Free Study Guide IncludedMatthew: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
The Sermon on the Mount, the Great Commission, and the parables of the Kingdom — the Gospel most cited in early Quaker preaching, whose ethical demands and vision of inward righteousness shaped the Quaker way of life.
- 28 chapters · ~85,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read3.8 hours
- Length54,901 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 3.8 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 3.8 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 3.1 hours to 5.2 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 54,901 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 54,901 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
3.1 hours and 5.2 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 3.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 157–220 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
The Sermon on the Mount was the ethical charter of early Quakerism. George Fox preached it as a literal program: blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the peacemakers, let your yes be yes and your no be no, love your enemies. These were not counsels of perfection for a spiritual elite but commands for all who followed Christ. The Quaker refusal to swear oaths, the peace testimony, the commitment to plain speech, the care for the poor — all flow directly from Matthew 5–7. This commentary traces that lineage in careful detail, showing how each section of the Sermon shaped Quaker practice and theology.
The commentary also engages with the parables (many of which appear in Matthew), the controversies with the Pharisees, and the extended eschatological discourse of Matthew 24–25. Early Friends read these passages as describing not merely future events but present spiritual realities: the separation of sheep from goats happening continuously in the conscience of every person, the judgment of nations beginning now in the lives of those who feed the hungry and welcome the stranger. The free Group Study Guide provides structured questions for each section of the commentary.
