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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Colossians 3:11 - 3:11
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Where there is (ὅπου ἔνι)
Where, in the renewed condition; there is, better, as Rev., can be: ἔνι strengthened from ἐν in signifies not merely the fact but the impossibility: there is no room for.
Greek, Jew, etc.
Compare Gal 3:28. National, ritual, intellectual, and social diversities are specified. The reference is probably shaped by the conditions of the Colossian church, where the form of error was partly Judaistic and ceremonial, insisting on circumcision; where the pretense of superior knowledge affected contempt for the rude barbarian, and where the distinction of master and slave had place as elsewhere.
Circumcision
For the circumcised. So Rom 4:12; Eph 2:11; Phi 3:3.
Barbarian, Scythian
See on 1Co 14:11. The distinction is from the Greek and Roman point of view, where the line is drawn by culture, as between the Jew and the Greek it was drawn by religious privilege. From the former stand-point the Jew ranked as a barbarian. Scythian. “More barbarous than the barbarians” (Bengel). Hippocrates describes them as widely different from the rest of mankind, and like to nothing but themselves, and gives an absurd description of their physical peculiarities. Herodotus describes them as living in wagons, offering human sacrifices, scalping and sometimes flaying slain enemies, drinking their blood, and using their skulls for drinking-cups. When a king dies, one of his concubines is strangled and buried with him, and, at the close of a year, fifty of his attendants are strangled, disemboweled, mounted on dead horses, and left in a circle round his tomb. The Scythians passed through Palestine on their road to Egypt, b.c. 600, and a trace of their invasion is supposed to have existed in the name Scythopolis, by which Beth Shean was known in Christ's time. Ezekiel apparently refers to them (38, 39) under the name Gog, which reappears in Revelation. See on Rev 20:8.