Digital Logos Edition
Volume 2 of Godet’s Introduction to the New Testament covers the Synoptic Gospels. In this volume, he defends the historicity and authenticity of the Gospels and their writers—a position not widely held at the time of publication—and investigates the canonicity of the Gospels. Each chapter is devoted to one of the Synoptic Gospels, and the volume concludes with chapters on the relationship between the Synoptics and the textual and contextual similarities and differences.
Godet, in all his commentaries, shows a scholarly breadth of familiarity with the commentators who preceded him. Many of their interpretations are stated and refuted in order to present that which the author feels is the correct interpretation of the passage. One can in reading this work avail himself of a clear summary of the views of many various writers. The author was respected as a theologian, hence his work has depth, and was revered as a Greek scholar and exegete, and thus his work has accuracy.
[Frédéric Louis Godet] has many qualifications for his work. One of the most needful exists in an eminent degree—a hearty sympathy with the book he is expounding. He does not approach it from the outside, but the inside, having a heartfelt experience of the power of the blessedness of its truths.
—Talbot W. Chambers
Frédéric Louis Godet (1812–1900) was a Swiss Protestant theologian and New Testament scholar.
Godet was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland—he was educated there, as well as in Bonn and Berlin. Godet served from 1838 to 1844 as tutor to Crown Prince (later King) Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia. He served as supply preacher in the Val-de-Ruy from 1844 to 1851, and as Pastor in Neuchatel from 1851 to 1866. Between 1851 and 1873 he was also Professor of Exegetical and Critical Theology in Neuchatel. From 1873 to 1887 he was Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the newly established Free Evangelical Faculty, which he helped to found.
Godet did much to interpret German theological thought to French-speaking Protestants, and the English translations of his works made him influential in international New Testament scholarship.