SOURCE: Baker, Frank. “John Wesley, Biblical Commentator.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 71, no. 1 (spring 1989): 109-20.

In the following essay, Baker discusses Wesley's commentaries on the Bible and their textual histories.

Not until John Wesley was in his fifties did he experience any clear call to serious expository scholarship apart from preparing sermons and conducting extemporaneous Bible study in his societies. He ventured into the world of biblical commentaries very diffidently and reluctantly, partly because of what he felt to be his own inadequacy, partly because of his enormous responsibilities as chief administrator and spokesman of a growing and turbulent Methodist society. Having ventured into it, however, called (as he believed) by God, he put more time and effort into this venture than into any other of his hundred literary projects—even the fifty-volume Christian Library. From 1754 to 1768 there was no year when he was...