Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Revelation 12:5

In accordance with the rabbinic notion which withdrew messiah for a time, the infant, like a second Moses, is caught up out of harm's way. He has no career on earth at all. This is intelligible enough in a Jewish tradition; but while no Christian prophet could have spontaneously depicted his messiah in such terms, even under the exigencies of apocalyptic fantasy, the further problem is to understand how he could have adopted so incongruous and inadequate an idea except as a pictorial detail. The clue lies in the popular messianic interpretation of passages like Psalms 2. where messiah's birth is really his inauguration and enthronement. The early application of this to Jesus, though not antagonistic to an interest in his historic personality, tallied with the widespread feeling (cf. note on Revelation 1:7) that his final value lay in his return as messiah. Natiuitas quaedam eius ascensio : “The heavens must receive him” (Acts 3:21) till the divine purpose was ripe enough for his second advent. This tendency of primitive Jewish Christianity serves to explain how John could refer in passing to his messiah in terms which described a messiah, as Sabatier remarks, sans la croix et sans la mort, and which even represented his ascension as an escape rather than a triumph. The absence of any allusion to the Father is not due so much to any reluctance on the prophet's part to call Jesus by the name of Son of God (cf. Revelation 2:18), which pagan usage had profaned not only in such mythical connexion but in the vocabulary of the Imperial cultus, as to the fact that the mythical substratum always gave special prominence to the mother; the goddess-mother almost invariably displaced the father in popular interest, and indeed bulked more largely than even the child.

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Expositor's Greek Testament (Nicoll)

Revelation 12:5

Old Testament

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