Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 91:361 (Jan 1934)
Article: Some Much Needed Books in Biblical and Theological Literature Part 1
Author: Wilbur M. Smith

BSac 91:361 (Jan 34) p. 47

Some Much Needed Books in Biblical and Theological Literature
Part 1

Wilbur M. Smith1

Whether or not every great book has been foreseen and its need pointed out years before that particular book has appeared, would be very difficult to determine, but certainly this is true of a great many of the most important books published during the last fifty years. Thus Professor Waldo H. Dunn wrote, in 1916, that “a Dictionary of American Biography on a proper plan is yet a desideratum.”2 Twelve years later appeared the first volume of the Dictionary of American Biography, which, when completed, will magnificently fill the need to which Professor Dunn referred. In 1893 the statement was made, in an editorial in the Biblical World, that “we have not an adequate grammar of the New Testament,” an assertion that could never be made after 1914, when Professor A. T. Robertson’s monumental Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research appeared. One could give many more illustrations of what might be called prophecies of great books.3 It is the purpose of this article to call

BSac 91:361 (Jan 34) p. 48

attention specifically to a number of volumes, in various spheres of Biblical and theological literature, which are greatly needed at the present time. I have felt free to draw upon the assertions of many outstanding scholars in the Christian world and, at the same time, I have included a number of subjects that have, for a shorter or longer time, been growing in my own mind. Inasmuch as the author of this article has always been in the active ministry and not a professor, and consequently, has not had the opportunity of spending his life in books alone, his article cannot be considered complete. There must be many other volumes, the need for which has somewhere been pointed out, that have escaped his attention.

I. Bibliographies

In 1893 Joseph Henry Thayer stated that “there is no good bibliography of theological literature in English.”4 After forty years this statement still holds true. In 1895 Bishop John Fletcher Hurst published his well-known Literature of Theology: a Classified Bibliography, the most comprehensive work of its kind thus far to appear in this country, though by no means to be compared in exhaustiveness with James Darling’s Cyclopedia Bibliographica, which had appeared forty years before. In 1906 Dr. Samuel G. Ayres gave us his excellent well-classified bibliography of literature relating to the life of Christ, the very best attempt in this fi...