THE EXCLAMATION OF ST. THOMAS
["Thomas answered and said to him, 'My Lord!' and, 'My God!'"—John 20:28.]
The double difficulty which, as we have seen, attends the common theory, that Thomas here proclaimed the Deity of Christ, has led to various other interpretations, which we must now proceed to consider.
The orthodox [Gottfried Christian Friedrich] Lücke, in his commentary on John (2. 504), remarks that "the uncertain meaning of theos in this connection does not allow us to deduce from Thomas's mode of address any argument for the strict deity of Christ." For both in Greek and in Hebrew the word "God" admits of being used at times in a looser and weaker meaning than is permissible in modern languages. This may be seen in Psalm 110:1, and in John 10:34-35; and one or two striking instances occur even in later Christian literature. Thus in the Epistle to Diognetus, in the second century, we read that a donor "becomes a God to those who receive" his gifts; and the Apostolical Constitutions (2, 26) call the bishop "a God upon earth"—Epigeios Theos. In the case of Thomas's exclamation, such an interpretation is rendered additionally easy by the presence of the limiting word "my." Hence the Trinitarian scholar Michaelis (Anmerkungen in loc), pointing out the difficulty of supposing Thomas to have passed, in an instant, from extreme doubt to a height of belief which no other disciple attained till long afterwards, maintains that the ejaculation, uttered as it was in a moment of intense wonder, should be understood "metaphorically" (figurlich); as possibly meaning, for instance, "whom I shall ever most highly venerate." So, too, Kuinoel considers theos to be used here in the same way as in John 10:33. The same view is said to be taken by [Heinrich Eduard?]Schmieder (Hohep. Gebet. s. 14); but I have not been able to refer to his book. A similar interpretation is given by the Trinitarian Rosenmuller, and the Unitarians Yates, Norton, and Wakefield; who suppose Thomas to have had in view the specific character of the Messiah as being the earthly representative of God.
Some writers, however, have treated the matter in an entirely different manner, and have avoided both the difficulty of supposing Christ to have been then addressed as "Theos," and also the counter-difficulty of giving "Theos "an unusual signification, by regarding that word as having been addressed to the Father, and not to Christ at all. It has been objected to this view that the Jews were not guilty, like modern Frenchmen and Germans, of the profanity of taking God's name in vain in everyday conversation. But the remark is surely irrelevant. We are dealing here with no ordinary moment, but with a supreme religious crisis; and Thomas's words are no conversational, "mon dieu" or "gott-lob, but a solemn apostrophe like, end perhaps in the very words of, the "Adonai Elohai of Gideon's cry (Judg. 6:22).
Of the writers who take this view, some treat the verse as recording not a single consecutive exclamation, but two independent ones, "My Lord!" again and "My God!;" Thomas first recognising with awe the identity of his risen master, and then breaking forth into an apostrophe of gratitude to the Father who had raised him from the dead. This arrangement of the verse, which is adopted by Milton and by W. J. Fox, is to some extent confirmed by the repetition of the 'my,'a repetition which seems meaningless unless two persons were addressed. Too much stress must not be laid on this argument with such an instance to the contrary as Ps. 35:23, "My God and my Lord." But it cannot fairly be denied that the usual effect of such a repetition is to suggest a duality of persons; as when Southey says,—
"Patiently, his crown resigned,
He fixed on heaven his heavenly mind;
Blessing, as he kissed the rod,
His Redeemer and his God."
Similarly, when we find Dr. Watts addressing Christ as
"My dear Redeemer and my Lord,"
we are conscious of an nnnaturalnesa in the repetition of the "my," which nothing but the exigencies of metre can excuse.
This view is rejected, though somewhat hesitatingly, by Rosenmuller, on the ground that the 'and' seems to connect the two epithets and refer them to one person. But it may be doubted whether the 'and' has necessarily this force, even if we regard it as being (as the printers of our English Bible make it), one of the words which Thomas himself uttered. And if, on the other hand, it be (as the Greek MSS. will equally well permit) a conjunction inserted by the historian John, between two separate exclamations, then the very care taken by John thus to mark them as separate utterances would point to his having regarded them as having separate objects.
Milton's view of the passage may not improbably be as old as the time of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who certainly rejected the common interpretation of the passage. But Theodore's words are not free from ambiguity, nor are they recorded with perfect precision. He is usually regarded as having taken the still bolder course of treating the words of Thomas as a single unbroken apostrophe to the Father, no part of it being addressed to Christ at all. In modern times this same view has been adopted by Paulus and (but I cannot learn where) by Fritzsche. An objection to it lies in the fact that John expressly represents the words as said "to him," i.e., to Christ. To remove this objection it has been pointed out that a similar phrase has, on some rare occasions, been used of a person on account of whose words something is said, although it is not said to him personally. Thus in 1 Sam. 20:12, "Jonathan said unto David, 0 Lord God of Israel! when," &c; Bo, too, John 14:23, and perhaps Luke 14:23 may be cited as parallel.
It will, I think, be seen from this resume' of the various interpretations of the verse that every one of them is attended with some difficulty of its own. Doubtless all embarrassment would vanish if we possessed a fuller record of what was said and done; for it must be remembered that John's account is only a compressed one. As Professor Westcott says (John, p. lvii.), "It is undeniable that the discourses of the Lord which are peculiar to St. John's Gospel are, for the most part, very brief summaries. . . . It is wholly out of the question that they can be literally complete reports. The evangelist . . . has not given as all the words which were actually spoken, and this being so, it follows that he cannot have given the exact words, or only the words, which were spoken. Compression involves adaptation of phraseology. He adds examples, not only of discourses, but also of conversations, in which this condensation has evidently taken place; nor is this all. If as seems surely to be established, most of the discourses recorded by St. John were spoken in Aramaic, the record of the evangelist contains not only a compressed summary of what was said, but that also a summary in a translation."
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