Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary

Revelation 1:5

ἀπὸ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, ὁ μάρτυς. The anacoluthon is probably an intentional parallel to that in the previous verse, though here the threefold title might have been declined if the writer had pleased. There is a tendency throughout the book, where one clause stands in apposition to another, to put the nouns in the second clause in the nominative regardless of the rules of ordinary Greek.

ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός. See 1 Timothy 6:13 : Jesus Christ was in His Death much more than a martyr, but He was also the perfect type and example of martyrdom. Observe His own words in John 18:37—to which perhaps St Paul l.c. is referring. It may be doubted whether μάρτυς is used in the N.T. in the later sense of “martyr.” The distinction between martyrs and confessors was not fixed in the days of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyons: whoever confessed Christ before men was still said to “bear witness” to Him.

ὁ πρωτότοκος τῶν νεκρῶν. “Firstborn” rather than “firstbegotten;” cf. τὰς ὠδῖνας τοῦ θανάτου Acts 2:24, where the metaphor is hardly pressed so far as in 2Es 4:42. The genitive is explained by St Paul, Colossians 1:18 ὁ πρωτ. ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν. The sense is that He is “first to enter life.” The thought in Romans 1:4 is similar.

ὁ ἄρχων τῶν βασιλέων τῆς γῆς. A reminiscence (hardly to be called a quotation) of Psalms 89:27, “I will make Him My First-born, higher than the kings of the earth.”

τῷ�. “It is His ever-abiding character, that He loveth His own,” John 13:1.—Alford. The contrast of tense between this clause and the next is quite correct, though it struck the later copyists as harsh.

λύσαντι. The balance of evidence is in favour of this reading. The preposition ἐν in a Hebraistic book like this would be used of an instrument, where we should say “by” or “with”: while to later readers the idea of “washing in” would seem more natural. So we should probably render “released us from our sins by His own Blood”—the Blood of Christ being conceived as the price of our redemption, as in 1 Peter 1:18-19—not, as in Revelation 7:14; Revelation 22:14 (according to the preferable reading), and perhaps in St John’s Ep. I. Revelation 1:7, as the cleansing fountain foretold in Zechariah 13:1. If therefore we ask “when Christ thus freed us,” the answer must be, at His Passion, not at our conversion or baptism.

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Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary

Revelation 1:5

Old Testament

New Testament