In his
commentary on 1 Tim 3:16, J.N.D. Kelly rendered the text thusly:
Yes, beyond all question great is the mystery
of our religion—‘Who was manifested in flesh, vindicated in spirit, gazed on by
angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed in throughout the world, taken
up in glory.’ (J.N.D. Kelly, The Pastoral
Epistles: I & II Timothy Titus [Black’s New Testament Commentaries;
London: A&C Black, 1963, 1986], 86)
This text is
strong biblical disproof of the
Protestant understanding of δικαιοω, showing that it is transformative, not declarative merely.
Indeed, even if one wishes to privilege the declarative understanding, one has
to conclude that the declaration is based, not on an imputation, but a
recognition of an intrinsic reality. For a full discussion, see:
This is
borne out in Kelly’s interpretation of this verse, showing that the declaration
is based on a reality intrinsic to the person the declaration is focused upon
(in this case, Jesus Christ Himself [!]):
The second strophe, vindicated in spirit, is more difficult. Since vindicated (Gk. edikaiōthē)
literally means ‘justified’ or ‘declared righteous’, M. Dibelius argues that
what is affirmed is Christ’s exaltation to the divine sphere, the sphere of
righteousness. Admittedly this entails giving ‘justified’ a sense it has
nowhere else in the N.T., but this is not a serious problem, especially as the
passage is a citation. The real problem is how to extract this meaning from the
Greek, for spirit does not naturally
suggest ‘the sphere of spirit’. If this interpretation is rejected, we are left
with two alternatives (a) If spirit is taken as strictly parallel to
flesh, the two expressions must stand
for the divine and human elements in Christ’s being respectively, as in Rom. i.
3 and 1 Pet. Iii. 18. The clause will then affirm that, while the Saviour
appeared on earth as true man, he was vindicated,
i.e, declared righteous and shown to be in fact Son of God, in respect of his
spiritual nature, a reference to the resurrection being implied. (b) Others, giving in an instrumental sense and reading spirit as denoting the Holy Spirit, prefer the rendering, ‘He was
declared righteous through, or by means of, the Holy Spirit’. The meaning will
then be that, although Christ was crucified as a malefactor. God vindicated him
and declared him to be righteous when, through the Holy Spirit (cf. Rom. viii.
11), he raised him from the dead. It is difficult to deciare between these two
exegeses, especially as in primitive thought no clear distinction was drawn
between Holy Spirit and the Lord’s spiritual nature. If a choice must be made,
it should probably be in favour of (a)
in view of the manifest parallelism between flesh and spirit and the
consequent difficulty of giving in
before the latter an instrumental sense. (Ibid., 90-91, emphasis in original)
