Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 17:5

καὶ νῦν δόξασον … σοί. The precise character of the glorification He looks for is here presented. It is παρὰ σεαυτῷ, and it is a restoration to the glory He had enjoyed πρὸ τοῦ τὸν κόσμον εἶναι. By παρὰ σεαυτῷ it is rendered impossible to understand παρὰ σοί of an “ideal” pre-existence; because these two expressions are here equivalents, and Christ cannot be supposed to have prayed for an “ideal” glory when He asked that God would glorify Him παρὰ σεαυτῷ. “There is, consequently, here, as in John 6:62; John 8:58, a continuity of the consciousness of the historical Christ with the Logos.” Tholuck. On this verse Beyschlag remarks (i. 254): “The possibility of such a position was first won by Jesus through His life and death on earth, so that, in point of fact, it forms the divine reward of that life and death; how then could He have possessed it realiter before the world was?” But the representation given by Paul in Philippians 2 is open to the same objection. Christ is represented as leaving a glory He originally enjoyed and returning to it when His work on earth was done and as the result of that work. The humanity was now to share in and to be in some way the organ of that divine glory; and this it could not be until it had been perfected by the experience of a human life. Wendt (Teaching of Jesus, ii. 169) says: “According to the mode of speech and conception prevalent in the N.T., a heavenly good, and so also a heavenly glory, can be conceived and spoken of as existing with God, and belonging to a person, not because this person already exists, and is invested with glory, but because the glory of God is in some way deposited and preserved for this person in heaven”. The passages, however, on which he depends for this principle do not sustain it. Such expressions as John 1:14; John 2:11, which indicate that already while on earth a divine glory was manifest in Christ, in no degree contradict but rather confirm such statements as the present.

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

John 17:5

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