Ver. 17. αὐτός ἐστιν. αὖτ. is emphatic, He and no other. Lightfoot (followed by Westcott and Hort and Ellicott) accents ἔστιν, “He éxists,” on account of the present, and com- pares ἐγὼ εἰμί (John viii. 58). But there eyo εἰμί stands alone, whereas here αὖτ. ἐστ. is completed by πρὸ πάντων. Besides, there is no object in the asser- tion of the existence of the Son here. The sense of ἐστὶν depends to some extent on that of πρὸ πάντων. If, as is usual, πρὸ is taken here as temporal, αὐτός will be the pre-incarnate Son. If, however, with Haupt, it be taken to assert superiority in rank, αὐτός will be the exalted Christ, and the present will be quite regular. It is urged that for this
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some other preposition, such as ἐπὶ or ὑπέρ, would have been expected. Gess says that in each of the eleven other pas- sages in which it occurs in Paul it is tem- poral, and in the other N.T. passages (37) it is used of place or, as generally, of time, except in Jas. v. 12, 1 Pet. iv. 8, where it is used of rank. It is used, however, in classical Greek in this latter sense. Perhaps it is safest to allow the general Pauline usage to determine the sense here. In this case πρὸ is temporal and ἐστιν atimeless present. πάντων is, of course, neuter, like τὰ πάντα, not π]αδου]πθ.--συνέστηκεν: “hold to- gether”. The Son is the centre of unity for the universe. He keeps all its parts in their proper place and due relations and combines them into an ordered whole. Apart from Him it would go to pieces. Philo ascribes a similar function to the Logos. Haupt thinks that this thought that Christ is the principle of coherence for the universe is not in the passage, which means no more than that He sustains it (cf. Heb. i. 3, φέρων τὰ πάντα).
The interpretation of vv. 15-17 given by Oltramare should not be passed over. He eliminates the idea of pre-existence from the passage, and says that the reference is throughout to Christ as Redeemer. God had in creation to pro- vide by a plan of Redemption for the entrance of evil into the universe, and only on that condition could it take place. So since Christ is the Redeemer, creation is based upon Him, He is the means to it, and the end which it contemplates. He objects to the common view on the fol- lowing grounds: (1) Elsewhere Paul speaks of God, not Christ, as the Creator and goal of the universe; (2) Paul starts from the Christ in whom we have redemp- tion as πρωτότ. π. κτίσεως, and in ver. 18, which refers to the same Person as ver. 17, He is spoken of as the Head ot the Church, therefore the context is against any reference to a pre-incarnate Christ; (3) He carefully avoids saying that the Son has created all things, though he has to change the subject ot the sentence. In reply to (1) it may be
said that the Son acts as Agent of the Father, and so creation may be referred to either, and that while Paul contem- plates the final surrender by the Son of the kingdom to the Father, he also con- templates a prior subjection of everything tothe Son. Oltramare himself, for another purpose, points to apparent inconsistency in John (Johni, 2 compared with Rev. iii. 14, iv. 11, x.6) and the author of Hebrews
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