Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

508 Hebrews IX. 13, 14.
antithesis to dead ivorJcs.
The imregcncrate legally righteous man
sets not God before him, but rather the requirements and services of
the law; his eye is not directed immediately to the living God ; he
does not compare himself, his whole person, with the person of the
living God, he sees not his personal organic corruption in the
mirror of the Divine holiness ; but he measures and compares himself
only with the particular isolated requirements of the law, and
directs his regard and attention only to his particular, falsely supposed
meritorious, works, and feels perfectly satisfied if he only has
performed a certain number of such works. The regenerate man ;
on the contrary gives up his own personality to the person of the
living God.
It will now, moreover, be evident why the author has in ver. 13
mentioned particularly the ashes of the heifer. There, it was a
(Levitically outward) cleansing that was effected from contamination
caused by contact with the dead bodies of others; here, it is an inward
and real cleansing from one's oivn inner death that takes place,
and a consecration of oneself to the li^ang God.
What that act of Christ was, by which he has rendered this inward
purification possible, we are now told in the relative clause,
who through the eternal spirit offered himself ivithout spot to God.
Instead of alioviov, the reading dyiov is to be found in D, Copt.,
Basn., Vulg., Slav., and Lat. D, E, and in Chrysostom. But there
is still stronger external authority for alo)vtov in A, B, Peshito, Philoxen.,
Armen., Ambrosius, Theodoret, and Theophylact ; for, besides
the Alexandrine and Byzantine families, there is here the oldest
authority, the Peshito, against the Italian family. Be>jides, it is
easy to understand how the reading dyiov may have arisen, through
a gloss or correction, in place of the more difficult alioviov.—But what,
now, does this mean :
Christ has offered himself through the eternal
spirit as a spotless sacrifice to God ? These words have received
some very strange interpretations ;
Niisselt has rendered nrevfia by
victima.; Doederlein by status beatissimus ;
Storr and Olshausen
understand by -nvEvna aluiviov the heavenly life of Christ, tlie holy
moving principle of love in Christ ;
Welcker has declared the whole
passage to be inexplicable, and supposed that the author did not
know himself what he would say, upon which Tholuck well observes:
" It is bad, indeed, when the conceit of an interpreter leads him to
impute the product of his own fancy to his author." But many,
also, of the most judicious critics, go too hastily to work, when (as
Bleek, Tholuck, and others) they all at once explain Trvev/ia aiojviov
as synonymous with TTvtvjia clyiov. Bleek thinks that the Holy
Spirit has here the designation of eternal spirit, " because he imparts
to him in whom he dwells an eternal imperishable existence."
But in ver. 14 it is not the eternal life with God as the result of the