phenomenal work or Schreiner on Romans in a revised edition where he made some needed updates to the first edition.
- These are incredibly thorough. You are going to get dozens and dozens of pages on background and thorough exegesis of the passages. See Their Breakdown of the Text below.
- Original languages are used in places but an understanding of them is not required and for the times Greek is used, Logos makes it easy to understand by scrolling over the words and getting translation. They do explaining when the original languages are used so you don’t feel like you are missing anything. It typically looks like this, “‘The χάρισμα πνευματικόν (charisma pneumatikon, spiritual gift) is not a general “blessing’” where you have the Greek, transliteration into English (how you would spell it/say it out loud in English) and the translation. If you don’t know Greek/Hebrew you can often feel like you are missing a main point in some commentaries. These have done a great job filling you in with a few exceptions.
- Extensive references/notes for further study. These are very important because there may be things you want to explore further. Because these are more up to date on publication year they are able to point you to more up to date references to help substantiate their points.
- The Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings – you know at the end of the book where you can look and see the page numbers a particular verse was mentioned on…now imagine if you could click those page numbers/passage and go directly to the citation. This is what you can do in these books and along with that you can do the same thing with any references to the church fathers, Dead sea scrolls, Philo, Josephus, Apocrypha and so much more in the index! Very powerful and a huge time saver.
Here is the list along with date of publication and bestcommentaries.com ranking (Average rank = 7.6!)
Matthew – David Turner (2008) – 29th
Mark – Robert Stein (2008) – 7th
Luke vol 1 & 2 – Darrell Bock (1994, 1996) – #1
Acts – Darrell Bock (2007) – #1
Romans 2nd ed – Thomas Schreiner (2018) – #3
1 Corinthians – David Garland (2003) – #2
2 Corinthians – George Guthrie (2015) – #14
Galatians – Douglas Moo (2013) – #11
Ephesians – Frank Thielman (2010) – #10
Philippians – Moises Silva (1992) – #2
Colossians & Philemon – G.K. Beale (2019) – #12
1 & 2 Thessalonians – Jeffrey A.D. Weima (2014) – #15
James – Dan McCartney (2009) – #8
1 Peter 2nd ed – Karen Jobes (2022) – #1
1-3 John – Robert Yarbrough (2008) – #6
Jude, 2 Peter – Gene L. Green (2008) – #5
Revelation – Thomas Schreiner (2023) – #3
Average Rank = 7.6!
With all of the quality commentaries out there (many coming out each year) to rank on average every commentary in the Top 10 is incredible. There can’t be very many sets that do that….probably NIC and maybe that’s it. So I don’t normally recommend buying whole sets but in the case of this set and NIC I think it is well worth it.
These commentaries individually sell for close to $70 and with 18 volumes on sale in August at 40% off you have a total price of $621 which is $34.50 per commentary. And these are in Logos Bible software where you get to use the functionality of Logos to search and explore these books.
Their Breakdown of the Text
Each section:
- Begins with the passage
- Show you where it fits in context
- Give Exegesis and Exposition
- Then gives additional notes – these are things that are important to understand (nearly verse by verse) but don’t necessarily fit cleanly into the Exegesis and Exposition section. There are some real gems in this section.
Final thoughts. I only review things that I think will benefit you in your study. I don’t want to waste your time or money. The scholarship is present. These have been well used and loved over the last 15 years and I believe you will really benefit from using them in your studies, sermon prep, class prep, writing, etc. I cannot imagine writing a paper on Romans without having access to Schreiner or Luke-Acts and Darrell Bock.
So now is your chance to get that access at $400 off!
Here is the affiliate link…thanks to Logos for opening this resource for me to receive in exchange for the review – Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (18 vols) for $621 (Reg $1035).
