Colossians 3:11

where "in" "the new Man." This phrase is a further suggestion of the inner reference to Christ as the New Man which we find in this passage and the Ephesian parallel. Certainly the language of localityaccords better with such a reference than with a reference merelyto the regenerate state of the Christian.

there is neither The Greek is emphatic; there exists neither. "Not merely the fact but the possibility" is negatived (Lightfoot). In Christ, such differences cannot breathe.

Greek nor Jew Cp. Rom 10:12; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28 (a close verbal parallel). The word Hellênin such antithetical places "denotes all nations not Jews that made the language, customs and learning of the Greeks their own" (Grimm's N.T. Lexicon, ed. Thayer). In this sense it is used e.g. John 7:35, where A.V. renders "Gentiles." See too Acts 11:20 (true reading), Acts 14:1, &c.

circumcision nor uncircumcision Cp. Romans 2:25-27; Romans 3:30; 1 Corinthians 7:19; Galatians 5:6; Galatians 6:15; and see Ephesians 2:11.

barbarian, Scythian The word barbaros, in Greek, first denoted a speaker of an unintelligible language, and so a non-Greek, whatever his state of society or culture. It thus included the Romans, and in pre-Augustan Latin writers is even used as a synonym for Latin. But "from the Augustan age the name belonged to all tribes which had no Greek orRoman accomplishments" (Liddell and Scott, Greek Lexicon).

" Scythian:" an intensification of the previous word. The Scythians, a wandering race, akin probably to the modern Turks, were regarded by both Greeks and Jews as the wildest of wild tribes, (though the opposite view, strangely, had been taken by early Greek thought, idealizing the unknown. Thus Æschylus (cent. 5 b.c.) calls the Scythians "well-ordered"). Lightfoot points out that to the Jews the Scythians were specially a name of terror and savagery, for in the reign of Josiah they had poured into Palestine (Herodotus i. 105 6); an invasion not recorded in Scripture, but perhaps indicated in Jeremiah 1:13-16; Ezekiel 38-39.

bondnor free Cp. 1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 6:8 (with notes in this series on Colossians 3:5); and see 1 Corinthians 7:22. Onesimus and Philemon would be at hand as living illustrations of this brief but wonderful statement.

but Christis all and in all More exactly, to paraphrase, but all things, and in all (persons), are Christ. Such was the union of every believer with Him, that each was to each an embodiment as it were of His presence and life. In this respect all differences, national, ritual, educational, social, were assimilated in the eyes of faith and love. Facts of race, history, status, were not indeed contradicted, but they were overruled, and transfigured into mere varying phases of a central union in the Lord, Who shone equally through all His members.

This short sentence is at once a radical contradiction to some of the deepest prejudices of classical paganism and of (distorted) Judaism, and a wonderful positive revelation.