Lightfoot's Commentary on the Gospel of John

J.B. Lightfoot (1828-1889)

When one thinks of the great British commentators on the Fourth Gospel, Westcott, Hoskyns, Dodd, Barrett, and Lindars, one name is conspicuous by its absence: Joseph Barber Lightfoot. Lightfoot, the preeminent NT scholar of his time, never wrote a commentary on the Fourth Gospel, partly due to his respect for his colleague, B.F. Westcott.

Lightfoot did, however, continue to take notes on John's Gospel, which Ben Witherington III discovered at the Durham Cathedral Library in the spring of 2013. With this discovery and its future publication (The Gospel of St. John: A Newly Discovered Commentary; Dec. 2015; InterVarsity Press Academic; 384 pp.), perhaps Lightfoot's name will be placed alongside the pantheon of the great British commentators on the Fourth Gospel.


Here are the particulars:



InterVarsity Press is proud to present The Lightfoot Legacy, a three-volume set of previously unpublished material from J. B. Lightfoot, one of the great biblical scholars of the modern era. In the spring of 2013, Ben Witherington III discovered hundreds of pages of biblical commentary by Lightfoot in the Durham Cathedral Library. While incomplete, these commentaries represent a goldmine for historians and biblical scholars, as well as for the many people who have found Lightfoot's work both informative and edifying, deeply learned and pastorally sensitive. In addition to the material on the Acts of the Apostles, published in volume one, there were detailed notes on the Fourth Gospel, a text that Lightfoot loved and lectured on frequently. These pages contain his commentary notes for John 1-12. Lightfoot had long wanted to write a commentary on the Gospel of John, but he was unable to do so due to more pressing demands on his time, as well as his respect for his colleague B. F. Westcott. As a result, though he continued to compile notes on the text, they never saw the light of day until now. Included alongside the commentary are Lightfoot’s long out-of-print essays on the historical reliability of the Fourth Gospel. Now on display for all to see, these commentary volumes reveal a scholar well ahead of his time, one of the great minds of his or any generation. 

Contents:


Abbreviations
Foreword
Introduction: External and Internal Evidences of the Authenticity and Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel
Commentary
Appendix A: External Evidence for the Authenticity of the Fourth Gospel
Appendix B: More Internal Evidence for the Authenticity and Genuineness of St John’s Gospel Appendix C: Lightfoot and German Scholarship on John’s Gospel
Author Index
Scripture Index