The long-awaited commentary on the Pastoral Epistles by Stanley E. Porter (Baker Academic) is finally out.

The overview on the website states:

Leading New Testament scholar Stanley Porter offers a comprehensive commentary on the Pastoral Epistles that features rigorous biblical scholarship and emphasizes Greek language and linguistics.

This book breaks new ground in its interpretation of these controversial letters by focusing on the Greek text and utilizing a linguistically informed exegetical method that draws on various elements in contemporary language study. Porter pays attention to the overall argument of the Pastoral Epistles while also analyzing word meanings and grammatical structures to tease out the textual meaning. Porter addresses major exegetical issues that arise in numerous highly disputed passages and–while attentive to the history of scholarship on First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus–often takes untraditional or innovative positions to blaze a new path forward rather than adopt settled answers.

This commentary will appeal to professors, students, and scholars of the New Testament.

In the Introduction to the commentary, Porter writes:

I examine the Greek text of the Pastoral Epistles from a linguistic perspective, but this is not a full-blown linguistic commentary. I attempt to minimize the jargon and put the description and explanation into language that New Testament scholars without linguistics will readily be able to understand, although I admit that it is difficult not to use some linguistic terminology. However, I think that it is important to make clear the linguistic framework that I use. I find it highly problematic when people use the term “linguistics” without defining what they mean or use an eclectic model that haphazardly seems to draw upon elements from various frameworks without making clear why they do so.

At nearly 1,000 pages, a detailed linguistic, cultural, historical, and contextual analysis of the three letters of Paul to Timothy and Titus is expected to cause readers to think more deeply and critically through the biblical text, particularly such as passages as 1 Timothy 2–3 and Titus 2.

— David I. Yoon