Reading the New Testament Commentary series aspires to present cutting edge research in a way that is accessible to upper-level undergraduates, seminarians, seminary educated pastors, and educated laypeople, as well as to graduate students and professors.
Rather than following the verse-by-verse method of traditional commentaries, these volumes study section-by-section, concentrating on key concepts and how they are developed. Each commentary takes a more literary-theological slant while focusing on a close reading of the final form or structure of the text. The aim is to make one feel at home in the biblical text itself.
The approach of these commentaries involves a concern both for how the biblical author communicates and what the religious point of the text is. Care is taken to relate both the how and the what of the text to its milieu: Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman. This enables both the communication strategies and the religious message of the text to be clarified over against a range of historical and cultural possibilities. Throughout, the basic concern is to treat the New Testament texts as religious documents whose religious message needs to be set forth with compelling clarity.
