Review
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Title: The Testimony of Luke: Brigham Young University New Testament Commentary
Author: S. Kent Brown
Publisher: BYU Studies
Genre: Scripture commentary
Year of Publication: 2015
Number of Pages: 1,213 (yes, that’s one thousand, two hundred thirteen)
Binding: hardcover
ISBN13: 978-1-942161-07-3
Price: $29.95
Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters
This hefty volume—which you wouldn’t take with you on a casual walk, and which, if books were priced according to their weight, would be much more expensive than it is—is part of the ambitious BYU New Testament Commentary project (BYUNTC). The project seeks to combine for a Latter-day Saint audience a wide range of linguistic, historical, cultural, and theological New Testament scholarship with the insights of other LDS scripture, in both e-book and print formats; “The Revelation of John” was issued as an e-book in February 2014 and will be available in hardback some time around December, but “The Testimony of Luke” is the first to be issued in print. Though non-LDS readers may be a little skeptical about some of the premises on which the commentary is based, faithful students of the Gospel of Luke will be gratified by the sheer mass of information to be found here. It is certainly impressive, assuredly significant.
Brown, an emeritus professor of Ancient Scripture at BYU and former director of the BYU Jerusalem Center, has poured a prodigious amount of time and energy into this work. A lengthy introductory chapter (pp 1-80) first lays out the foundational principles behind the commentary.
Among these foundational principles is the presentation in column form of every chapter and verse from the King James translation, divided into sections such as “Prologue,” “Zacharais and Elisabeth,” “The Annunciation,” etc. Beside the KJV is a “New Rendition,” a fresh translation “prepared to illustrate how a Greek text can be understood a little differently” when “rendered into modern English” (3). Commentary on significant aspects of each section follows this double-column format, and after that, an analysis of the section as a whole. Commentary always begins with the KJV, though often enough the New Rendition is discussed in the commentary as it differs from or sheds light on the KJV.
The introductory chapter proceeds to preview what Brown perceives as Luke’s focus on the Savior’s compassion and care for minorities and marginalized people, on home and family, on service, and on discipleship. Further, he addresses Luke’s access to eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s trial and teachings, and the implications this access would have for Luke’s credibility.
According to Brown, the testimony of Luke is unique among the Gospels in its references to Jesus’s childhood and personality, especially in relation to women, its hints at Jesus’s teachings about the spirit world, and its focus on the Gentiles (extended into Luke’s second book, the Book of Acts).
Brown explains and illustrates the BYUNTC mission to include the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible as well as all other revealed latter-day scripture in the commentary, showing why these illuminate many (if not all) Lucan passages. He discusses the relationship of the testimony of Luke to the other Gospels and to the book of Acts. He points out distinctive teachings such as those relating to property and money, pointing to what is known about Luke as an educated, propertied individual to suggest that his priorities changed when he converted to Christianity, and hence his focus on the poor and needy. Brown states that according to Luke, Jesus’s “attitude toward the institutions of worship in his day…is glowingly positive” (64), points to hints at such common LDS concepts as keys and spirit prison (and others), and writes at length about the dating of this document, the world it represents, and the person of Luke himself.
And that’s just the introduction. Worth the price of the book by itself, it is tremendously informative as it previews and justifies the tone and direction of the commentary to come. Thus I was not surprised—though not entirely convinced—by some of the emphases in the remaining chapters. I would not describe myself as a skeptic, but I’ve read Luke many times, and taught it, and to me it seems that pointing to an emphasis on family and to a “glowingly positive attitude toward institutions of worship” is a bit of a strain. Latter-day Saints may be very happy to see these, but I’m not sure they’re as readily visible as Brown would have us believe. But then that’s why he points to them: to bring them to our attention. Let them hear who have ears to hear.
That said, no one could fault the meticulousness of the verse-by-verse, line-by-line, word-by-word commentary that follows. Every one of the twenty-four chapters of Luke has its own two- or three-page introduction. Following this comes the two-column presentation of a few verses at a time in both the KJV and the New Rendition. These take up the top half of a page, and then the commentary follows in exhaustive detail. After that comes an “Analysis” section (for every few verses!), putting the section in the context of Jesus’s life, of Luke’s agenda, and of the other Gospels.
Every section has its own heading—you could give a twenty-minute talk on, say, the four verses that comprise “The Parable of the Fig Tree” (Luke 13:6-9), based on Brown’s four-page commentary and analysis (655-659). In this brief parable, a landowner instructs the keeper of his vineyard to cut down a fig tree that has borne no fruit in three years, but the keeper pleads with him for one more year to tend it. We read the verses in both the KJV and the barely-modified New Rendition (here is a case where differences hardly need to be mentioned). Then Brown discusses such words, phrases, and concepts as “parable”; “man” (referencing the JST, “husbandman”); the Greek words for “vineyard”; the graveness of a tree that bears no fruit; alternative or more modern readings for “why cumbereth it [the fig tree] the ground?”; ancient horticultural practices; and so on.
The analysis summarizes and explains the parable. But the best part of the analysis, in my opinion, is a comparison to the allegory of Zenos in Jacob 5. Brown suggests that the similarities “may well point to a common stock of stories that carry a similar message”—an idea that resonates with my interest in, and study of, cross-cultural mythologies such that, rather than pointing to some kind of “copying” of the New Testament in the Book of Mormon, the authenticity of the Zenos story may actually be “proven” here.
This is the kind of value to be found for every one of the sections of Luke in this grand Commentary. A clear Table of Contents, an extensive scripture index and an equally comprehensive subject index, and copious notes, citations, and bibliographic material render this excellent volume all the more relevant. Any student of the New Testament or the Gospel of Luke will be rewarded by a perusal of this work. Brown is to be honored and commended for the enormous accomplishment it represents.