Introduction to the Series

A catena, from the Latin for “chain,” is a commentary made of links taken from other commentaries. The form is old: from the sixth century onward, Greek and Latin compilers set the words of a biblical book beside short extracts from the Fathers, one after another, so that a reader could hear several voices on the same verse at once. Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea on the Gospels is the best known. Each link is the work of its own author, quoted and named; the compiler’s work is the choosing and the arranging.

This series applies the old form to the English commentators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who wrote on the King James Version and whose work is long out of print or hard to read in its original pages. Each volume prints the King James text of one book, verse by verse, and after each verse short excerpts from four commentators in the order in which they wrote: the Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament (1645), the work of a group of London divines, here called the English Annotations; the Annotations upon the Holy Bible begun by Matthew Poole and completed after his death by others (1683–85), here called Poole; the Exposition of the Old and New Testament begun by Matthew Henry and completed after his death by other ministers, here called Henry; and John Gill’s Exposition of the New Testament (1746–48).

They were chosen because each wrote on every verse, each wrote on the King James text, and together they span a century of English reading of the Bible, from the years of the Westminster Assembly to the middle of the eighteenth century. They are not chosen as a party. The annotators of 1645 were Puritan divines of the Church of England in the years of the Westminster Assembly; Poole and Henry, and the ministers who finished their work, were Presbyterians outside the Church of England after 1662; Gill was a Baptist and a strict Calvinist. They often agree, and where they do the reader may take some confidence from it. Where they differ, on the order of the church, on baptism, on the reach of grace, the excerpts show each side in its own words, and the editor’s note says that they differ without taking a side.

How to read this book

Each verse is printed first, in the King James text. The excerpts follow, each one opening with its commentator’s name in small capitals. Where a commentator wrote on a different verse or a group of verses, that is given after his name (“Henry (W. Harris), on 1:12–20”). An excerpt often opens with the words of the verse it comments on, set in italic and followed by a dash.

The excerpts are short. Each is cut from the commentator’s own words at the end of a sentence, and every omission within it is marked with an ellipsis ( … ). Nothing in an excerpt is the editor’s: not a word is added, and none is changed except as described in the Note on This Edition. A reader who wants the whole of a comment will find it under the same verse in any edition of the commentator.

After the excerpts there is sometimes a short note, marked Note. It is the editor’s, and it does only a few things: it says where the commentators read a verse differently and who holds what; it gives the Greek word behind a key term in the English and its range of meaning; it points to other passages, in this letter or in the history the commentators assume; and, in a sentence, it gives the modern view where it differs on a matter of fact. Footnotes, all of them the editor’s, gloss old words, Latin phrases and persons. Short summaries under each passage heading say what the passage says, without interpreting it.