Luke 2:21

1. The Circumcision: Luke 2:21.

It was under the Jewish form that Jesus was to realize the ideal of human existence. The theocracy was the surrounding prepared of God for the development of the Son of man. So to His entrance into life by birth succeeds, eight days after, His entrance into the covenant by circumcision. “ Born of a woman, made under the law,” says St. Paul, Galatians 4:4, to exhibit the connection between these two facts. There is a brevity in the account of the circumcision of Jesus which contrasts with the fuller account of the circumcision of John the Baptist (chap. 1). This difference is natural; the simply Jewish ceremony of circumcision has an importance, in the life of the latest representative of the theocracy, which does not belong to it in the life of Jesus, who only entered into the Jewish form of existence to pass through it.

Ver. 21. The absence of the article before ἡμέραι ὀκτώ is due to the determinative τοῦ περιτεμεῖν αὐτόν which follows. In Hebrew the construct state (subst. with complement) excludes the article.

The false reading of the T. R., τὸ παιδίον instead of αὐτόν, proceeds from the cause which has occasioned the greater part of the errors in this text, the necessities of public reading. As the section to be read began with this verse, it was necessary to substitute the noun for the pronoun. Καί, while marking the apodosis, brings out the intimate connection between the circumcision and the giving of the name. This καί is almost a τότε, then.