Part front matter for Part II ‘It Is Finished’

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According to John, Christ’s last utterance from the cross was the single word τετέλεσται (19:30). Usually translated as ‘it is finished’, this might be taken as meaning that the life of Christ has come to an end. This sense is reinforced by the regular mistranslation of the following clause, ‘and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit’ (RSV), for the second (and the first) ‘his’ does not occur in the Greek, παρέδωκεν τὸ πνεῦμα, but a definite article, and the Greek word translated as ‘gave up’ really means to ‘hand over’.¹ Christ’s final word, τετέλεσται, has more the sense of ‘it has been completed’ or ‘it has been perfected’. In the Gospel of John, Christ has of course come to do the Father’s will, all that the Father has ‘given’ or ‘shown’ to the Son (cf. 5:20; 13:3; 15:15; 17:7). Yet, as Bultmann argues, τετέλεσται is most closely related not to Luke 18:31, where Christ prospectively tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem where ‘everything written of the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished [τελεσθήσεται]’, but to Revelation 10:7, where it is said that in the days when the seventh angel sounds his trumpet, ‘the mystery of God as announced to his servants the prophets would be completed [ἐτελέσθη]’.² The work of Christ completed upon the cross is not simply a specific or particular task among others (for instance, atonement as distinct to incarnation, or salvation as distinct to creation); it is the very mystery of God that is now ‘completed’ or ‘perfected’, revealed, as we have seen, in the apocalyptic opening of the Scriptures through the Passion, in ‘the Apocalypse of God’ as de Boer puts it. And at this point Christ hands over the Spirit to ‘the mother’ (19:26; again, there is no ‘his’) and the beloved disciple standing at the foot of the cross, the Spirit who ‘was not’ until Christ is glorified (7:39, which is also regularly mistranslated as ‘not yet given’), but now leads his disciples ‘into all truth’ (16:13).

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Part front matter for Part II ‘It Is Finished’

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