Foreword
Foreword
In 1978, I (Ben) was in the Durham Cathedral cloister visiting the Monk’s Dormitory that then, as now, served as a display room for important artifacts and manuscripts. It was also something of an archival library. I was a young doctoral student of Charles Kingsley Barrett and had already come across the name of J. B. Lightfoot on various occasions. Indeed, I had bought a reprint of his classic Philippians commentary while I was still in seminary in Massachusetts several years earlier. While perusing the various display cases, I came across an open notebook that displayed Lightfoot’s comments on a notoriously difficult passage in Acts 15, and I wondered whether more of this sort of meticulous exegetical material existed, written in Lightfoot’s own hand, somewhere else in that library.
Naturally I was interested, since there were no publications by Lightfoot that directly dealt with Acts, and certainly no commentaries by Lightfoot on Acts. I mentioned this discovery to Professor Barrett, who himself was an admirer of J. B. Lightfoot. In fact, in the early 1970s he had written a Durham University Journal article in which he praised Lightfoot as arguably the foremost scholar of the New Testament of his era. Somehow, however, nothing more happened in regard to this matter, and in truth, I forgot about it.
I mentioned in passing seeing this material some years later to Professor J. D. G. Dunn, who was then the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at Durham University. Still, nothing more came of it. Yes, there was a celebration of the centennial of Lightfoot’s death in 1989, planned and organized by the tireless efforts of Professor Dunn, that produced a fine special issue of the Durham University Journal, published in 1990, with various articles about the legacy of Lightfoot. There was even a fine monograph done by G. R. Treloar on Lightfoot as a historian. Although it was clear that Treloar had read and studied some of Lightfoot’s unpublished work on Acts, the primary sources had not been completely read or studied, much less published.
On my sabbatical in the spring of 2013, when I was scholar-in-residence in St. John’s College at Durham University, I decided to try to see just what Lightfoot materials might still be gathering dust in the Cathedral library. I must confess, I was not prepared for what I found. There, in the Monk’s Dormitory in a tall bookcase—whose lower compartment was filled with Lightfoot files, folders, letters, pictures, inkwells and more—sat not only three brown notebooks of Lightfoot’s detailed exegetical lectures on Acts numbering over 140 pages, but also a further gigantic blue box full of hundreds of pages of additional Acts materials, including a lengthy excursus on the authenticity of the Stephen speech. But even that was not all.
There was also a whole blue box full of hundreds of pages of Lightfoot’s exegetical studies on the Gospel of John, lectures on 2 Corinthians, two notebooks on 1 Peter, and finally a further notebook of Lightfoot’s reflections on early Judaism. All were in Lightfoot’s own hand, all done in great detail and none of it, except the first four or five pages of the introduction to Galatians contained in the first Acts notebook (which Kaye and Treloar excerpted and published in a Durham University Journal article in 1990), has ever been published—until now.
It is important to say at this juncture that this material would still be unpublished were it not for (1) the capable help of the Durham Cathedral Library staff, especially Catherine Turner (now retired) and Gabrielle Sewell; (2) the hard work of a current doctoral student at the University of Durham, Jeanette Hagen, who did much of the painstaking work of reading and transcribing this material; (3) the generosity of Asbury Seminary, Baylor University (through an Arts and Humanities Faculty Development Program Grant administered by the office of the vice provost of research) and Willard J. Still, who helped to pay for the digitalization and transcription of these materials; and (4) our friends at InterVarsity Press, in particular Andy Le Peau, Jim Hoover, Dan Reid and David Congdon, who saw the value of letting this material see the light of day so it might provide valuable help for our understanding of the New Testament, help from an unexpected quarter.
From where exactly did this material come? The answer is from Lightfoot’s lecture notebooks. When Lightfoot served as fellow (1851), Hulsean Professor of Divinity (1861) and Lady Margaret’s Professor (1875) at Cambridge University, he gave several series of lectures on Acts, the Gospel of John, 1 Peter and 2 Corinthians (among other subjects). The first Acts notebook, which also includes notes on Galatians, begins with these words—“Lenten Term, 1855.” Over time, as he continued to lecture on these great New Testament texts, Lightfoot would revise his lectures, further annotate them, change his mind on a few things and add things. This in part explains why there are two sets of lecture notes on Acts, neither one of which gets all the way to Acts 28. One set of notes goes up to Acts 20, the other to Acts 21.
When Lightfoot became bishop of Durham in 1879, he brought all of his Cambridge work on the New Testament, and much else, with him. This is how these materials eventually came into the possession of the Durham Cathedral Library. Lightfoot had been lecturing on Acts and John and other parts of the New Testament for more than twenty years when he left Cambridge for Durham, and the impression one gets from these unpublished manuscripts is that, having already published commentaries on Galatians (1865), Philippians (1868), and Colossians and Philemon (1875), Lightfoot’s views on Acts, John, 2 Corinthians and 1 Peter were mostly formed by the time he came to Durham. Indeed, one finds in these same Acts notebooks some of the materials that went into Lightfoot’s Galatians commentary and his fragmentary commentaries on certain Pauline letters (namely, Romans, the Corinthian and Thessalonian correspondences, and Ephesians). It is clear, however, that even after he had come to Durham, Lightfoot continued to read about and to work on Acts. In fact, he wrote a detailed introductory article on Acts in the 1880s for the second British edition of William Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible.
Instead of opting for a certain degree of redundancy in this volume, we have chosen to offer a single set of exegetical comments from Lightfoot on Acts 1–21. We have done so by combining materials from both sets of his lecture notes. We will reserve all of Lightfoot’s materials on the Fourth Gospel and early Judaism on the one hand and on the other 1 Peter and 2 Corinthians for volumes two and three in this series. Our hope is that these materials will be as rewarding for you in your reading and studying as they have been for us.
To be sure, it is an honor to work on these long-lost manuscripts from a great exegete and historian who set in motion a long line of great New Testament scholars in Durham. Scholars who, like Lightfoot, left their mark in Durham include Lightfoot’s contemporary and friend B. F. Westcott as well as Alfred Plummer, William Sanday, H. E. W. Turner, C. K. Barrett, C. E. B. Cranfield, J. D. G. Dunn, J. M. G. Barclay, Stephen Barton and Francis Watson. These are but a few of those who have followed in the footsteps and in the tradition of Lightfoot, focusing on detailed historical, exegetical and theological study of the text. This volume, and the two to follow, continue that Durham legacy and contribution to New Testament scholarship.
Ben Witherington III
St. John’s College, Durham, England
Pentecost 2013
Todd D. Still
Baylor University/Truett Seminary, Waco, Texas
Advent 2013/Epiphany 2014