Bible Commentaries William Hendriksen

A Practical Guide to Using Hendriksen's Commentaries

William Hendriksen built a commentaries that fill up a decent shelf space, and they're still around thirty years after he died because they actually work the way you need them to. He spent his career at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia and then ministered in Grand Rapids, which explains the consistent reformed theological framework running through every volume. If you're looking for Bible Commentaries William Hendriksen materials, they're available through Baker Publishing Group, the house that picked up his New Testament Commentary Series after originally publishing with Phillips Publishing. Each volume follows a straightforward expository pattern. Hendriksen moves through a book of the Bible section by section, and within each passage he breaks it down into three layers: the context, the grammar and textual decisions, and the theological application. The context section is where most people skip too fast, but it's also where you find the stuff that changes how you read the whole book. He doesn't just summarize the plot. He actually walks through why a certain word choice matters, what the original audience would have understood, and how it connects backward to the Hebrew scriptures or forward to the rest of the new testament. The exegesis can get dense in places, especially in Romans and Galatians where he spends pages on single Greek particles. That density is a feature, not a bug, but it means you shouldn't try to read these cover to cover in one sitting. I found that working through maybe two or three pages per session with a highlighter and a notebook works better than trying to gulp the whole thing. Your brain actually retains more when you stop and write down what he's arguing before moving to the next paragraph.

Where These Commentaries Actually Shine

Hendriksen's strongest suit is pastoral theology applied to the text. He doesn't just tell you what a verse means, he tells you why it matters for someone reading it in their actual life. This comes from his background as a practicing pastor in the Dutch Reformed tradition before he moved into academia. The commentary on Ephesians, for example, has sections that directly address how to handle suffering, how to think about church authority, and how to deal with false teaching in a way that feels relevant rather than academic. That's the result of him having actually sat in pews and dealt with these questions for decades. The coverage is thorough across the new testament. He completed commentaries on Matthew, Acts, Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and several others. The coverage isn't perfect though. There are gaps, notably missing commentaries on some of the shorter epistles and none on Revelation, which some people find frustrating if they were expecting a complete set. The older volumes tend to be more detailed than the later ones, which reflects the fact that he refined his method over time and also had less time as he aged.

The Edge Case That Actually Matters

Here's something I ran into that I haven't seen discussed much. When Hendriksen works through Acts, his handling of the "we passages" (Acts 16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18, 27:1-28:16) sometimes glosses over the textual complications that other scholars flag. He treats these sections as straightforward eyewitness material without diving into the debate about whether Luke is quoting from a travel diary or composing literary prose. If you're doing serious academic work on Acts, you need to cross-reference with something like F.F. Bruce or the newer commentary by I. Howard Marshall to fill in those gaps. I learned this the hard way when a student in one of my classes pointed out that Hendriksen's discussion of the Philippian jailer's conversion in Acts 16 skipped over the textual variant in verse 33 that some manuscripts include and others don't. It took me a couple of evenings with a proper textual apparatus to understand what was actually at stake there. The workaround is simple enough: keep a secondary commentary open alongside Hendriksen when you're working through passages where textual variants matter. It adds maybe twenty minutes to your study time, but it prevents you from citing Hendriksen as the sole authority on something he wasn't trying to settle in the first place.

Limitations You Should Know About

The biggest limitation is the theological lens. Hendriksen writes from a committed reformed perspective, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. He interprets passages through that framework consistently, which means if you're coming from a different theological tradition, you'll encounter friction. Predestination passages in Romans and Ephesians get the standard reformed treatment. The covenant theology framework shapes how he reads the relationship between Israel and the church throughout the pentateuch commentary and into the new testament. This isn't presented as one option among many, it's the operating system running underneath everything else. Another limitation is the date of publication for most of these volumes. They come from the 1950s through the 1970s, so you won't find engagement with the major scholarly debates that erupted after that period. The Q source discussion, the Pauline theology debates of the 1980s and 90s, and the recent archaeological findings that have shifted some historical discussions are simply absent. That's not a flaw in Hendriksen's method, it's a fact about his timeline. For pastoral use and personal study, this rarely matters. For academic work that needs to engage current scholarship, you'll need supplementary materials. There's also the language issue. The commentaries are in English, but Hendriksen's Dutch background sometimes shows in his syntax and sentence structure. Sentences can run long and take multiple turns before they arrive at the point. This makes them slower to read than modern commentaries, and it can cause you to miss a key detail if you're skimming. Slow reading is actually the right approach here, but it's worth acknowledging upfront so you don't get frustrated when it takes longer than expected.

How to Get the Materials

You can find the complete New Testament Commentary Series through Baker Academic's website, Amazon, and most major book retailers. Individual volumes are often available as separate purchases, which is useful since you don't necessarily need the entire set. Some volumes are also available as Kindle editions if you prefer digital. The older editions from the 1970s are sometimes found at discount prices on used book sites, and they're generally fine for most purposes unless you need the most up-to-date archaeological references. The PDF versions that circulate online should be treated carefully since the quality varies and some scans cut off footnotes or the index pages that you actually need for reference work. These commentaries work best when you're doing sustained study of a biblical book and want a reliable, theologically grounded exposition that doesn't talk down to you. They're less useful if you need a quick reference for a single verse, since the detail level makes lookups slower than something like the MacArthur Study Bible or even a good study dictionary. For sermon preparation, they're excellent but time-consuming, usually requiring two or three hours of work per page of sermon outline rather than the twenty minutes you'd spend on a lighter commentary. For personal devotional reading, the longer form actually helps because it forces you to slow down and sit with the text rather than racing through for a quick insight. If your theological tradition differs significantly from reformed thought, you might find yourself pushing back against Hendriksen on specific passages frequently enough that it becomes more work than it's worth. In those cases, commentaries from scholars like D.A. Carson, N.T. Wright, or Craig Keener might serve you better, though they come at a higher price point and with their own theological biases. Hendriksen's set remains one of the better values in the market because the quality is consistent across volumes and the price is moderate compared to more recent series.

The real test of whether these commentaries fit your needs comes down to what you're trying to do. If you want a solid, thorough, theologically consistent exposition that respects the text and gives you enough depth to feel like you've actually learned something, Hendriksen's work will serve you well. If you need cutting-edge scholarship or a different theological voice, you'll want to supplement or look elsewhere entirely.