“Biblical cultural and historical commentary. The New Testament by Craig Keener is a concise, high-quality commentary reflecting the current state of biblical scholarship. Helps to better understand the context of New Testament events. The author is a highly erudite Traditional Protestant. Craig Keener writes in the preface to his Cultural-Historical Biblical Commentary: “Cultural-historical background helps clarify and deepen understanding of virtually every text in the New Testament, but much of this material has been inaccessible to the general reader. Although there are many commentaries, none of them are devoted entirely to the consideration of the cultural and historical background of the biblical works. It is this factor—the cultural and historical background that shows how the New Testament authors and early readers understood the message of the New Testament—that requires its illumination and serves as a source of information for the average reader in the process of studying the Bible (most other components, for example, context, are contained directly in the biblical text itself).