The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the CorinthiansDenney, James
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the Corinthians
Denney, James
Bible. Corinthians, 2nd -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
The bearing of this passage on the religious blindness of the Jews
ought not to hide from us its permanent application. The religious
insensibility of his countrymen will cease, Paul says; their religious
perplexities will be solved, when they turn to Christ. This is the
beginning of all intelligence, of all freedom, of all hope, in things
spiritual. Much of the religious doubt and confusion of our own times
is due to the preoccupation of men's minds with religion at points
from which Christ is invisible. But it is He who is the key to _all_
human experiences as well as to the Old Testament; it is He who
answers the questions of the world as well as the questions of the
Jews; it is He who takes _our_ feet out of the net, opens the gate of
righteousness before us, and gives us spiritual freedom. It is like
finding a pearl of great price when the soul discovers this, and to
point it out to others is to do them a priceless service. Disregard
everything else in the meantime, if you are bewildered, baffled, in
bonds which you cannot break; turn to Jesus Christ, as Moses turned to
God, with face uncovered; put down prejudice, preconceptions, pride,
the disposition to make demands; only look stedfastly till you see
what He is, and all that perplexes you will pass away, or appear in a
new light, and serve a new and spiritual purpose.
Something like this larger application of his words passed, we may
suppose, before the Apostle's mind when he wrote the eighteenth verse.
In the grandeur of the truth which rises upon him he forgets his
controversy and becomes a poet. We breathe the ampler ether, the diviner
air, as we read: "But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a glass
the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to
glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." I have kept here for
κατοπτριζόμενοι the rendering of the Authorised Version, which in the
Revised has been relegated to the margin, and replaced by "reflecting as
a mirror." There do not seem to be sufficient grounds for the change,
and the old translation is defended in Grimm's Lexicon, in Winer's
Grammar, and by Meyer, Heinrici, and Beet. The active voice of the verb
κατοπτρίζω means "to exhibit in a mirror"; and the middle, "to mirror
oneself"--_i.e._, "to look at oneself in a mirror." This, at least, is
the sense of most of the examples of the middle which are found in Greek
writers; but as it is quite inapplicable here, the question of
interpretation becomes rather difficult. It is, however, in accordance
with analogy to say that if the active means "to show in a mirror," the
middle means "to get shown to one in a mirror," or, as the Authorised
Version puts it, "to behold in a mirror." I cannot make out that any
analogy favours the new rendering, "reflecting as a mirror"; and the
authority of Chrysostom, which would otherwise be considerable on this
side, is lessened by the fact that he seems never to have raised the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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