The Matthew Henry commentary app for iPhone
Three hundred years after it was written, Matthew Henry’s Commentary is still one of the most-read Bible commentaries in English — quoted by Spurgeon, Whitefield, and Wesley, and still sitting on pastors’ shelves today. The hard part has always been carrying six volumes around. On a phone, that problem disappears.
Here is what Matthew Henry’s Commentary actually is, whether it still earns its place, and how to read the whole thing offline on an iPhone.
Who was Matthew Henry?
Matthew Henry (1662–1714) was a Welsh Presbyterian minister who spent the last years of his life writing a verse-by-verse exposition of the Bible for ordinary readers. He finished through the end of Acts before he died; ministers who knew his work completed the New Testament from his notes. The result is the Exposition of the Old and New Testaments — what everyone now just calls “Matthew Henry.”
What is Matthew Henry’s Commentary?
It is a devotional and practical commentary, not a technical one. Henry walks through the text passage by passage, drawing out its meaning and then pressing it home — what it shows about God, and what it asks of the reader. It is warm, quotable, and pastoral, which is exactly why it has outlived most of its contemporaries.
In Scribe it runs to nearly 6 million words, spanning Genesis to Revelation across more than 5,000 chapter- and verse-level notes. For scale, that is roughly 67 average paperbacks of commentary from this one author alone.
Is Matthew Henry’s Commentary still worth reading?
Honestly: yes, with one caveat. Its strength is application — few writers connect a verse to the heart as directly. Its limit is that it predates modern scholarship, so it is not where you go for Greek and Hebrew lexical detail or recent archaeology. The sensible way to use it is alongside the original-language tools, not instead of them.
That pairing is the whole idea in Scribe. Tap a word to read the Liddell-Scott-Jones or Brown-Driver-Briggs entry behind it for the technical layer, then read Matthew Henry for the application — both on the same device, both offline.
How do you read it on an iPhone, offline?
Most “Matthew Henry” results online are websites: fine until you lose signal. A real Matthew Henry commentary app keeps the full text on the device and searches it locally. In Scribe, Matthew Henry is part of the Classical Commentary Library, so:
- The complete commentary is on your phone — no connection needed to read or search it.
- Keyword search finds an exact phrase across the whole commentary; semantic search finds the right passage when you only remember the idea.
- It sits beside 11 other classic commentators (Spurgeon, Adam Clarke, John Gill, Barnes, Wesley, and more), so you can compare how several writers handle the same verse.
If you also use AI research, the assistant can search the library and quote Matthew Henry — and the other commentators — with author attribution, grounded in the passages you actually own rather than invented.
Where to start
The Classical Commentary Library is a one-time $24.99 add-on — also included with the $4.99/mo subscription — that installs once and then works entirely offline. See what’s included, or read more about choosing an offline Bible commentary app. And because it — like Scribe itself — is a one-time purchase, Matthew Henry’s whole exposition is yours to keep, with no subscription.