Coming Soon, Commentary on Luke, Vol. 1
Announcing that Pastor Morecraft’s commentary on Luke, The Most Beautiful Book in the World, Volume 1 is coming soon! I wanted to let everyone know that work has been progressing. Given I knew he had preached about 250 sermons when working through Luke, I should have known this book would be extra long. Having just finished up chapter 6 of Luke I realized this book is already as long as the longest single volume published to date, Genesis at 640-ish pages. So, now the commentary on Luke is going to be a multi-volume set.
I want to keep the rollout of publications on a reasonable timetable so that subscribers and donators are getting their money’s worth. Additionally, this enables the print versions to be feasible as beyond 700 pages, physical books get particularly unwieldy.
Editing and proofing is complete, now onto creating a cover, formatting for print, uploading sermons for listening, etc. Lord willing, I’ll have this available here and on Amazon by middle of next week at the latest.
The Most Beautiful Book in the World
“Almighty God, Who called Luke the Physician, Whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an evangelist, and physician of the soul; may it please Thee, that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of Thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
An Ancient Collect for St. Luke’s Day
Why This Study of Luke is Called “The Most Beautiful Book in the World”
This study of the Gospel According to Luke is entitled “The Most Beautiful Book in the World” because of:
Its Contents: The ministry of Jesus, the most beautiful Person in the world.
Its Literary Style: Luke has been described as the most literary author of the New Testament, “the painter in words.” His artistic literary skill is probably responsible for the tradition of several centuries that Luke was a painter who painted a portrait of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
“The idyllic charm, homely earnestness, simplicity and purity, and the deep, devotional spirit characterizing the stories concerning the birth of John and that of Jesus, are unsurpassed. These stories as well as others in the Gospel of Luke have indeed done more than anything else in the world to inspire painters and other artists to create masterpieces of art - His description of the various personalities in the Gospel is so simply realistic and at the same time so sublime that throughout the centuries it has set to work tens of thousands of artists....
“Something very striking in Luke’s language and style is his literary versatility. We find, for instance, that he commences his Gospel with an accurately balanced sentence written in irreproachable, pure, literary Greek. After the preface, however, in the description of the nativities of John and Jesus he immediately switches over to a Hebraistically tinted language corresponding to that of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the OT. This transition from the one kind of style to the other shows that Luke is consciously an artist. He could, had he chosen, have retained throughout the distinguished literary style with which he had commenced. But in order to adapt his style better to the nature of the events that had taken place in a Jewish environment, he changes to a more Hebraistic diction in the description of such events... In his descriptions of stories with a Jewish background Luke is Semitizing throughout, but in stories with a Greek background... he writes in a purely Greek style....
[Geldenhuys, Norval, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, New International Commentary on the N.T., (Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., 1951)]
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