VI. THE USE OF άΥοράζω
e. άντ
λύτρον
This word occurs but once in the New Testament (I Tim. 2: 6) and its only known occurrences outside the Scripture are later. In meaning it does not seem to differ greatly from the simple λύτρον, but the preposition emphasizes the thought of substitution; it is a ‘substitute-ransom’ that is signified. Such a term well suits the Timothy passage which says of Christ, ‘who gave himself a ransom for all’. The thought clearly resembles that of Mark 10: 45,98 i.e. that Jesus has died in the stead of those who deserved death.99 If the thought of substitution is present in the Marcan passage there is even greater reason for holding it to be present here in view of the addition of the preposition which emphasizes substitution.
The position then appears to be that the words associated with λύτρον consistently express the ransom idea. They remind us of a conception that has disappeared, at least in large measure, from the modern scene, but which appealed to the early Christians as of value in illustrating one aspect of a vast and complex subject. Viewed from this aspect the atonement looked to them like a process of ransoming. Christians were men who had been under sentence of death (Rom. 6: 23), they had been enslaved to sin (Jn. 8 : 34; Rom. 6: 17; 7: 14). Now they were ransomed from the death sentence (free ‘from the law of death’, Rom. 8 : 2, and cf. I Cor. 15 : 54f ; I Jn. 3 : 14; 2 Tim. I: 10; etc.),100 they were free from sin (Jn. 10: 34-36; Rom. 6: 6f., 18, 22). Processes which were familiar to them from their ordinary daily life gave a vivid picture of what had happened in the spiritual realm when the Saviour gave His life for them.
G. A. Deissmann brings out the force of the redemption terminology for an ordinary man of the first century thus: ’A Christian slave of Corinth going up the path to the Acrocorinthus about Eastertide, when St. Paul’s letter arrived, would see towards the north-west the snowy peak of Parnassus rising clearer and clearer before him, and everyone knew that within the circuit of that commanding summit lay the shrines at which Apollo or Serapis or Asclepius the Healer bought slaves with a price, for freedom. Then in the evening assembly was read the letter lately received from Ephesus, and straightway the new Healer was present in spirit with His worshippers, giving them freedom from another slavery, redeeming with a price the bondmen of sin and the law - and that price no pious fiction, first received by Him out of the hard-earned denarii of the slave, but paid by Himself with the redemption-money of His daily new self-sacrifice, rousing up for
freedom those who languished in slavery.’101
There is no need to water down the language of the biblical writers, to reduce their colourful metaphors to a uniform drabness. They did not intend ransom to be taken as a full and sufficient statement of what the atonement was and did, but as far as it goes it gives a picture of one aspect of that great work. It is a metaphor which involves the payment of a price which is plainly stated in several places and understood in others to be the death of Christ. From the very nature of the imagery this involves a substitutionary idea; instead of our death there is His, instead of our slavery there is His blood. All our verbal juggling cannot remove this from the New Testament.