Of the many remarkable teachings of our Lord Jesus, His utterances on the theme of His departure out of this world and His return to this world are, perhaps, the most outstanding. And strangely enough, this teaching of the Master was, prior to Pentecost, a source of grief and perplexity to His faithful followers. As for the unbelieving Jews, it was rejected by them with scorn as being absolutely contradictory to the orthodox teachings concerning the Messiah, for did they not read "out of the law that Christ abideth forever"? This then was not only "a new teaching," it was an impossible word.
While personally present with His devoted disciples, Jesus was to them as a bridegroom, the source of their deepest joy; but this relationship could not be for long. He must go away, and His departure would leave them mourning. The world about them, with its "poor" and needy, would ever remain with them; "but Me ye have not always," He said.
Nevertheless this departure, real and personal as it would be, would not, Jesus assured His followers, leave them "orphans," totally cut off from His gracious influence. He would "come" to them, and in their long missionary trail as they carried the gospel message to all the nations, He would be with them "always [margin, all the days], even unto the end of the world," their unseen, invisible Companion. Bodily He would, and did, leave them, but with that never-to-be-forgotten promise, "I will come again, and receive you unto Myself." And the last living message borne in upon these same disciples as they gazed on their ascending Lord, was, "This Jesus, who was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven." Thus from its being a source of perplexity, this word of His departure and coming again became their great shining hope.
In common with all His other teachings, this word relating to His second coming was given in His mother tongue, the Aramaic language. Just what Aramaic word or expression He used in speaking of His future advent, we probably have no way of knowing. Mark in his Gospel has preserved for us a few Aramaic expressions coming directly from Jesus. To the little maiden sleeping in death He said, "Talitha cumi; . . . damsel, I say unto thee, Arise." In Gethsemane He prayed, "Abba, Father." On the cross He cried out, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani."
The apostle Paul in his first Corinthian letter (16:22) uses the Aramaic phrase "Marana tha." Moffatt comments, "an Aramaic phrase, probably meaning 'Lord, come.' " This expression is paralleled quite closely, but in the Greek, in Revelation 22:20, "He who bears this testimony says, 'Even so: I am coming very soon.' Amen, Lord Jesus."—Moffatt's Translation.
But in all these expressions, full of interest as they are, we get no definite clue to the particular word Jesus used in setting forth this most important truth of His second advent. Our recourse must be an appeal to the Greek translation as transmitted to us in the Gospel records. And we find that in the main we have just one Greek word to deal with, the word parousia.
Some have held, erroneously, that the word parousia came from the synagogue. Not so; neither the idea nor the word had any place in the Jewish worship of that day. The word is not even found in the Greek Old Testament. It does occur in the Apocryphal writings, but not in a religious sense. It is only as we come to New Testament writers that the word begins to carry a religious meaning.
The word parousia is in its own right a Greek word, altogether indigenous to the speech and literature of the Grxco-Roman world in the New Testament period. And since the word had such a slight Jewish background, carrying so meager a religious meaning, it might seem passing strange, at first thought, that it ever came to be selected by the writers of the New Testament. Even so distinguished a scholar as Cremer, who wrote a half century ago, says, "How the term came to be adopted, it would be difficult to show." Yet there it is, taken up by most of the writers of the New Testament, and made to stand as the decisive term for the advent of Christ. It occurs four times in the great eschatological discourse of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (24:3, 27, 37, 39), and we must believe that it faithfully represents the original language of our Lord. But when viewed in the light of the many important archeological findings of the last three or four decades, which throw a flood of light on the Greek of the New Testament period, it is not difficult to see why this word was selected to play the part that it does. And furthermore, when it is remembered that the Greek of the New Testament is simply the vernacular or common language of that vast Mediterranean world of Jesus' day, so strikingly illustrated in the multiplied papyri writings and inscriptions recently found in Egypt and Asia Minor, it is only natural and reasonable to conclude that the original meaning of this word and others should be sought in the Greek language and literature of that day, of which the Greek of the New Testament was a living part.
What, then, was the meaning of the word parousia in Greek literature generally, in the pre-Alexandrian period as well as in the time following His day? But more particularly, let us inquire, What was its force as revealed in the papyri and inscriptions in the day of primitive Christianity?
Scholars tell us that among the Greek tragic poets the word parousia generally meant presence; but the closely allied idea of arrival (presence is the inevitable consequence of arrival) is also found.
The occurrence of the word parousia in the Jewish writings of Old Testament times is so rare as to make it negligible in this study.
Polybius (3, 41, 1) summarizes a series of events as having taken place "from the beginning of the war until the coming (parousia) of Hannibal." And in that same connection Publius, informed of the actual arrival of Hannibal, is said not to have believed the report, since the parousia (of Hannibal) could not, in his judgment, have been so sudden. In another reference to the same writer a record is found in which he states that counsel is given to send ambassadors to Rome in connection with the prospective coming (parousia) of Antiochus the Great.
A very interesting and clear-cut instance, affording a definite illustration of the real sense of the word "presence," when used to render parousia, is found in a papyrus of the Oxyrhynchus collection, dated in the second century A. n., where a certain woman named Dionysia, who is involved in a lawsuit, urges a petition for leave to return home since her home affairs demand her parousia. Still other papyri of the same collection, of somewhat later date, read: "The repair of what has been swept by the river requires my parousia;"
"We await your parousia,"—a man writing to his brothers. Once again, we are informed in another papyrus, that a certain woman declares that her husband swore in the parousia of the bishops and of his own brother, "Henceforward I will not hide all my keys from her."
Are not these citations illuminating commentaries on the force of that word parousia as used by the apostle Paul in Philippians 2:12 and 2 Corinthians 10:10, where it is properly translated presence, meaning, of course, His bodily, physical, literal presence?
But the high point of interest and illumination in the force of this word is seen when it is employed to describe visits on state occasions of royal personages, emperors, kings, queens, and other persons of high rank. In these instances parousia comes to have a decidedly technical meaning, and it is very evident that this is the real force of the term when applied in the New Testament to the advent of our Lord.
The following quotation taken from that excellent work, "Light From the Ancient East," by A. Deissman, page 368, is to the point:
"We now may say that the best interpretation -of the -primitive- Christian hope of- Hteparusia is the old advent text, 'Behold, thy King cometh unto thee.' Zech. 9:9; Matt. 21:5. From the Ptolemaic period down into the second century A. D. we are able to trace the word in the East as the technical expression for the arrival or the visit of the king or the emperor. The parusia of the sovereign must have been something well known even to the people, as shown by the facts that special payments in kind and taxes to defray the cost of the parusia were exacted, that in Greece a new era was reckoned from the paritsia of the emperor Hadrian, that all over the world advent coins were struck after a parusia of the emperor, and that we are even able to quote examples of advent sacrifices."
The earliest mention of this matter of parousia taxes is found in a papyrus of the third century B. c., where contributions for the purchase of a crown of gold to be presented to a certain king at his parousia, are demanded.
Again, there has been found among the wrappings (papyri) of the mummy of a sacred crocodile, dating from about 113 B. c., a similar case, in which a great quantity of corn is called for in view of the parousia of Ptolemy the Second, who called himself "soter" (saviour). The corn is being collected at Cerceosiris, and the village fathers are responsible for this undertaking. How seriously they take the responsibility and how distressed they are about the matter may be gathered from the following:
"And applying ourselves diligently, both day and night, unto fulfilling that which was set before us and the provision of the 80 artabae which was imposed for the parusia of the king."—Id., p. 369.
Another papyrus from the Tebtunis collection about the end of the second century B. c., mentions the parousia of the king, while a broken piece of pottery dating from the same century from Thebes, carries the account of the expenses of the parousia of the queen.
And once again, in this case not in Egypt, an inscription dated in the third century B. c., makes mention of "the parousia of King Saitapharnes," narrating also the distress of the city officials upon whom the burden of the heavy expenses of the parousia rested. As good fortune would have it, in the hour of their great perplexity a rich citizen steps forward and pays the entire sum required-900 gold pieces, a handsome present to the king on his parousia arrival. (See page 370.)
Another instance of unusual significance is the record on an inscription of the third century B. c., in which a cure is mentioned at the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus, and it also tells of the parousia of the saviour-healer himself, the god Asclepius.
"Other examples of Hellenistic age known to me are a passage in Polybius referring to a parusia of King Antiochus the Great, and two letters of King Mithradates VI, Eupator of Pontus at the beginning of his first war with the Romans, 88 B. c., recorded in an inscription at Nysa in Caria. The prince, writing to Leonippus the Pmfect of Caria, makes twofold mention of this own parusia, i. e., his invasion of the province of Asia."—"Light From the Ancient East," p. 370.
From all this* we clearly see how the word parousia was first used in its ordinary sense, meaning presence, the consummation of an arrival, and then of the arrival itself, and finally how it came to be used in a technical sense to designate a royal visit by an emperor, a king, a queen. And still further we see how its full significance is made all the more vivid when it is remembered that these visits often marked the beginning of a new era in any province where the parousia visit chanced to be made, that in some cases coins were struck, a whole host of them in the case of Hadrian, and sacrifices offered in honor of such royal parousia:.
Still one more illuminating quotation from Deissman may be allowed, since it contributes an additional feature:
"In memory of the visit of the emperor Nero, in whose reign St. Paul wrote his letters to Corinth, the cities of Corinth and Patras struck advent coins. Adventus Aug (u,sti) Cor(inthi) is the legend on one, Adventus Augusti on the other. Here we have corresponding to the Greek parusia the Latin word advent, which the Latin Christians afterward simply took over, and which is today familiar to every child among us."—Id., p. 371.
In the light of all these facts, how natural and consistent it was for the authors of the New Testament to take over this current and highly specialized word parousia as the one definite, clear-cut term with which to express concisely and intelligently the great truth of the second coming of their Lord and King!
And viewed in the light of these parousia visits of the emperor or the king, with all that such visits had come to mean, even to the masses, how luminous and appealing the word parousia must have been to the early Christians when used in relation to the glorious return out of the heavens of their crucified, risen, and ascended Lord and sovereign King! The parousia of the emperor must have been an occasion of transcendent importance, an event spectacular beyond every other event in the Roman world, hailed by the populace with the highest enthusiasm; but the Christians who had out of the very depths of their hearts given their allegiance to Jesus as the King of kings and Lord of lords, saw in all this earthly glory a mere faint analogy, an illustration, of the supreme parousia of their spiritual Emperor that would usher in the consummated kingdom of light and truth, and forever bring to nought all the powers of darkness.
Washington, D. C.
* God's special self-revelation was made through the medium of the Jewish race ; "salvation is of the Sews." Thus the initial voice of that revelation was the Hebrew and the Aramaic language But in the providence of God it was so ordered that while the Old Testament, with minor exceptions, was written in the Hebrew language, and our Lord Jesus doubtless spoke His burning message in His own mother tongue, the Aramaic, a modified form of the Hebrew, the reports of what He said and did, together with the inspired interpretations by His followers of His words and life, were transmitted for all humanity in the Greek language, through the Greek New Testament.
Since this Greek New Testament on its religious side came mainly out of the soil of the Hebrew Old Testament, influenced slightly perhaps by other Jewish writings, it follows naturally that the Hebrew Old Testament is the real key to the thought world of the Greek New Testament. But on the language side where the Greek speech prevails, appeal must be made to the Greek language which had become the dominant linguistic instrument in the Greeco-Roman world of that period. And it is here that the mass of archeological discoveries of the last three or four decades make their interesting and helpful contribution to the understanding of the Greek of the New Testament. More than ten thousand texts, almost exclusively in the Greek language, are now available in the form of inscriptions on stone, metal, etc. ; texts on papyri, parchment, and potsherds, illustrating every phase of life in the Mediterranean world of the New Testament period.
The article appearing herewith, which will be followed by two others dealing with different aspects of the same subject, is designed to illustrate how certain Greek words must have appealed to readers of the Greek New Testament in the time of the primitive church, and also to give us in our day, almost two thousand years removed, a clearer insight into Jesus' teachings relative to His second coming.
**The following authorities have been used in the preparation of this article : A. Deissmann. "Light From the Ancient East," 4th ed., pp. 368ff. ; Geo. Milligan, "Epistles to the Thessalonians," pp. 145ff.; Prof. W. M. Ramsey, in "The Greek of the Early Church and Pagan Ritual," p. 208 ; and Expository Times, Vol. X ; Liddell and Scott's New Greek Lex. ; J. H. Thayer, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament ; Moulton and Milligan, "Vocabulary of the Greek New Testament ;" and a few others of less importance.
