Revelation 12:11

αὐτοί. א cop[420] read οὗτοι.

[420] Coptic.

11. διὰ τὸ αἶμα … διὰ τὸν λόγον. These conquerors are the martyrs and confessors of Christ: though He is gone up, Satan is not at once cast down. The accusatives mark the cause, not the means of their victory: we might have expected the second to have been replaced by a genitive. The whole verse would be easier to understand after Revelation 12:17.

οὐκ ἠγάπησαν τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτῶν. St John 12:25, St Luke 14:26 are the closest parallels among the similar sayings of our Lord. Here, as in all of them, the word for “life” is that elsewhere rendered “soul“—not the same as that used for “life eternal” in St John l.c.

ἄχρι θανάτου. They carried the temper of not loving life (not only to the renunciation of its joys, but) even to death.