1 Peter 1:18

Amplification of Isaiah 52:3 f., Δωρεὰν ἐπράθητε καὶ οὐ μετὰ ἀργυρίου λυτρωθήσεσθε (cf. Isaiah 45:13 … εἰς Αἴγυπτον κατέβη ὁ λαός μου τὸ πρότερον παροικῆσαι ἐκεῖ. The deliverance from Babylon corresponds to the deliverance from Egypt. To these the Christians added a third and appropriated to it the descriptions of its predecessors. οὐ φθαρτοῖς, κ. τ. λ. The preceding negative relief to positive statement is characteristic of St. Peter, who here found it in his original (Isa. l.c.). φθαρτοῖς echoes ἀπολλυμένου and is probably an allusion to the Golden Calf of which it was said These be thy gods O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:14). According to Sap. 14:8, it is the proper name for an idol: τὸ δὲ φθαρτὸν θεὸς ὠνομάσθη. So the dative represents the agent and not only the instrument of the deliverance. ματαίας supports the view taken of φθ., for the gods of the nations are vanity, μάταια הבל (Jeremiah 10:3, etc.). πατροπαραδότου, ancestral, hereditary. The adjective indicates the source of the influence, which their old way of life patrius mos, patriritus still exercised over them. The ancient religion had a strength not merely vis inertiae which often baffled both Jewish and Christian missionaries: “to subvert a custom delivered to us from ancestors the heathen say is not reasonable” (Clem. Ac. Protr. x.). This power of the dead hand is exemplified in the pains taken by the Stoics and New Pythagoreans to conserve the popular religion and its myths by allegorical interpretation. Among the Jews this natural conservatism was highly developed; St. Paul was a zealot for the ancestral laws. But the combination of patriarch and tradition does not prove that the persons addressed were Jewish Christians. The law, according to which the Jews regulated their life, was Divine, its mediator Moses; and there is a note of depreciation in the words not that it is derived from Moses only from the Fathers (John 7:22). πατρο is contrasted with πατέρα (17) as παραδότου with the direct calling.