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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Luke 1:80 - 1:80
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80. Τὸ δὲ παιδίον ηὔξανεν καὶ ἐκραταιοῦτο πνεύματι. The ηὔξανεν refers to bodily, and the ἐκραταιοῦτο to mental growth. The description resembles that of the childhood of Samuel (1Sa 2:26) and of our Lord (Luk 2:40-52). Nothing however is said of ‘favour with men.’ In the case of the Baptist, as of others, ‘the boy was father to the man,’ and he probably shewed from the first that rugged sternness which is wholly unlike the winning grace of the child Christ. “The Baptist was no Lamb of God. He was a wrestler with life, one to whom peace does not come easily, but only after a long struggle. His restlessness had driven him into the desert, where he had contended for years with thoughts he could not master, and from whence he uttered his startling alarms to the nation. He was among the dogs rather than among the lambs of the Shepherd.” (Ecce Homo.)
ἦν ἐν ταῖς ἐρήμοις. Not in sandy deserts like those of Arabia, but in the wild waste region south of Jericho and the fords of Jordan as far as the shores of the Dead Sea. This was known as Araboth or ha-Arabah, 2Ki 25:4-5 (Heb.); Jer 39:5; Jer 52:8; Mat 3:1. See on Luk 1:39. This region, especially where it approached the Ghôr and the Dead Sea, was lonely and forbidding in its physical features, and would suit the stern spirit on which it also reacted. In 1Sa 23:19 it is called Jeshimon or ‘the Horror.’ The political unsettlement, the shamelessness of crime, the sense of secular exhaustion, the widespread Messianic expectation, marked ‘the fulness of time,’ and drove men to desire solitude. John was by no means the only hermit. Banus the Pharisee also lived a life of ascetic hardness in the Arabah, and Josephus tells us that he lived with him for three years in his mountain-cave on fruits and water. (Jos. Vit. 2.) But there is not in the Gospels the faintest trace of any intercourse between John, or our Lord and His disciples, and the Essenes. John has Messianic hopes; the Essenes had laid them aside. The Essenes were recluse ascetics; St John is a preacher, a reformer, a missionary. The Essenes were mystics; St John is intensely practical (see Godet, p. 145). The great Italian painters follow a right conception when they paint even the boy John as emaciated with early asceticism. In 2Es 9:24 the seer is directed to go into a field where no house is, and to “taste no flesh, drink no wine, and eat only the flowers of the field,” as a preparation for ‘talking with the Most High.’ It is doubtful whether Christian Art is historically correct in representing the infant Jesus and John as constant friends and playmates. Zacharias and Elizabeth, being aged, must have early left John an orphan, and his desert life began with his boyish years. Further, the habits of Orientals are exceedingly stationary, and when once settled it is only on the rarest occasions that they leave their homes. The training of the son of the priest and the ‘Son of the Carpenter’ (Mat 13:55) of Nazareth had been widely different, nor is it certain that they had ever met each other until the Baptism of Jesus (Joh 1:31).
ἀναδείξεως αὐτοῦ. His public ministry, literally, “appointment” or manifestation. The verb (ἀνέδειξεν) occurs in Luk 10:1; Act 1:24. Thus St John’s life, like that of our Lord, was spent first in hallowed seclusion, then in public ministry.
At this point ends the first very interesting document of which St Luke made use. The second chapter, though in some respects analogous to it, is less imbued with the Hebraic spirit and phraseology.