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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - 1 John 3:15 - 3:15
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Murderer (ἀθρωποκτόνος)
Manslayer. Only here and Joh 8:44, of the devil.
Hath eternal life, etc.
The contrast is suggestive between the sentiment embodied in this statement and that of Pagan antiquity respecting murder, in the Homeric age, for instance. “With regard to the practice of homicide, the ordinary Greek morality was extremely loose.... Among the Greeks, to have killed a man was considered in the light of misfortune, or, at most, a prudential error, when the perpetrator of the act had come among strangers as a fugitive for protection and hospitality. On the spot, therefore, where the crime occurred, it could stand only as in the nature of a private and civil wrong, and the fine payable was regarded, not (which it might have been) as a mode, however defective, of marking any guilt in the culprit, but as, on the whole, an equitable satisfaction to the wounded feelings of the relatives and friends, or as an actual compensation for the lost services of the dead man. The religion of the age takes no notice of the act whatever” (Gladstone “Homer and the Homeric Age,” ii., 436).