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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - 1 Corinthians 15:8 - 15:8
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
One born out of due time (τῷ ἐκτρώματι)
Only here in the New Testament. It occurs, Num 12:12; Job 3:16; Ecc 6:3. The Hebrew nephel, which it is used to translate, occurs in the same sense in Psa 58:8, where the Septuagint follows another reading of the Hebrew text. In every case the word means an abortion, a still-born embryo. In the same sense it is found frequently in Greek medical writers, as Galen and Hippocrates, and in the writings of Aristotle on physical science. This is the rendering of the Rheims Version: an abortive. Wyc., a dead-born child. The rendering of the A.V. and Rev. is unsatisfactory, since it introduces the notion of time which is not in the original word, and fails to express the abortive character of the product; leaving it to be inferred that it is merely premature, but living and not dead. The word does not mean an untimely living birth, but a dead abortion, and suggests no notion of lateness of birth, but rather of being born before the time. The words as unto the abortion are not to be connected with last of all - last of all as to the abortion - because there is no congruity nor analogy between the figure of an abortion and the fact that Christ appeared to him last. Connect rather with He appeared: last of all He appeared unto me as unto the abortion. Paul means that when Christ appeared to him and called him, he was - as compared with the disciples who had known and followed Him from the first, and whom he had been persecuting - no better than an unperfected foetus among living men. The comparison emphasizes his condition at the time of his call. The attempt to explain by a reference to Paul's insignificant appearance, from which he was nicknamed “The Abortion” by his enemies, requires no refutation.