You've heard it all before--why do we need all these commentaries? It's the same question people in the pew ask about Bible translations, why do we need all these versions? New commentaries survive only because of niche markets and the playing out of new hermeneutics.
What's worse, they get longer and longer and longer. So now we can't cover 2 Corinthians in one commentary. We have to have two or even three!
I can see what is coming. Someone will create an online commentary resource with endless layers. If you want to dig deep, you click. But the surface is big picture and majority position oriented. Since the resource will be owned by some arbitrator--a university or the Society of Biblical Literature, individual writers will not get the final say on some position taken. The resource will record and map all the positions.
Of course someone could create a Wiki for this. That would be better than nothing. Maybe a person would have to have a bona fide masters degree in some area of biblical studies to post. But then you would effectively eliminate most biblical scholars, who undoubtedly won't be doing any blogging or wiki-ing any time soon, let alone Facebook :-)
How 'bout it, guild. A publisher could of course do it, but most of them have partisan leanings too and dark popes controlling what gets published. And besides, as I think someone somewhere will post Monday, publishers are at an end.
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