The Johannine Letters

I have come to love the Hermeneia series as a whole. And I do really like this author. He is quoted in many other commentaries on John's epistles, and has provided a wealth of interesting thoughts for the scholar or scholarly student. Here are some of the best things about this book. The format of the material is the most pleasant of any commentary I have on John's epistles. The pages are a bit larger (wider) with formatting to set off different parts of the material. He has an overview section from 1:5 through 2:17 called "Communion with God". In that section (I will look at 2:12-17) he has a number of subsets. Each natural paragraph is treated as a unit and then each verse individually. So everything is easy to find (a lot easier than the WBC series that's for sure). In 2:12-17 he calls the subset "Concrete Ethical Demands". He then gives a short overview of the paragraph. After that he starts in with vv 12-14. Underneath everything is a clearly separated footnoting section with dense bibliographical trails for the student or scholar who wants more on a particular jot or tittle. This is great for the pastor (like me) who wants to skip most of that stuff and get to the conclusions he makes. In vv 12-14 he spends a lot of time (several pages) dealing with nuances of the striking use of tenses for the verbs there. The reason it is important is because how one sees John's use of verbs here can feed into different theories on who wrote 1, 2, 3 John and why one scholar is correct vs another scholar in the debates around these sort of things. Well, that's important I suppose. But if you have to talk to people about the Bible who are not required to attend your lectures, there really isn't a lot in his several pages to inspire anyone. So for my purposes, I found his material interesting, but not very inspiring. In other words, I will use this commentary only for the more technical parts of my research. Almost all pastors never have time to get to that part of their sermon prep, so this commentary will have to remain a secondary resource at best for most pastors. Because of this, I only recommend this commentary for pastors who have a lot of time in their schedule to do extensive exegetical reading. It's really more of a scholars dream. So many great points in the battles that scholars work out on these things. From that perspective I think this is an excellent work and ought to receive a five star rating. But from a practical ministerial perspective, I recommend Smalley's work on John's epistles, which lacks the wonderful formatting of this series, but has a lot of inspiring and preachable points throughout.

The Hermeneia series is an expensive but outstanding set of commentaries. The main advantage for an English or North American student is that they offer the opportunity to engage the studies of outstanding European scholars that might not otherwise be available. Strecker's work has been translated from German but reads very easily and smoothly. The quality of the series is outstanding, both in the physical presentation of the books to the detail and care put into the writing of the commentary itself. I find the Johannine letters to be wonderful windows into the early church, and Strecker's work is comprehensive in it's analysis of the deep themes that run through these letters. Strecker has a great ability to give understanding to the Greek words such as agape which dominate the writing and theology of these letters. He is able to demonstrate both the similarities between I John and II and III John while giving proper respect to each letter as an individual entity. I am a lay student attempting to study my way through the New Testament to enhance my understanding of these books and also to help my preparation as an adult and high school teacher. This book has been very helpful to me in both these goals. It would help to have a basic knowledge of Greek to read the text, but it is not essential. I have read Marshall's volume in the NICNT series, and I would favor slightly favor this book. Both are outstanding commmentaries. I enjoyed this commentary and the format, which leaves most of the scholarly discussion in the footnotes, to be accessed if needed. This book is pricey, but well worth it if you want to explore the riches of these wonderful letters.