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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Luke 2:40 - 2:40
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
40. ἐκραταιοῦτο. The ἐν πνεύματι of our Received Text is omitted in אBDL.
πληρούμενον. ‘Being or becoming filled.’ The growth of our Lord is here described as a natural human growth. The nature of the ‘Hypostatic Union’ of His Divine and Human nature—what is called the Perichoresis or Communicatio idiomatum—is one of the subtlest and least practical of mysteries. The attempt to define and enter into it was only forced upon the Church by the speculations of Oriental heretics who vainly tried “to soar into the secrets of the Deity on the waxen wings of the senses.” This verse (and still more Luk 2:52) is a stronghold against the Apollinarian heresy which held that in Jesus the Divine Logos took the place of the human soul. Against the four conflicting heresies of Arius, Apollinarius, Nestorius and Eutyches, which respectively denied the true Godhead, the perfect manhood, the indivisible union, and the entire distinctness of the Godhead and manhood in Christ, the Church, in the four great Councils of Nicaea (A.D. 325), Constantinople (A.D. 381), Ephesus (A.D. 431), and Chalcedon (A.D. 451), established the four words which declare her view of the nature of Christ—ἀληθῶς, τελέως, ἀδιαιρέτως, ἀσυγχύτως—‘truly’ God; ‘perfectly’ man; ‘indivisibly’ Godman, ‘distinctly’ God and Man. See Hooker, Eccl. Pol. V. Leviticus 10.
χάρις θεοῦ ἦν ἐπ' αὐτό. Isa 11:2-3. “Full of grace and truth,” Joh 1:14. “Take notice here that His doing nothing wonderful was itself a kind of wonder.… As there was power in His actions, so is there power in His silence, in His inactivity, in His retirement.” Bonaventura. The worthless legends and inventions of many of the Apocryphal Gospels deal almost exclusively with the details of the Virginity of Mary, and the Infancy of Christ, which are passed over in the Gospels in these few words.