William Kelly's Bible Commentary

William Kelly (1821–1906) was born at Millisle, County Down, Ireland, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Left fatherless as a boy, he supported himself as a tutor on the island of Sark, and it was there in 1841 that he came to the convictions of the Brethren. From then until his death he wrote almost without pause. He edited The Bible Treasury for fifty years, edited the thirty-four volumes of J. N. Darby's Collected Writings, and published his own lectures and expositions on nearly every book of the Bible. He was also a serious Greek scholar.

The SwordSearcher module gathers Kelly's published lectures and expository notes into one commentary covering all sixty-six books. It is a compilation, not a series Kelly prepared in this form, and the coverage varies: some of the smaller books are treated briefly, others at great length. For the New Testament books, Kelly's own translation of the Greek text is included alongside his commentary. The Old Testament material is drawn from lectures delivered to audiences and later published, which gives it a conversational character. Because Kelly expounds a chapter or section at a time, his comments are attached to the verse where each section begins, and the other verses in the section carry a link to it.

Kelly's opening words on Genesis show what he thought the Bible is:

There is one characteristic of divine revelation to which attention may be profitably called as a starting point. We have to do with facts. The Bible alone is a revelation of facts, and, we can add (not from the Old Testament, but from the New), of a person. This is of immense importance. In all pretended revelations it is not so. They give you notions — ideas; they can furnish nothing better, and very often nothing worse. But they cannot produce facts, for they have none. They may indulge in speculations of the mind, or visions of the imagination — a substitute for what is real, and a cheat of the enemy. God, and God alone, can communicate the truth.

Kelly is the most extensive of the Brethren expositors in the SwordSearcher library. Where Mackintosh is devotional and Darby's Synopsis is compressed, Kelly is full, careful about the text, and willing to spend a paragraph on a single word. His standpoint is dispensational and premillennial, and he does not hide his disagreements with other schools. Readers who want the same tradition in shorter form will find F. B. Hole and Hamilton Smith in the library as well.