Kretzmann’s Popular Commentary of the Bible, originally published by Concordia Publishing House in 1921-1924, is a Bible commentary beloved by confessional Lutherans for over a century for its faithful exposition of Scripture, its spirit of faith and piety, and its commitment to Lutheran orthodoxy.
This website presents to the Church an entirely new transcription of Kretzmann’s Commentary. The transcription has been done by state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs), namely Anthropic’s Claude model and OpenAI’s GPT model. It is our hope that this transcription is more accurate and has fewer errors than traditional OCR transcriptions while also requiring far less manual review and editing, but these models do still make mistakes, so any feedback is appreciated — feel free to contact us at contact@kretzmanncommentary.org. Many thanks to the Internet Archive for their work in scanning and preserving public domain works.
We’ve further taken the transcription and adapted it for the web. Kretzmann’s summaries of Bible chapters have been moved from the end of each chapter to the start of each chapter, directly under the chapter title. Bible passages and block quotes are formatted for easier reading. On wider screens, an outline of section and subsection headings is displayed.
The original text of Kretzmann’s Commentary is in the public domain, so our transcription and formatting enhancements fall in the public domain as well. The source code for this website is also open source. The content and source code may be found on GitHub at https://github.com/ibelieve/kretzmanncommentary. We offer this new website for the good of the Church and the proclamation of the Gospel. We echo what John Theodore Mueller wrote in his original foreword to the first volume of the commentary in 1921:
May, therefore, the blessings of God rest upon the POPULAR COMMENTARY as it goes forth to herald the Word of Life, and may it help many toward gaining a better understanding of the Holy Scriptures as they bask in the light of divine wisdom! If it will lead but a single soul into the Bible, and through the Bible to Christ, and through Christ to the glorious inheritance which awaits the saints in heaven, both the author and the publishers regard themselves as abundantly recompensed for their efforts on behalf of a deeper and more intense study of the Book of Books.
Michael Spencer
Trinity 6, A+D 2026