A Note on This Edition

The texts

The Bible text is the King James Version, without the translators’ italics. The English Annotations are taken from the first edition (London, 1645), and Poole from the second volume of the Annotations (London, 1685), both in the transcriptions of the Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP A36467 and A55368). Henry is taken from a modern digital edition of the Exposition, released into the public domain, and Gill from a modern digital edition of the Exposition of the New Testament.

What has been changed

Within each excerpt the commentator’s words, italics and punctuation are kept as the base text has them, and the spelling is lightly modernized. The seventeenth-century spellings of the English Annotations and Poole are given in their modern form (onely as “only,” chuse as “choose,” Originall as “Original,” receiv’d as “received,” it self as “itself”), as are the few older forms in Henry and Gill (any thing). The old verb forms (doth, saith, worketh) and the British spellings (honour, judgement) are kept, and so is any old word that a footnote explains. A missing apostrophe is supplied in a possessive (Christs as “Christ’s”), and then is printed “than” where it compares. The long s is printed as a round s, and I as J where it stands for it (Iesus). The text of the King James Version is printed as it stands.

Where a transcriber left out a Greek word or could not read a letter, the word or letter has been supplied from images of the printed page, and the Greek is given as it was printed, with its accents. Where a transcription differs from the printed page by a slip of the transcriber’s (taht for “that”), the printed reading has been restored. A few evident misprints of the original printing (empoly for “employ,” a word printed twice) have been corrected. The reference letters and marks that tie a note to the margin or to the verse have been left out.

Three things are a matter of setting only. At the end of an excerpt, a colon or semicolon is printed as a full stop. The opening words of the verse that a comment begins with are set in italic and followed by a dash, whatever bracket or mark the original used. And Scripture references are printed in the modern form (Joh. 5. 18. as “John 5:18”), with the points around them made regular. Where a commentator cites a passage by a misprinted book, chapter or verse, the corrected reference is printed, and the base text’s reading is given at the head of the Index of Scripture.

Attribution

The labels name the work, and say where its writer is someone other than the man whose name it bears: the notes on Philippians in Henry’s Exposition are by William Harris, and those in Poole’s Annotations by Richard Adams, one of the friends who completed the work after Poole’s death. “The Commentators,” above, gives what is known of each.

The editor’s work

The selection and arrangement of the excerpts, the passage headings and summaries, the notes and the footnotes are the editor’s. The excerpts were chosen with the help of software that aligns each commentary to the verses and checks that every excerpt is verbatim; every choice, and every note, is the editor’s own.