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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - John 19:20 - 19:20
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Hebrew, Greek, Latin
Some editors vary the order. Rev., Latin, Greek. Such inscriptions in different languages were not uncommon. Julius Capitolinus, a biographer (a.d. 320), in his life of the third Gordian, says that the soldiers erected his tomb on the Persian borders, and added an epitaph (titulum) in Latin, Persian, Hebrew, and Egyptian characters, in order that it might be read by all. Hebrew was the rational dialect, Latin the official, and Greek the common dialect. As the national Hebrew, King of the Jews was translated into Latin and Greek, so the inscription was prophetic that Christ should pass into civil administration and common speech: that the Hebrew Messiah should become equally the deliverer of Greek and Roman: that as Christ was the real center of the religious civilization of Judaism, so He should become the real center of the world's intellectual movement as represented by Greece, and of its legal and material civilization as represented by Rome. The three civilizations which had prepared the way for Christ thus concentrated at His cross. The cross is the real center of the world's history.