The Commentators

The English Annotations (1645)

Annotations upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament was published in London in 1645, in two folio volumes, and enlarged in later editions (1651, 1657). It was prepared by a group of divines working at the request of Parliament, among them John Downame, who saw it through the press, Thomas Gataker, William Gouge, Daniel Featley and John Ley. Several of them sat in the Westminster Assembly, and the work is often called the Westminster Annotations, though the Assembly did not issue it. Its notes are brief: a reading of the Greek, a cross-reference, a sentence of sense. The writer of the notes on Philippians is not named in the book.

Poole (1685)

Matthew Poole (1624–1679), a Presbyterian minister ejected from his London living in 1662, is best known for his Latin Synopsis Criticorum, a digest of the critics on the whole Bible. His English Annotations upon the Holy Bible was left unfinished at his death, at Isaiah 58, and was completed by a group of his friends; it appeared in two volumes in 1683 and 1685. The volume does not name them, but Edmund Calamy gives “a true List of the Compleaters” in his Account of the ejected ministers (1713), and by it the notes on Philippians and Colossians are by Richard Adams (c. 1626–1698), once a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and ejected in 1662 from St Mildred’s, Bread Street, in London. Calamy’s account of Adams himself says the same: he “wrote the Expositions of the Epistles to the Philippians and the Colossians” in Poole’s Annotations. The label “Poole” names the work, not the writer.

Henry (William Harris)

Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Presbyterian minister at Chester and then at Hackney, died having carried his Exposition of the Old and New Testament to the end of Acts. The epistles and Revelation were written by a group of Nonconformist ministers from his notes and in his manner, and published as the sixth volume of the work. Its preface names William Harris (1675–1740), Presbyterian minister at Crutched Friars in London, as the writer on Philippians and Colossians, and the label “Henry (W. Harris)” says so.

Gill (1746–48)

John Gill (1697–1771) was for over fifty years pastor of the Baptist church that met at Horsleydown and later at Carter Lane, Southwark. A largely self-taught scholar of Hebrew and of the rabbinic writers, he wrote an Exposition of the New Testament in three volumes (1746–48) and then one of the Old Testament, the first verse-by-verse commentary on the whole Bible by a Baptist. He was a strict Calvinist, and his expositions are full, learned and often long; the excerpts here take the sentences that explain the text.