Acts 3:22

μὲν : answered by, or rather connected with, καὶ πάντες δὲ (Acts 3:24), “Moses indeed, yea and all the Prophets from Samuel” not “truly” as in A.V., as if μὲν were an adverb. The quotation is freely made from Deuteronomy 18:15. On the Messianic bearing of the passage see Weber, Jüdische Theologie, p. 364 (1897), and Lumby, Acts, in loco. Wetstein sees no necessity to refer the word προφήτην, Acts 3:22, to Jesus, but rather to the succession of prophets who in turn prophesied of the Coming One. But “similitudo non officit excellentiæ” (Bengel, so Wendt), and the words in Deuteronomy were fulfilled in Christ alone, the new Law-giver; the Revealer of God's will, of grace and truth, “Whom the Lord knew face to face,” Who was from all eternity “with God”. But the N.T. gives us ample reason for referring the verse, if not to the Messiah, yet at least to the Messianic conceptions of the age. To say nothing of St. Stephen's significant reference to the same prophecy, Acts 7:37, it would certainly seem that in the conversation of our Lord with the Samaritan woman, John 4:19 ff., the conception of the Messianic prophet is in her mind, and it was upon this prediction of a prophet greater than Moses that the Samaritans built their Messianic hopes (Briggs, Messiah of the Gospels, p. 272, and see also for Deuteronomy 18:15, and its Messianic fulfilment, Messianic Prophecy, p. 110 ff.). On other allusions in St. John's Gospel to the anticipation in Deuteronomy 18:15 see Bishop Lightfoot, Expositor, 1 (fourth series), pp. 84, 85; there are, he thinks, four passages, John 1:21; John 1:25; John 6:14; John 7:40, in all of which “ the prophet” is mentioned (so R.V. in each place). But whilst in St. John the conception is still Jewish (that is to say, St. John exhibits the Messianic conceptions of his countrymen, who regard the Christ and the prophet as two different persons), in Acts it is Christian. St. Peter identified the prophet with the Christ (and so inferentially St. Stephen). (But see also Alford's note on St. John 6:14, and also Weber, ubi supra, p. 354, for the view that Jeremiah was ὁ προφ., in John 1:21; John 1:25; John 7:40 (cf. 2Ma 15:14), whilst Wendt's Teaching of Jesus, i., pp. 67 69, E.T., should also be consulted.) ὡς ἐμέ : rendered by A.V. and R.V. “like me” (the meaning of the Hebrew, in loco), but in margin R.V. has “as he raised up me,” a rendering adopted as the only admissible one of the Greek by Page and Rendall; as no doubt it is, if we read ὥσπερ, as in LXX, Deuteronomy 18:18. But ὡς is found in the LXX in Acts 5:15. Certainly the rendering in A.V. and R.V. could not be applied to any one prophet so truly as to Christ, and the ὡς ἐμέ is a rendering of the familiar Hebrew כְּ (Lumby), which is so frequent in the LXX; see also Grimm-Thayer, sub v., and Delitzsch, Messianische Weissagungen, p. 46 ff., second edition (1899).