Maybe it’s not yet large enough to qualify as a kerfuffle, but Jim West’s response to Michael Bird’s complaint about students citing Matthew Henry’s commentary in term papers prompted a sharp retort from Charles Halton and a substantial counter-argument from Mike Aubrey.

Michael’s beef is with students quoting Matthew Henry in exegetical papers. I happen to share this “pet peeve” with Michael, and it extends to a number of other commentators with a chiefly homiletical or devotional rather than an academic focus. Students love Matthew Henry’s commentary largely because they can read it for free at any number of “Bible study helps” websites. Publishers love Matthew Henry’s commentary because the text is in the public domain, so they can publish a commentary on the whole Bible, sell it at what looks like a bargain price, and not have to worry about paying royalties to the author—hence Hendrickson and Zondervan each publish a version, and electronic versions are included in the Logos Bible Study Library and Accordance Library 7. Because Henry’s commentary is reprinted so frequently and in so many formats, students may get the impression that it’s a “classic”—and perhaps it is a classic of devotional Bible study. Nevertheless, Henry’s commentary has nothing to do with academic Bible study.

Because the repackagings of Henry’s commentary usually carry dates corresponding to the release of each particular edition of the commentary—and because students frequently “quote mine” instead of reading carefully, critically, and holistically—students often do not realize that Matthew Henry’s commentary is 300 years old. The preface to the Pentateuch volume is dated 1706 and over the course of five volumes and fifteen years Henry completed his commentary on the whole Old Testament and the gospels. He also completed a manuscript for a commentary on Acts, but then he died, so students who quote “Matthew Henry” as commenting on any of the New Testament epistles or the book of Revelation are not even quoting Matthew Henry at all, but one of thirteen nonconformist divines who completed the New Testament volume between Henry’s death and 1797 (I’m sorry, but I don’t know the exact year that the New Testament volume was completed).

Astute readers will note that there is no question mark at the end of this post’s subtitle. I agree completely with Michael Bird that Matthew Henry’s commentary is a poor—yes, an unacceptable—source for academic exegesis. (It would be entirely appropriate to cite Henry in a study of the commentary genre as such, though, or a history of early 18th-century devotional/homiletical use of the Bible, or something like that.) Even my best students are sometimes very poor judges of good source material—but that is probably because I and my colleagues have somehow failed to train them well in this skill. For their benefit, then, and for the benefit of anyone who happens to care about my opinion, here are the reasons that Matthew Henry’s commentary is unsuitable for citation in an academic exegesis, including student papers.

First, Henry’s commentary isn’t academic. It’s that simple. Hopefully, neither students nor scholars would quote sermons or devotional texts to try to support an academic case. Henry’s commentary belongs in this category. In the post mentioned above, Jim West also panned Rick Warren. For some reason, Jim has an irrational hatred for Rick Warren, but he’s right to say that Rick Warren shouldn’t be quoted in academic papers; the same goes for T.D. Jakes or Bruce Feiler or Billy Graham or Lee Stroebel or Josh McDowell or Philip Yancey or any of the authors popular in evangelical bookstores. Some of these guys may be great homiletical/devotional writers, some less so (and some may produce outright dreck), but they’re not academics, and their books are not good sources for academic papers. From this point of view, citing Matthew Henry in an academic paper is a category mistake, like wearing a Mavericks jersey to a Cowboys game.

Second, even if Henry’s commentary had been academic, it would be woefully out of date. Henry wrote his commentary (Genesis through Acts) in the first two decades of the 18th century. The Pentateuch volume was published over 45 years before Jean Astruc’s Conjectures sur les memoires originaux, dont il parai que Moses s’est servi pour composer le livre de la Genèse, which paved the way for modern source criticism. That was over 80 years before Johann Gabler’s famous speech distinguishing “biblical theology” as a historical investigation from “dogmatic theology” as a religious practice. De Wette’s arguments attributing Deuteronomy to the reign of Josiah began circulating in print around 1805—almost 100 years after Henry finished his Pentateuch commentary—and it would be 50 more years before Karl Heinrich Graf identified the Holiness Code and yet another 30–35 years before the first publication of Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena. Form criticism wouldn’t bloom until the early 1900s, and Martin Noth wouldn’t propose the idea of the Deuteronomistic History until a little later than that. Of course, ideas are always in flux, and we can’t blame Matthew Henry for not knowing about scholarly developments that happened long after his death! We can and should, however, help students understand that a commentary written before the rise of modern biblical criticism is not an appropriate source for an exegetical paper written this side (chronologically speaking) of form, source, and redaction criticism.

However, the principle I’m articulating here has broader implications than the use of Matthew Henry’s commentary. It also means that we as scholars need to consider carefully the contextual limitations of our secondary source material, and we must teach our students to do the same. It will not do to enshrine De Wette, Graf, Wellhausen, Gunkel, Noth, et al. as authorities any more than Matthew Henry. Many of the 19th-century critical commentators—who, let it be known and proclaimed from the highest rooftops, were academics of the highest caliber—were fantastic in their day, but cannot be relied upon uncritically. (Of course, no commentator should be relied upon uncritically.) Think, for example, of the contributors to the International Critical Commentary series—folk like Charles Augustus Briggs (two volumes on Psalms, 1906–1907), S. R. Driver (Deuteronomy, 1902), George Buchanan Gray (Numbers, 1903 and 1st Isaiah, 1912) and John Skinner (Genesis, 1910). These commentaries are excellent and their authors were top-notch exegetes and philologists. Nevertheless, when we or our students use the commentaries, it is important for us and them to bear in mind that these magnificent scholars worked with textual and philological data much inferior to that available today. For example, any text-critical discussion published before 1947 needs to be updated with data from the Dead Sea scrolls, if such data is available. Although it is cliché to say so, we now have at our disposal an “embarrassment of riches” that was unavailable to our critical forebears. Students and scholars alike need to be sensitive to the constraints under which our esteemed predecessors worked and wrote.