John Gill was an English Particular Baptist pastor, theologian, and author. He was born November 23, 1697 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, to Edward and Elizabeth Gill. His father was a deacon in the local Baptist church. There in Kettering he attended grammar school. He also helped his father in the wool trade. He was a ready scholar, mastering the Latin classics and Greek by age 11 or 12. As a dissenter, he was excluded from the bigger and better higher learning institutions of England (such as Oxford & Cambridge). He continued on his own studies of everything from logic to Hebrew, becoming a well-known well-respected Hebraist.
After relating his experience to the Baptist Church at Kettering, John Gill was baptized in November 1716. In March of 1720, he was ordained and became the pastor of the Goat Yard Church (Southwark, London). He served that church for about 51 years. Gill would be followed by John Rippon, and after a series of moves of location, Charles Haddon Spurgeon would become the pastor.[i] John Gill died October 14, 1771 and was buried at the dissenter’s burial ground, Bunhill Fields. He married Elizabeth Negus in 1718, and she preceded him in death in 1764.
Gill was an outstanding Bible scholar and doctrinal polemicist. He wrote not only in quality, but in quantity, earning the nickname “Dr. Voluminous.” He was a decided and vocal proponent of the five points commonly called Calvinism, but he has been somewhat misrepresented as a “hyper-Calvinist.” In By His Grace and For His Glory, chapter 2, Tom Nettles successfully refutes that charge.[ii]
Gill’s Exposition of the Whole Bible was produced over a period of almost 20 years, 1746-1763. When I was young, I heard that John Gill is the only man who ever wrote a commentary on every verse of the Bible.[iii] I know there are other “whole Bible” commentaries. Matthew Henry’s work would seem to compete with Gill’s claim to fame – except that Henry died having only gotten through the book of Acts; his commentary was finished by others. Matthew Poole’s Annotations is somewhat the same, finished by others. Some “whole Bible” commentaries cover all the books of the Bible, but unlike Gill’s, do not have comments on every verse. Some commentary sets may cover every verse, while not done by one person. Just a few years ago, Chip Thornton wrote:
“Gill is the only man who ever lived (to my knowledge) who commented on every single verse in the Bible (by age 66) and wrote a systematic theology (by age 72). Given his training in logic, the order is noteworthy: exposition, first; systematic theology, second.”
Ian Hugh Clary describes Gill as “the first person to complete a verse-by-verse commentary on the whole of Scripture in English.” I wonder whether John Gill still holds the “record” of being the only man to produce a commentary on every verse of the Bible.
[ii] Gill believed, for example, “The ministry of the word is for the conversion of sinners; without which churches would not be increased nor supported, and must in course fail, and come to nothing; but the hand of the Lord being with his ministers, many in every age believe and turn to the Lord, and are added to the churches; by which means they are kept up and preserved: and hence it is necessary in the ministers of the word, to set forth the lost and miserable estate and condition of men by nature, the danger they are in, the necessity of regeneration and repentance, and of a better righteousness than their own, and of faith in Christ; which things are blessed for the turning of men from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.” (Nettles, p. 106)
[iii] I must give the caveat that, though one who regularly checks the comments of Gill, I have not personally looked up every verse in the Bible exposition by Gill, so it might be possible he skipped over some verses. I have not had such an experience of finding nothing on any verse I have checked.
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