The IVP New Testament Commentary Series: Acts
By William J. Larkin, Jr.
IVP. 422 pages. £9.99
ISBN 0 85111 690 9
It is a brave publisher who produces anything on Acts currently, with definitive new work from Paternoster emerging. And one might ask whether the standard texts already on IVP's list, Stott's fine exposition in the Bible Speaks Today series, and Marshall's Tyndale Commentary, do not make a new expository commentary superfluous.
First impressions of the book do it no favours. A sentence like: 'The church will be awakened by Acts, which declares that being on the move with the gospel witness across cultural thresholds is the church's number one job.' (p. 14) signals an uneasy compromise between the extremes of popular relevance and scholarly commentary. Early on, Larkin's quotations from other scholars tend towards the banal; he overuses cliches such as 'salvation blessings' and 'cultural thresholds' throughout; sometimes the material in parentheses is longer than the sentence containing it.
