Foreword
Foreword
In 1978, I (BW3) 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 there were more of this sort of meticulous exegetical material, 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 serving as 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 Although it was clear that Treloar had read and studied some of Lightfoot’s unpublished work on Acts, the primary sources had not been completely read or studied, much less published.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 crammed 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, two notebooks on 1 Peter, lectures on 2 Corinthians 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), had 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 Jeanette Hagen, a recently minted PhD graduate in New Testament from the University of Durham, who did much of the painstaking work 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), tutor (1857), 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.
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).
In his own lifetime, Lightfoot was a widely recognized expert in the Pauline corpus, having published landmark commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians and Philemon before beginning his tasks as bishop of Durham in 1879. It is then something of a surprise that his very interesting work on 2 Corinthians was never found and published, when in fact fragments of his work on Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and 1 and 2 Thessalonians were published posthumously in a volume titled Notes on Epistles of St. Paul from Unpublished Commentaries. It is thus a true windfall that we can now bring to the light of day Lightfoot’s work on 2 Corinthians, though sadly it too is fragmentary. What is especially evident in this commentary is its contradiction of the suggestion that Lightfoot was almost entirely a historian and not a theologian. While one may be forgiven for thinking that when reading the first volume in this series, on the Acts of the Apostles, there can be no excuse after reading the second and third ones.
But, of course, this was stressed some time ago by C. K. Barrett. Consider this quote from Barrett’s well-known essay “J. B. Lightfoot as Biblical Commentator.” After saying that Lightfoot is a master of historical-critical exegesis, he adds:
Thus historical exegesis has not only the negative function of saying to the modern theologian or moralist, “No, you may not base your proposition on that text,” but the positive function of providing solid ground for inferences relevant to ages long after the original truth was stated. Lightfoot assumes—and if the assumption is valid he may be vindicated not only as a philologist and a historian but also as a theologian—that the language and the historical circumstances of Scripture have a quality of universality that gives them a perennial applicability. . . . There remains for him however an absolute qualitative distinction between the words of Scripture and all other words, and it is this, together of course with his splendid scholarly equipment, that places him securely in the line of great biblical expositors, from Origen and Chrysostom to Calvin to Bengel.
We are also very happy to be able to present Lightfoot’s work on a very different epistle indeed, and a non-Pauline one, namely 1 Peter. Lightfoot believed that the two great apostles were indeed Peter and Paul, the former for the Jews, the latter for the Gentiles. He also thought that these two documents upon which he offers commentary in this volume well represented the two great leaders of early Christianity. After presenting some of Lightfoot’s necessary prologomena to 2 Corinthians, we set forth his commentary itself. We follow the same protocol with the materials on 1 Peter.
The commentary on 1 Peter takes us up to 1 Peter 3:21. It is in many ways richer and fuller throughout than the 2 Corinthians commentary. This is the case for at least two reasons: (1) Lightfoot basically eschews detailed attention to text criticism, except where needed, and focuses instead on verse-by-verse exegesis of the text, and (2) he forgoes the interesting paraphrases we find at points in the 2 Corinthians manuscript and deals more deeply with theological and ethical matters raised by 1 Peter. Nevertheless, Lightfoot is interested in showing that Peter knew and drew on the work of St. Paul, including his Romans and Ephesians letters, as well as using a great deal of material from the LXX to make his points about suffering, atonement and Christology. He sees the two apostles as in essential harmony when it come to matters of theology and ethics, and there can be little doubt that he has one eye on the offspring of the Tübingen school in some of his pointed remarks and refutations on this score.
In the appendixes there are two essays of relevance to the commentary on 2 Corinthians and a third that is a protracted theological reflection that shows how the lessons of the early church, the suffering church of which Peter and Paul both speak, and the lessons from the history of Judaism may still instruct us today. This large, long essay was beautifully handwritten and is page after page of closely packed argument. On the back of the last page Lightfoot apologizes that due to the time constraints it ended somewhat abruptly. In other words, this is surely the original form of Lightfoot’s prize-winning essay (wrongly identified by some during Lightfoot’s day as perhaps on the Stephen speech). He was given a certain amount of time during a few days to do it, and he did not finish it on time.
Picture a youngish Lightfoot, already a brilliant scholar, sitting at a big wooden table with books stacked all around him, his ink pen and his notebook in hand. And in an amazingly short span of time he writes a detailed essay with full references that goes on for about fifty of our pages! Lightfoot was a churchman through and through, and he always did his scholarship in the service of both his Lord and the Christian church, believing that historical knowledge and vital piety belonged together, not hermetically sealed off from each other. This volume demonstrates both the character of the man and the quality of his scholarship time and again.
Full marks must go to G. R. Treloar and B. N. Kaye for finding this early essay in more than one form and publishing the more polished later form of it, which is in part a response to D. F. Strauss and indeed focuses on early Jewish literature and early Jewish messianic hopes. I (BW3) have had now extensive exchanges during the summer of 2014 with Professor Treloar about the source history of this important essay, and he agrees we are publishing the earliest form of this prize-winning essay.
The source history of this material as I would reconstruct it is as follows: (1) Treloar and Kaye found both the earlier and later forms of Lightfoot’s prize-winning essay in the 1980s and published in the 1987 article cited below the later form of the essay, which actually has a proper ending. But they also stated clearly on page 166 of the article that “an earlier and in some places fuller draft” had been found by them as well. It is this latter that is published for the first time in an appendix to this volume.
(2) Treloar and Kaye deserve the credit for figuring out that the Strauss and Philo essay was the one he originally wrote for the Cambridge prize. It is important to remember, however, as the abrupt end of the original form of the essay indicates, that this was a timed essay. There was no time originally for Lightfoot to revise this manuscript during the contest, and in the unrevised form, he refused to put it out. Only later did he return to the essay, polishing up the ending and editing out some materials. We do not know for sure how much later the revision was done.
(3) The later revision of the original essay may have been in response to those that Martin Hengel calls the “Essayists.” If so, Lightfoot did this revision long after the original 1850s essay and under some provocation. He did not really want to publish his early essay, but he felt it necessary to do a little light editing, produce a proper ending and contemplate putting it out without fuller research. We need to remember that the book Supernatural Religion, as well as the attacks on his friend Hort, put Lightfoot in something of a bind as an English Christian gentleman. He felt a response was required, and certainly his essays on Supernatural Religion are his most polemical essays ever. It seems, however, he did not think that this was enough. The earlier Strauss and early Judaism essay suited the purpose of answering others who kept touting the Tübingers and their take on the Gospels and other Scripture. Hence we have two somewhat different versions of the earliest publishable essay Lightfoot ever wrote. It says something about Lightfoot’s meticulousness and care, however, that even after revising the essay, and intending to put it out, in the end he demurred, and even the revised essay did not see the light of day until thankfully Kaye and Treloar saw to it.
Finally, we are very honored to be able to reprint two key essays on Lightfoot by C. K. Barrett and J. D. G. Dunn that were given at the centennial celebration of the passing of Lightfoot in 1989. These essays first appeared in a special issue of the Durham University Journal that came out in the early 1990s but have long since gone out of print. We reprint these essays with minor editing with the blessing and encouragement of Professor Dunn, and the permission of Durham University itself. I am certain as well that C. K. Barrett, my Doktorvater of blessed memory, would be glad that his essay was given a further life by its being republished here.
To close this introduction we would like to express our sincere and abiding appreciation to Jeanette M. Hagen for her assistance in coordinating, transcribing and editing the three volumes that constitute the Lightfoot Legacy. Thanks are also due to Andrew Stubblefield and Gehard Stübben for their help in editing and compiling the abbreviations and indexes in this volume. Finally, we would convey our profound gratitude to Benjamin Snyder for offering readers an expansive bibliography on works by and about the inimitable Joseph Barber Lightfoot.
Ben Witherington III
Asbury Theological Seminary
Todd D. Still
Baylor University, Truett Theological Seminary
Lent 2016