A Commentary on the New Testament (Volume I)

By Ronald Knox “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” These famous words of Saint Jerome make for a stirring challenge in the Christian life. For while Sacred Scripture does indeed bear the words of eternal life, those same words also throw difficulties into the path of understanding—apparent contradictions, obscure sayings, parallel passages, variant readings, and so forth. Yet the fact remains that the God who reveals himself to man is the true Light, “full of grace and truth,” and not a God who delights in obscurantism. On these grounds stand Monsignor Ronald Knox’s three volumes of Commentary on the New Testament, originally published in 1952, 1954, and 1956. Intended for a lay readership, rather than scholarly, Knox’s work aims to resolve, at least in part, those difficulties of the New Testament for those who “want to read the Bible for themselves without shirking the difficulties.”  In this first volume, The Four Gospels, Knox examines every sentence in the back­g