Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures

Johann Peter Lange (1802–1884), a farmer's son from near Elberfeld who became professor of theology at Bonn, planned and edited one of the largest commentaries of the nineteenth century. In German it was called the Theologisch-homiletisches Bibelwerk. Philip Schaff, the Swiss-American church historian, supervised its translation into English, enlisting American and British scholars who not only translated but added to the German work, so that the English edition is considerably larger than the original. It was published by Charles Scribner's Sons, T. & T. Clark, and others between 1871 and 1899, and in its fullest form runs to sixty-three volumes.

The title of the English edition explains its design: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical. Every section of Scripture is treated three times over. First comes the text with notes on the Hebrew or Greek, then a section headed Exegetical and Critical, which explains the passage; then Doctrinal and Ethical, which draws out its teaching; and finally Homiletical and Practical, which gathers outlines and suggestions for preaching, often quoting older commentators at length. A preacher can find in one place the meaning of a passage, its doctrine, and the way other men have preached it.

Because the authors move back and forth across a passage in these three sections, the work does not break neatly into notes on single verses. The SwordSearcher edition therefore presents it as a chapter-based commentary, with the material attached to the first verse of the chapter, so that it can be read the way the authors wrote it. The module's own note puts it this way: "Separating out the individual verse commentary would do great ruin to the flow of the work." There are 1,141 entries covering all sixty-six books, plus introductions. That is fewer than the number of chapters in the Bible, because the authors' sections sometimes begin partway through one chapter and end partway through the next; if the comments you want are not at the chapter you expect, use the commentary panel's next and previous entry buttons to check the adjoining entries.

Lange's is a work of continental Protestant scholarship in the generation before higher criticism swept the German universities, and its contributors were on the whole believing men, but they were many and they did not all think alike. A reader will find it most valuable for the depth of its exegesis and for the doctrinal and homiletical sections, and least valuable where a contributor wanders into speculation. Weigh it, as with every human commentary, against the text.

It sits alongside the other large multi-author sets in the library, the Pulpit Commentary and the Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary.