From a team of more than 50 international scholars comes the Word Biblical Commentary Series.

Its more than 60 volumes offer the best in critical scholarship firmly committed to the authority of Scripture as divine revelation.

Until recently, the Gospel of Luke, along with the other synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Mark, has been understood as a biography of Jesus rather than as a fountainhead of theological content.

Now, modern study has demonstrated that the evangelists who wrote the synoptic gospels were theologians in their own right. Just as important to them as preserving and propagating the memory of Jesus, says Dr. John Nolland, was 'the need to interpret him and all that his coming implied. . . . The evangelists were engaged in proclamation and not just reporting; their concern was so to tell the story of the historical Jesus that their readers might encounter the living Christ.'

In this first two volumes of commentary, Dr. Nolland covers Luke 1:1 to 9:20, helping us to a rich and insightful engagement with the text through discovering what we can about how Luke actually produced his gospel - Its intended audience, purpose and setting; its sources, language, and form. The Introduction includes essential background on the perspectives of modern gospel scholarship with special attention to modern parables research; relationships between Luke and Acts and among the Gospels and other writings of the period; questions on authorship, date and quality of surviving text. Dr. Nolland's fresh Translation of the text is undergirded by technical Notes on the textual witnesses, and an extensive Bibliography accompanies the verse-by-verse Comment in which his well-tempered emphasis on scholarly discussion supports perceptive and practical interpretation of the biblical writing in terms meaningful for late twentieth-century faith.